Laura J Mixon

Watching the news report on the president's greasy little grift as a customer satisfaction story and not, you know, This is Deeply Unconstitutional and Also Fucking Embarrassing as Hell

This really captures the nexus of cruelty and corruption at the core of MAGA:

I was today years old when I learned that Picasso overlapped in time with both Charles Darwin and Eminem. True fact.

Trump the tyrant is on full display — but his acting out highlights how weak he is Trump got his Comey indictment Thursday and issued a memo directing "domestic terrorism" investigations. And yet, both provided more evidence that Trump is losing.

Here was my Comey indictment report from days later:

A sharp picture of the personal nature of Trump's disregard for the rule of law Allegations against Trump's "border czar" and DOJ, TikTok shenanigans, and Trump's Virginia federal prosecutor manipulations. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

Like, come off it.

Here was my Sept. 21 report:

Notification Center 11 WSJ Breaking News 2m ago New York Attorney General Letitia James has been indicted following a Justice Dept. investigation into mortgage fraud allegations

Or this.

Notification Center 22 NBC NEWS Breaking news Federal grand jury in Virginia charges Letitia James, the New York attorney general who investigated Trump's business practices, with bank fraud

The prosecutor put in office after the president who wants vengeance against his enemies told his AG that a WH lawyer was the person for the job — despite no prosecution experience — successfully sought an indictment against one of the named enemies, the second such indictment.

And you push this?

CNN headline: Former GOP election official buys Dominion Voting Systems, says he'll push for paper ballots

Oh www.cnn.com/2025/10/09/p...

Jack also commits the kind of voter fraud he's supposedly rooting out. Because blatant hypocrisy is part of the brand. www.msn.com/en-us/news/p...

Just a reminder that Jack published a book last year called “unhumans” that makes the argument that all Democrats and anyone left of Francisco Franco should be rounded up and murdered en mass for the rest of the populations entertainment.
Jack is a Nazi and hell bent on the murder of his opponents

periodic reminder that if you write stuff that's published on the web for a publication you yourself do not own, PDF that shit as soon as it goes live

Truly, tell me, how is this different than Jewish and gay people and Romani people being dragged away by Nazis? And didn’t we have some fairly clear agreement to never let that happen again?

Marvel’s “Punisher” Was a Hate Symbol Long Before Police Co-opted His Character The Punisher has long been embraced as a classic superhero, but his comics spread reactionary ideology.

3c) Want to take the opportunity to share this great article from @truthout.org about racism/fascism and The Punisher character

A Blue Lives Matter Punisher skull logo with the text "To Protect & Serve, Blue Lives Matter" but crossed out with three downward facing red arrows.

3b) That tension in breaking the law in the name of the (new or real) law is central to fascism and evident in the popular Blue Lives Matter Punisher imagery. Also evident in much of what Trump has to say about the subject.

Mussolini and other fascists marching in black shirts

It was the very faith that had ripened in the trenches and in intense reflection on the sacrifice accomplished in the course of battle, a sacrifice for the only worthy goal: the vigor and greatness of the fatherland. It was an energetic, violent faith, unwilling to respect anything opposed to the fatherland's vigor and greatness. This is how squadrism arose. Determined youths, armed, organized in military fashion, and dressed in black shirts, placed themselves outside the law in order to institute a new law. They fought the state in order to found a new state.

3a) Notable in the "Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals:
- the desire to do politics as warfare (important given the legacy of WWI)
- the argument that what was needed at the start of fascism was a 'revolutionary' violation of the (perverted) law to restore 'order', i. e. the "new law."

Photo of Gentile in a suit.

"Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals" (1925) On 29-30 March 1925 the first Conference on Fascist Culture was held in Bologna under the leadership of Giovanni Gentile. Over four hundred profascist intellectuals lent their names to the event, though actual attendance was more modest. Its aim was to rally Italian intellectuals behind the regime in an effort to enhance the image of the newly declared dictatorship both at home and abroad. One of the congress's immediate results was the following manifesto, largely drafted by Gentile...

3) Next, some primary sources like "Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals" (1925) by the "philosopher of fascism," Giovanni Gentile.

Given fascism's renunciation of rational consistency, there is arguably something paradoxical in the notion of a "fascist intellectual." Anyway...

The fascist leaders themselves, as we observed in chapter 1, called their movements ideologies, and many interpreters have taken them at their word. It is commonplace to see fascism defined by extracting common threads from party programs, by analogy with the other “isms.” This works better for the other “isms,” founded in the era of educated elite politics. I tried earlier to suggest that fascism bears a different relation to ideas than the nineteenth-century “isms,” and that intellectual positions (not basic mobilizing passions like racial hatreds, of course) were likely to be dropped or added according to the tactical needs of the moment. All the “isms” did this, but only fascism had such contempt for reason and intellect that it never even bothered to justify its shifts.

