Ted Cruz Disowns One GOP Nazi... But Not the Nazi Faction In The Party And Not Any Of The Other Fascists Running As Republicans This Year

You know there is an actual fascist wing of the Republican Party-- and since Trump's occupation of the White House, it has been gaining strength. More and more neo-Nazis have been winning GOP primaries, as we saw Friday in North Carolina. The party establishment is embarrassed and would rather hide the connection between overt fascists and the Republican Party, but the hated-talk radio and Fox brainwashed base hears the Nazi campaign rhetoric and recognizes it as pure GOP, but a little more extreme. Republican neo-fascists in Virginia, Illinois, Wisconsin are proudly representing the GOP, leaving the party... uncomfortable.

Ted Cruz is one of the most right-wing Republicans in the Senate and he's running scared as Beto O'Rourke continues to make inroads in his campaign to replace him. This week Cruz decided to draw a line in the sand between the overt Nazis and himself.

Republican primary voters picked a self-avowed Nazi, Arthur Jones, to go up against one of the most right-wing Democrats in Congress, Dan Lipinski, in their Chicagoland district. The crap Jones is spouting in his campaign is a little to close for comfort for Cruz, who felt compelled to tweet to his fans in Illinois to voted for Lipinski rather than Jones. I wonder what Cruz would have done if Jones was running against a progressive-- say Marie Newman, who Lipinski recently beat in a hot primary 48,675 to 46,530, the thanks to the right-wing big money PAC financed by Cruz-backers, No Labels-- instead of Jones. Here's the very dramatic Cruz tweet:

This week, state Republicans let a deadline pass that would have allowed them to run someone as a third-party candidate to provide Republican voters with an alternative candidate to vote for. The GOP said the ballot requirements, including having to collect more than 14,000 signatures, was too burdensome and costly in a district Democrats dominate.

Republicans missed several chances, including in the primary, to challenge Jones or oust him from the ballot. The party failed to recruit a candidate to challenge him in the March primary where he went unopposed, did not draft a write-in candidate in the primary, and failed to knock him off the ballot by challenging his signature petitions.

Jones celebrated his role in sidelining Republicans, telling POLITICO this week: “I snookered them.”

So far Cruz hasn't had anything to say about a Republican from the fascist wing of the GOP running for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, Corey Stewart, who narrowly edged the mainstream conservative, Nick Freitas because another extremist, E.W. Jackson, drew votes away from Stewart.

• Corey Stewart- 136,410 (44.86%)
• Nick Freitas- 131,131 (43.12%)
• E.W. Jackson- 36,537 (12.02%)

Not a peep out of Cruz about Stewart, who might be sitting next to him in the Senate next year. That's odd, since Arthur Jones has no chance to win at all and he's running for a House seat, where Cruz never served. In fact, just yesterday, the Washington Post reported that Corey Stewart’s Republican nomination for U.S. Senate from Virginia has prompted an identity crisis within the state GOP, with some donors and activists saying they are so turned off, they are willing to vote for his Democratic opponent, Sen. Tim Kaine... Stewart almost won the gubernatorial primary last year-- by celebrating guns and Confederate statues, lambasting illegal immigrants, and associating with white nationalist Jason Kessler and Paul Nehlen, a Wisconsin candidate barred from Twitter because of anti-Semitic and racist posts. And, interestingly, Cruz hasn't chimed in on the race to replace Paul Ryan, where one of the leading Republican candidates-- probably second after the Ryan clone (Bryan Steel)-- is fascist Paul Nehlen. There are 6 candidates in the August 14 Republican primary to pick the sacrificial lamb to run against Randy Bryce. and in a crowded primary like that, there is no telling what will happen. Lots of GOP voters want to vote for Jeremy Ryan who they think is Paul Ryan's cousin and could well draw votes away from Steil, who Paul Ryan has endorsed and is helping raise money for. The fascist candidate, Nehlen, is a multimillionaire who has yet to deploy any of his own fortune in the race and has raised $189,613 so far. In 2016 Nelhen raised $1,451,04 from Republican donors sympathetic with his fascist agenda. And, by the way, he and Corey Stewart are allies. Cruz has nothing to say about Nehlen or the Nazi factions within his own party, just about the hapless Arthur Jones in Chicago.

Is Trump Really A Fascist?

Author Clive Irving thinks so. Yesterday he wrote an OpEd for the Daily Beast, It Is Happening Here, Trump Is Already Early-Stage Mussolini. He started by posing a couple of questions: "Is there a moment when a fanatical leader can be stopped before he takes a nation into the abyss? A moment when those with the moral determination to stop him can act before it is too late?" He realizes that "Trump stress tests this republic’s defenses against a demagogue. History has such moments. They need to be heeded... In Italy the moment came on Aug. 16, 1924." Before Mussolini supporters murdered socialist member of parliament Giacomo Matteotti, Mussolini was an elected prime minister and hadn't made himself a dictator. Before he was killed, Matteotti was preparing to give parliament a dossier exposing a series of crimes, including murder and corruption, carried out by Mussolini’s henchmen since he became prime minister.

The murder of Matteotti outraged millions of Italians who, until that moment, had been ready to turn a blind eye to fascist thuggery. For a while a 200,000-strong fascist militia had been used to suppress criticism of Mussolini, who in his regular belligerent public speeches had referred to liberty as “a more or less putrid goddess” who needed to be eliminated.

