Welcome to the Fourth Reich
We have reached the point where American (and South African) Nazis can publicly and proudly give "Heil Hitler" salutes.
Late December back in ‘23, my guest on the PREVAIL podcast was Brynn Tannehill, a senior defense analyst, former Naval aviator, and author of American Fascism—a smart, disturbing, and prescient book that people would do well to buy now and read. (There’s an audio version!) It is from Brynn that I first heard about Project 2025.
Fast forward to this past week. On Monday, as our so-called opposition leaders impotently looked on, American Fascism officially launched. Since then, the headlines have looked like something from a bad sci-fi movie: Executive order after executive order, laying waste to some federal project intended to help people, protect people, ennoble people, nourish people. Horrible human beings testifying at Senate confirmation hearings. The richest men (mostly they are men) in the country metaphorically gargling Trump’s balls in their lust for more oligarchical wealth. And Donald, whom no small amount of people believe is the literal Antichrist, refusing to place his tiny hand on the Bible as he was sworn in by a feckless, fascist Chief Justice, indoors, as his grifting wife watched beneath her fancy hat, looking for all the world like a stylized Eva Braun.
Even as I spent the 12 months since the discussion with Brynn warning about the potential death of our democracy and writing about the horrors that Trump Redux would bring, I must confess: I never fully believed that the people of this country would be gullible enough, dumb enough, short-sighted enough, mean enough, ignorant enough, mindfucked enough, or hateful enough to re-elect the Rough Beast.
But we were. And we did.
Elon Musk—the shadow president, DOGE doge, Reichsehefrau, Barron whisperer, vote count machine expert, and whatever the fuck else he is—gave an enthusiastic “Heil Hitler” salute while speaking at an inauguration event. Then, in case anyone missed it the first time, he did it again.
I have long known that Musk is a bad actor. The day he took over control of Twitter, in October 2022, I wrote this:
The question isn’t will he sabotage Twitter, but how? Laying off three-quarters of the workforce, as he’s said he’d do, would be a fine way to start the destruction (he began last night by pink-slipping the legal staff, including the executive primarily responsible for eighty-sixing Trump). Charging for the service would drive away many users and blow up engagement like an exploding Tesla. Re-platforming the likes of Trump, Mike Flynn, and other noxious disinformation peddlers, trolls, and chaos agents would gin up the rage—and scare off more normies. So would amplifying fascist accounts (or, to be more accurate, amplifying them more). He could verify bad actors—as the old administration used to do—and take away blue checks from those who don’t toe the Muskovite party line. He could tweak the algorithm so that we don’t see the accounts we want to, and are force-fed others. He could sell our data and our DMs on the dark web. Or he could simply sack the entire support staff and play his virtual-reality fiddle while Twitter burns.
Eleven days before what may be the last fair election in this country, the federal government should not have allowed such a vital social media company to be scooped up by a shady character with the maturity level of a second grader—a South African whose scumbag old man owned an emerald mine—using investment capital that appears to be partially from Saudi Arabia. It’s a national security issue, ffs. Alas, there’s lots of things the federal government should not allow but seems neither willing nor capable of putting a stop to.
(That the government tried to shut down TikTok this weekend while turning a blind eye to Musk’s purchase of Twitter a few weeks before the Midterms is beyond infuriating—Congress fumbling with the idea of maybe putting a lock on a barn door many months after the horses were stolen.)
Given Musk’s extensive engagement with and platforming of neo-Nazis, as well as their full-throated support of his Hitler salute this week, it should come as no surprise that Apartheid Clyde wound up being a Nazi himself. The indispensable Jim Stewartson has been writing about this for many months now:
As I’ve shown in my extensive reporting, Musk’s connections to Nazism are not in doubt. His mother’s family were “Hitler supporters” and “Holocaust deniers” according to his father.
Errol Musk is a deeply racist, elitist, natalist pervert who had two children with his own step-daughter. The name he chose for his son, Elon, comes from a rocketry hobby had in apartheid South Africa, where he was taught about Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun. According to Errol himself, Elon was named after the dictator of a Mars colony in von Braun’s sci-fi book “Marsprojekt” — and later “instilled” this story into his son.
It worked. Elon Musk is a blatantly racist eugenicist who believes that women are for making babies and slavery is fine. One of his main projects, in between supporting neo-Nazi movements in Germany and the UK, and trying to steal trillions from the Treasury for his massive Mars hoax, is to promote great replacement theory.