2a) Apart from featuring his definition of fascism (which he offers reluctantly), Paxton observes how the fascist relation to ideas is merely tactical and not grounded in intellectual consistency.

Useful for today's world to remember how fascists dont feel the need to "justify" changes in position.

Cover of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton. It shows a woman giving a fascist salute.

What Is Fascism? The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person. Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

2) For the same class we read Ch. 8 of Robert Paxton's classic The Anatomy of Fascism. I used his definition of fascism in my book Antifa.

I love his argument that a definition of fascism "encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person."

A page of text from the essay with certain sections underlined. With dynamics already apparent from the early 2000s, but sharply worsening since2008-2010, the US polity has entered a steadily escalating version of the dual crisis outlined earlier, one suddenly magnifed and massively jolted by COVID-19: a crisis of cohesion, a crisis of legitimacy. Not only is the polity broken, but very large masses of people have stopped believing in its repair. On the one hand, we have the extreme atrophy of democratic practices in the state, whether inside the legislature or in the relations of the presidency, Senate/Congress, and Supreme Court; or in the attack on voting rights, voting access, and the conduct of elections; or in the curtailment of civil liberties and the scale and character of the carceral state. On the other hand, there is now a default conviction among the citizenry that government consists only in burdensomeness, corruption, incompetence, and nonaccountability– a still-widening popular belief in what I would call the nonintelligibility of power, the belief that power is exercised in a distant place, behind closed doors and opaque glass, by conspiracies of elites who are beholden to no one and simply do not care. crisis of consent; government paralysis, democratic impasse– the prospects can be severe indeed. If we add the fields of structural determation outlined briefly at the very start of this chapter, whose ruinous consequences are now immeasurably expanded and sharpened by the intervening calamity of the COVID-19 pandemic, the severity grows further again. The deeper structural setting will need to be fully proceeding from the huge transformations begun in the 1980s. Here, we need to talk about fundamental capitalist restructuring: deindustrialization and neoliberal globalization. We need to talk about drastic class recomposition, including the reorganization of work and labor circuits and the rewriting of the labor contract...etc

1a) 1 takeaway is comparison between the "fascism-producing crisis[es]" of past + present characterized by the prevalence of the "nonintelligibility of power."

When a prominent historian of interwar Europe says we are living through a similar crisis amidst the rise of fascism, we need to listen.

Cover of the book Fascism in America: Past and Present showing the Statue of Liberty doing a fascist salute.

First page of the essay "Liberalism in Crisis" by Geoff Eley.

1) To start, we read the essay "Liberalism in Crisis" by Geoff Eley from the book Fascism in America.

This essay beautifully balances grounding our understanding of fascism in the interwar context with the need to conceptualize a more portable fascism that can apply to today.

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

🧵

What's happening to my colleague Mark Bray is disgusting. Him and his family are being doxed and getting death threats by right wing supposed "free speech" advocates bc wrote a book about anti fascism. You can't make this shit up! Our universities must fight back.

Happy book birthday to my debut picture book The Fib from @gloobooks.bsky.social !!! I hope everyone enjoys this fabulous fable about monsters and honesty.
gloobooks.com

The federal government is shut down. Here's what that means across the country The federal government is currently shut down. NPR's network is following the ways the government shutdown is affecting services across the country.

The federal government is shut down. Here's what that means across the country.

I’ve said it before:

Facts are for trial courts.
The record is for appellate courts.

Neither matters to the Supreme Court.

It is not a court at all in certain senses of the word, one of those senses being an institution that resolves a dispute between specific parties on the basis of evidence.

Save Durham Pride | Article, News | News | UNISON National Trade unions are helping effort to save the annual event after Reform council cuts funding

Durham Pride is at risk after the council withdrew its funding, citing financial pressure and political ideology.
UNISON is backing the fight to save it.
Support if you can.

A 90-second crash course in Trump's betrayal of American soy farmers Here’s the geopolitical beans.

Trump’s aid package to soybean farmers is expected to be in the billions of dollars. But to some farmers, that misses the point.

“The American farmer, especially myself included—we don’t want any payments. We want to work."

This week, the Global Sumud Flotilla tried to deliver life-saving aid to Gaza.

Instead, 461 people—including New Yorkers—have been detained by the Israeli military.

They must be freed at once. And the deliberate starvation of Palestinians must end now.