Will the uniforms be nice in the coming fascist era?

Hugo Boss is still around.

Happy Friday! I hope everyone’s week was better than mine (you’ll understand once you read my Rant!). I posted Africa: A Brief History Of Being Scrambled After earlier this week. If you missed it, here’s Easy Click Access:

Mark your calendars: VESPERS! December 7 with special guest Casey Michel. We’ll chat about his books, American Kleptocracy and Foreign Agents, and discuss illicit finance, organized crime, and more. Noon Eastern, 6pm Central Europe. I hope to see you there! Reminder: VESPERS is for paid subscribers only. Don’t miss out!

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ALEX’S WEEKLY RANT

Folks, I’m going to be honest here. I’m not feeling great about the coming fascist era. I’m all for the sleek, clean lines of the uniforms that tend to come out of fascist movements, but the actual day-to-day fear and violence I could do without. This week, I found myself suffering a bout of angst, as I worry that most people do not understand the stakes of all this [I say, as I gesture wildly at the world around us].

Fascists have great clothes, but shitty policies. It’s a tradeoff.

We are at an inflection point in history. What happens in the world over the next two to five years will determine the global order for the next generation (at least).

I know the results of the off-year election are giving Democrats and other non-authoritarian types hope, and the media have been covering those wins as if next year’s election will turn on such normal things: polls, voter turnout, voter will, and so on.

But they won’t. And I feel few people have managed to grasp that. It doesn’t matter what the actual vote is; Trump will insist he won. And therein lies the real problem. What happens when Trump claims to have won?

The Stakes

Let’s start with the proffer video from Jenna Ellis that came out earlier this week.

Ellis revealed that Trump had no intention of leaving the presidency, no matter the results of the vote. Here is the key exchange that took place between Ellis and Dana Scavino, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, after Ellis told him she thought they had reached the end of line in terms of challenging the election results:

Scavino: Well, we don’t care and we’re not going to leave.

Ellis: What do you mean?

Scavino: Well, the boss [Trump] is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power.

Ellis: It doesn’t quite work that way, you realize?

Scavino: We don’t care.

Of course Trump never had any intention of giving up power! He had been talking about the election being rigged for years before the election, laying the groundwork to mobilize his supporters in case he lost. He even stated, out loud, “I will accept the results of the election, if I win.”

Does anyone really think he will accept to lose next year?? He will claim he won, no matter what the actual results are. And he will unleash his violent mobs. He’ll do this with a wink and nod, to give himself plausible deniability. Remember his shout out to the Proud Boys? “Stand back and stand by.” Trump could claim he never directed the Proud Boys to go carry out a violent insurrection. But the Proud Boys sure took it that way.

Even if Biden wins by a landslide, Trump will insist it was rigged. There will be violence. Do people not get this??

Stop Being A Drama Queen!

First of all, no. Life would be boring without drama queens. But also: this isn’t hyperbole. Although I understand most people think it is, which is precisely why I am so anxious.

Trump has spent years, both in and out of office, chipping away at the institutions that prop up democracy and chipping away at public trust in said institutions. His legal problems out of office have given him a new platform for this, as he denigrates prosecutors, judges, even the staff of judges, and encourages his supporters to attack them. We’ve seen the same thing happen with local election officials, school board members, librarians for fuck’s sake!

Trump and his enablers (don’t even get me started on the Fight Club nonsense going on on Capitol Hill this week) have normalized violence, making it seem a normal channel for dealing with disagreement, and have actively worked to lower public trust in institutions. I’d lay out a million examples here, but

The Bulwark

has already done the work for me and I highly recommend reading this piece.

This leaves us with a few problems. To begin, when (not if!) Trump claims he won, and if all kinds of Secretaries of State and election officials come out and say, “That’s not true! Biden won!” none of Trump’s supporters will believe those people. They will understand it is their duty to go be violent because Trump, who they are sure won, demands it.

And what of the local election officials? Sure, Trump doesn’t have the sway over the Department of Justice or the Pentagon that he tried to use for his coup last time around. But he does have a lot of local loyalists in positions that can make a difference at the state level.