Simply put, Elon Musk is a literal Nazi, a “National Socialist.” He has barely hidden it for years.
Does this twisted South African weirdo sound like the villain in a bad sci-fi novel? Yes. But that’s where we are right now. We’re living in a watered-down idiot’s version of The Man in the High Castle, where the “high” in the title means “loopy on ketamine.”
In December 2023, as a supplement to the Tannehill interview, I wrote this:
Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s an authoritarian. He’s a despot. He’s a wannabe dictator. He’s the Mussolini of Queens, an American Hitler.
At this point, no serious commentator doubts this. The neocon dignitary Robert Kagan said as much in a Washington Post op-ed a month ago: “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”
The Godwin who developed Godwin’s Law—that is, that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”—said that it was appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler: “[W]hen people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”
These are not just labels intended to insult the presumptive GOP presidential candidate. These are not words thrown around casually. Trump really is all of those things. Unfortunately, enough voters don’t have the imagination, or the knowledge of history, to understand what this would mean, in practical terms. What would an American dictatorship look like?
In the very short term, it would look like Hungary, where another corpulent Putin puppet with ties to the Russian mob, Viktor Orbán, has set up an “illiberal democracy,” with himself as permanent Prime Minister. Voting rights—fairness at the ballot box—will be the first casualty. The rightwing minority will rule, literally. Like a vampire summoned through the window, once Trump is back in the White House, there will be no getting rid of him. Term limits will apply as little as any other law he doesn’t approve of. Then the country will be reconstituted in Russia’s image.
“Hungary is an intermediate stop to Russia,” says the senior defense analyst Brynn Tannehill, author of American Fascism and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “Hungary is the same as Russia, just ten years behind in terms of the autocratic movement.”
In the U.S., there will be no big surprises. The GOP’s despotic vision has been laid out in a horrific Heritage Foundation document, Project 2025, that would make Sir Oswald Mosely tumesce. Trump has his lieutenants in place this time around—dudes like Stephen Miller, Mike Davis, Kash Patel, and Michael Anton, who are as capable as they are authoritarian.
Trump’s appointees to his cabinet positions are even worse than I anticipated: a drunken sexual assault aficionado with a yen for Making the Crusades Great Again, for Defense Secretary; a whale-beheading polio enthusiast with his own history of sexual misconduct heading up Health & Human Services; cult member and Kremlin icon as Director of National Intelligence; a dog-killer to lead Homeland Security.
I went on:
“Where we are right now is that Donald Trump wants to set himself up as a dictator,” Tannehill says. “They have laid it out very, very clearly in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. I’ve tweeted about it, I’ve written about it. They are being more and more manifestly authoritarian with a goal of reshaping the United States in ways that would render us unrecognizable in terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, in terms of making abortion and birth control and healthcare for trans people completely unavailable, illegal. To make it possible for Red States to reach out and grab people they don’t like from Blue States to prosecute them.”
In short, a war on women’s healthcare, contraception, LGBTQ rights, and a lot of the freedoms we take for granted. There will also be state-sanctioned vengeance against anyone who has betrayed Dear Leader. Trump lickspittle Kash Patel said as much, in his recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast:
We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminal or civilly, we’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we’re tyrannical. This is why we’re dictators.
And if that weren’t enough, there will also be a fatal dose of rightwing Jesus. You know: the Jesus who hates his neighbor as he hates himself.
Patel is going to be the Director of the FBI. Which means our domestic federal law enforcement agency will be headed by a monomaniacal Trump-fluffer out for revenge. Swell!
“We are looking at a government that is going to elevate one particular brand of Christianity above all others and make it a singular force in both law and public policy,” Tannehill says. “These are things that should be unacceptable and are going to certainly set off protests, but what we’re also seeing is, Trump is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act, clearing out military leadership and replacing it with people who are loyal or at least won’t say no. He’s talked about using the military to shoot protestors, in the past, in 2020. He’s talked openly in the past about admiring how China handled Tiananmen Square. We’re heading for something ugly and brutal.”
And quick. Trump has talked about installing himself as dictator on Day One, and when given the opportunity to walk those comments back, by Sean Hannity and others, doubled down. These intentions cannot be laughed off, or brushed aside as “Trump being Trump.” “Being Trump,” at this point, is perilously close to being Hitler.