...Of the institutions that might have stopped Mussolini right then, the monarchy, in the person of the ageing King Victor Emmanuel, (Mussolini called him “physically no more than a half-cartridge”) was ineffectual; the Vatican was fearful of taking sides and strongly averse to the socialists who were seen as godless secularists; the parliamentary opposition, briefly vocal after the death of Matteotti, had reverted to factionalism. Mussolini had already made sure that the newspapers were cowed into blind obedience.

This is not Italy in 1925. Nonetheless there is no comfort to be gained from the gap in place and time. There are too many clear similarities in the Trump administration’s language, techniques and actions.

First, there is the flashpoint issue designed to make populations feel insecure-- and therefore, to justify a draconian response.

Trump has used immigration as that issue from the day of his notorious candidacy-launching “rapists and murderers” speech.

And, like Mussolini, Trump is surrounded by his own hard core of fanatics eager to use that issue to achieve their own ideological purposes.

Mussolini was greatly under the influence of Roberto Farinacci, a lawyer and one of the most unrelenting dogmatists of the fascist movement. Trump has Stephen Miller, under the nebulous title of political adviser, who has for years been in lockstep with Attorney General Jeff Sessions in whipping up fears about the browning of America (which is, in any case, already demographically inevitable).

The ultimate ghastly achievement of the Miller-Sessions axis has been the “zero tolerance” policy for those crossing the Mexican border without permission. In other words, the automatic criminalization of refugees.

All along, Miller and Sessions knew that in Trump they had an easy accomplice. The man who created the birthing smear against Obama and who thought the fascists at Charlottesville were OK was innately racist, and they exploited it.

In fact, “zero tolerance” has the same intransigent tone, the same absolutism and the same indiscriminate cruelty that Mussolini conveyed in his speeches when he used the unrest that he had himself fomented to justify seizing absolute power.

And the language used in attacking immigrants is based on lies used with the same frequency and conviction that was recommended by the original fascist dictum that if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes accepted as fact.

Immigration across the Mexican border has been continually presented as a threat to public safety. Thousands of innocents fleeing from terror in Central America are equated with terrorists. The MS-13 gangs become shorthand for a crime wave that doesn’t exist.

And Trump, as ever an empathy amputee, is still using words like “infest” and “invade” as a catch-all term for thousands of people who are refugees and asylum seekers.

Forced into stopping the separation of children from parents-- albeit when it had become untenable-- Trump pulled a sordid stunt by inviting to the White House a group of people who had lost loved ones to crimes committed by illegal immigrants. This sad and bewildered group found themselves suddenly complicit in sustaining the toxic fiction that nobody is safe when sharing the streets of our cities with illegal immigrants.

Where Mussolini had his militia, Trump has Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. Created in 2003, ICE was a child of the response to 9/11, part of the Bush administration’s plan to reinforce institutions to deal more effectively with terrorism, and it fell under the Department of Homeland Security.

Probably because of the haste of that change-- and the priorities given to anti-terrorist powers-- ICE has suffered from weak oversight. As a result, it has a long record of abusing detainees through both the Bush and Obama administrations and now in the era of Trump it seems alarmingly unfettered.

Last December the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, belatedly responding to disturbing reports about the treatment of immigrants, confirmed widespread cases of the abuse of detainees in ICE jails across the country.

The abuse included strip searches in violation of rules, failure to provide medical care, physical abuse by guards and unsafe and unhygienic conditions. Other reports have indicated systemic sexual harassment and abuse.

Indeed, since the arrival of “Zero tolerance” ICE has shown all the signs of going rogue. It scooped up and bundled off detainees to many parts of the country in the confidence that nobody was looking—until the whole miserable farrago of family separations was suddenly exposed. It remains belligerently opaque in its methods, consistently rebuffing the attempts of lawmakers to inspect its premises.

Not even Mussolini could have imagined concentration camps for babies. But that is where we are.

Trump and the White House are, in theory, constrained by Congress, an independent judiciary, a government staffed by people who are supposed to follow the law and a free press.

Looked at in the context of Mussolini’s Italy, how well are these constraints performing?

The judiciary is yet to be fully tested, but the Supreme Court is looking worryingly complaisant after its blessing of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, shaped indelibly by his splenetic Islamophobia. In contrast, the professionals at the Department of Justice have so far, in spite of Sessions, managed to secure their integrity.

The bureaucracy is far more wobbly. It is already deeply corroded by Trump appointees, most egregiously at the EPA, where Scott Pruitt’s vainglorious excesses and pandering to lobbyists has distressed even some Republicans.

The most obvious failure, though, is Congress. It is, at best, in denial and, at worst, calculatingly supine.

In Mitch McConnell the Senate has a majority leader who has spent years perfecting his impersonation of Uriah Heep, piously lamenting the lack of bipartisan support for any legislation, particularly on immigration, while making sure there is none. He has been typically AWOL during every stage of Trump’s moral depravities.

In the House Paul Ryan, half out the door already, was revealed as spineless long ago and now looks like a beaten man.

At least we still have the free press at the top of its form. But, at the same time, we also have Fox News, serving basically as a state propaganda machine so sycophantic and so malign that Mussolini would have found it exemplary.

Before we descend into hell let’s make sure we recognize the signs of its approach. They are all there now, in plain sight. History does not have to repeat itself.

Oops, Irving seems to have forgotten to mention the congenitally supine nature of the establishment Democrats. They may make a little noise here and there but they are utterly worthless. If that's all we have protecting the country from a fascist take-over, we might as well all start stockpiling food and water and building secret compartments behind bookcases in our homes. Schumer, in fact, is bound to be part of a deal that suspends the Constitution sooner or later. Ultimately-- beyond the theatrics-- he certainly has more contempt for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Alan Grayson than he has for his old campaign donor, Donald J. Trump.