We are seeing something similar play out in Ohio already. In last week’s election, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly for a constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion. The state’s Republican legislature, however, has decided to ignore the results of the election and are trying to use the courts to stop the measure from being implemented.

Does anyone truly think they won’t pull out all the stops to try to overturn voter will on a presidential election? And if somehow we make it to inauguration, January 6 will look like a quaint dress rehearsal compared to what we will see this time around.

President Trump 2.0: Orange Roid Rage

And should he win or should he lose but still manage to take the office?

Several reports this week laid out Trump’s plans for a second (and third and fourth and fifth…) term. Among the insanely scary plans, he will overhaul the FBI, Department of Justice, and the Intelligence Community, wiping out civil servants and replacing them with loyalists, then use the agencies to go after his perceived enemies, including individuals who worked for him previously but didn’t clap hard enough.

He is telling us this openly, just as he did when he was president. Only this time, he has learned where democracy’s fortifications are and he plans to wipe them out.

His fascist colors are showing. He uses dehumanizing language, like “vermin,” and threatens to throw political opponents in mental institutions (which is, by the way, what the Soviets used to do… and somehow now the Republican party is cool with their guy emulating the Soviets???). Of course, he did this already when he was president. He ordered investigations of his political opponents, set the IRS on two of them, in fact. And thanks to the Heritage Foundation and its Plan 2025, a transition roadmap for Republicans to expand executive power, he’ll have more enablers around this time. No pesky lawyers and civil servants to man the guardrails of democracy and make sure Trump doesn’t drive it off a cliff.

As people did in 2016 and throughout Trump’s tenure as president, they will dismiss the rhetoric. He’s just riling up his base, don’t be dramatic, they will say. But people around Trump will go along with it; you have to demonstrate loyalty, after all, if you want to keep your position and its benefits.

Party Like It’s 1933

I feel like I’m standing in 1933 screaming and all the red flags are waving and alarms are blaring and most people around me think I’m spouting hyperbolic nonsense. It could never happen here, right? Right??

Here’s what one German journalist wrote when Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor: “It is a hopeless misjudgement to think that one could force a dictatorial regime upon the [German] nation. [...] The diversity of the German people calls for democracy.”

How’d that work out?

Worse, I feel like most people don’t notice anything. They go about their daily lives, unaware of the approaching danger. Honestly, most people do fine in a fascist world, as long as they keep their heads down and mind their own business. It’s the people who want freedom of expression and silly things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness who will suffer the most. A lot of people clearly don’t want these things, based on their unwavering support for Trump, even when his policies will hurt them. His supporters have a habit of voting against their own interests.

We are living a moment in time that, when people read about it in the future, they will be shocked that so few people saw what was coming when it was so damn obvious (assuming we have history books in the future).

On the bright side, fascists tend to bring great pomp and circumstance, so we’ll have awesome parades filled with slick, clean-cut uniforms and enthusiastic clappers.

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THE WEEK’S LINKS

A roundup of stories you should be reading

RUSSIA

Secret deal links Abramovich to ‘Putin’s wallet’ (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism)

German journalist dubbed the ‘Putin connoisseur’ had secret book deal with Russian oligarch (ICIJ)

Cyprus firm helped a Putin ally move $5 million the day he was sanctioned (ICIJ)

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Alex Finley is a former officer of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, where she served in West Africa and Europe. She writes and teaches about terrorism, disinformation / covert influence, and oligarch yachts. Her writing has appeared in Slate, Reductress, Funny or Die, POLITICO, The Center for Public Integrity, and other publications. She has spoken to the BBC, MSNBC, CNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, France24, and numerous other media outlets. She was also invited once to speak at Harvard, which she now tells everyone within the first ten seconds of meeting them. She is the author of the Victor Caro series, satirical novels about the CIA. Before joining the CIA, Alex was a journalist, covering Capitol Hill, the Pentagon, and the Department of Energy. She reported on issues related to national security, intelligence, and homeland security. Did she mention she was invited to speak at Harvard?

Look at that beautiful smile! I look pretty happy, too.