“I know I sound crazy,” Tannehill says, “but this is—we’ve seen this historically. They’ve declared their intention to do this. We see them lining up to do all of this. We see them saying they’re going to do this. It’s—this is just taking the next step and saying, okay, if they do the thing that they say they’re going to do, what is going to be the response.”
Trump is not a dictator quite yet, but all those executive orders have the despotic whiff of imperial edicts or Papal bulls. I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’s aiming to be a Putin-style autocrat.
The best case scenario is the chaos and financial upheaval than comes with the dismantling of the federal government—which Trump has said he’s going to do, by firing 50,000 federal employees and eliminating certain key departments. Regulations will be a joke, leading to poisoned food, bad medicine, crumbling infrastructure, and so forth. There will be more tax cuts, more income inequality. Putin will win in Ukraine. And if you don’t like what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians right now, wait until you see how he behaves when given the green light by a president who cares more about building Trump Tower Gaza City than reining in Bibi’s more extreme impulses.
That’s the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is, the constitutional crises brought on by Red States enforcing antiabortion laws that compel them to arrest people in Blue States for performing medical care, and Blue States resisting—Albany telling Austin to go fuck itself—are so great, and SCOTUS so impotent and corrupt, that the union fractures completely, as empires historically do. That would be cataclysmic, and would end badly for Blue and Red States both.
The way to stave off this boot-stomping-on-a-human-face-forever future is to re-elect Joe Biden. Our honorable 81-year-old president is all that stands between us and American fascism.
Instead of re-electing Joe, we tossed him aside. Instead of electing Kamala Harris, we went with Orange Grover Cleveland.
“Trump will use anything within his power, including breaking the system and corrupting the system, to move stuff through. This is an existential threat to democracy in America the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Civil War,” Tannehill said on that podcast. “Even more so, perhaps.”
The existential threat is all too real. The question now becomes: are we up to the arduous task of neutralizing it?
Nos morituri salutamus te nolunt.
TONIGHT at 8pm ET, The Five 8 is live:
Photo: Still shot of Elon’s Hitler salute.
Holy fuck!!! This is only week one. King Shitpants and the GQP are following Viktor's playbook. They told the public they were going to do this. However, half of Americans are bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, functionally illiterate assholes. On top of that is the white Christian Nationalists fuckwads. I've been screaming this election was about protecting white privilege and their wealth. By releasing the January 6th criminals. He says, you commit a crime in my name, you're good. It's his justification for unleasing the militia on the public. To instill fear.
I watched some of the Davos billionaires goon squad welcome Shitpants with open arms. That's a group that gets together to figure out new ways to exploit populations for their own desires for greed and power. They happily slap each other on the back and hop on their private jets, pleased with themselves.
Putin runs his country like the Mafia. He takes a cut from everyone, but keeps their noses out of his office business. Shitpants is using all his malignant narcissistic psychopathic skills to rule. I've always said, the GQP wants to rule, not govern. I'm fucking mad as hell. Sons of bitches.
nos qui victuri sumus, laborare debemus
Greg, excellent piece that looks at past warnings in the context of today's realities.
Perhaps some words of comfort, hopefully not head in the sand thinking.
Tim Miller oft advises not to focus on what the 47th Administration says, rather focus on what they do. Massive number of Executive Orders. They remind me of a line from Mel Brooks' great satire " History of the World". To Mel's "I am a stand up philosper" Bea Arthur's character responds "OH a bullshit artist". According to the BBC of the myriad of bullshit, six could be very troublesome, birthright at the top of the list. Joy Vance recently opined that this EO will fail at SCOTUS, it is a step to far, especially as the godfather of conservatism, Antonin Scalia penned the settled law Robert must overturn.
Regarding my opening latin homemade saying, Timothy Synder's seminal "On Tryanny" rule number one " Do Not Obey in Advance" combined the Miller's react to what is done, not spoken promises, actually threats makes for a sane response. Your Prevail gives important insights, reminders of past failures put into today's reality, very useful.
This is not meant as a rebuttal, rather an extension of where we are and what laborers are doing in the fight to save Democracy that is surely facing its biggest not threat, rather challenge. Threats are words,, challenges opportunities to set the ship right.