Republican attacks on democracy continue to advance the cause of neo-fascism

A couple of recent items drive home the intensity and power of what is now a clearly, continuous anti-democratic Republican Party neo-fascism assault on democracy, inconvenient truth, the rule of law and civil liberties. These are just more evidence to add to the what has been accumulating ever since the ex-president announced his candidacy for president on June 16, 2015. The neo-fascist rot in the Republican Party started decades before that, but accelerated enormously with the rise of the ex-president.

The Republican attack on democracy and good faith governance

The first is an 8 minute segment that MSNBC aired a couple of days ago on the Rachael Maddow program. This segment deals with how Republican Party elites generate and distribute lies and slanders about Democrats. Although the financing is hidden behind laws that shield donors, a key lies and slanders organization called the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) appears to be significantly funded by a political action group controlled by our neo-fascist ex-president. 

The bottom line is this: Using donor money, the non-profit AAF group looks for dirt on all Biden nominees and then makes up lies and slanders about them to slow or block their confirmation in the Senate. All nominees are tarred as much as possible, which helps the broader GOP attack on Democrats as crooks, liars, communists, pedophiles, etc. That misinformation is then fed to Republican senators who use it as disinformation to attack and slander Biden's nominees. What AFF and the Republican Party elites are doing is conducting all-out political war on Democrats using all means they can get away with. Those means include slanders, smears and open contempt for inconvenient facts, truths and reasoning. There is nothing democratic about these tactics. This is the face of American fascism that the Republican Party and the ex-president are fully engaged in.

Research for this segment came from Jane Mayer, who wrote an article about the AAF, The Slime Machine Targeting Dozens of Biden Nominees, in the New Yorker magazine.

AAF runs a website called BidenNoms.com and it shows who it is targeting as shown in the screen shot below.

 

Biden's nominee (Sarah Blum Raskin, former United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury) for a Federal Reserve position was successfully blocked by AAF by smearing her with the lie that she is a crook. The real reason she was targeted is that she had spoken publicly about climate change being a risk for the economy. One can assume that oil, gas and coal interests helped fund that sleaze campaign, by funding AAF, Republican Senators or both. The Republican Party is in all-out opposition to dealing with climate change. 

The AAF also engineered the lie that Biden's Supreme Court nominee Katenji Brown Jackson was soft on pedophiles, presumably to implant the false belief that she is a pedophile herself. Some Republican senators relied on that AAF lie to oppose that nomination too.

Republican politicians no longer participate in democratic compromise. They want a single party system and the Democratic Party eliminated as a significant source of opposition.

The Republican attack on elections

A key GOP goal is to lay the foundation for an all-out attack on the 2024 presidential election if a Democrat wins. That foundation building continues every day. The New York Times writes:

Trump Allies Continue Legal Drive to Erase His Loss, Stoking Election Doubts

Fifteen months after they tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election, the same group of lawyers and associates is continuing efforts to “decertify” the vote, feeding a false narrative.

In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.

The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.

The efforts have fed a cottage industry of podcasts and television appearances centered around not only false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, but the notion that the results can still be altered after the fact — and Mr. Trump returned to power, an idea that he continues to push privately as he looks toward a probable re-election run in 2024.

“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”

Where does a serious threat, if any, come from?

At this point, most people will have made up their minds about a threat to democracy and where it comes from. Most Democrats and liberals probably see some reason for some degree of concern about threats to democracy from conservatives and Republicans. Most conservatives and Republicans probably see some reason for serious concern about threats socialist, communist and/or pedophile from tyrannical Democrats and liberals. Some see no significant threat from either side. 

To me, it looks like there is a major, urgent threat neo-fascist from the conservative and Republican side.