News bits: Regarding the Great White Replacement theory; Normalizing corruption; Thoughts on Democratic Party fascism

From the MAGA!! Files: Whites being replaced and oppressed by non-White people is one of the core dogmas that drives the American Christofascist wealth and power movement. The New Republic writes about White fears of being replaced and oppressed by barbaric non-White hoards:

Nebraska Republican Says Six-Week Abortion Ban Is Necessary 

Because White People Are Being Replaced

A Nebraska Republican state senator argued Wednesday for a six-week abortion ban by claiming there are too many foreigners living in the state, invoking a racist conspiracy theory.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion is allowed in Nebraska up to 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. But on Wednesday, the Senate began debating a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Senator Steve Erdman decided that the best argument in favor of the ban was the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.”

NE State Sen. Steve Erdman (R) uses Great Replacement talking points arguing for a six-week abortion ban.

"[We have] not grown except those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here … because we've killed 200,000 people. These are people we killed." pic.twitter.com/ehAqEYO6oC

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) April 12, 2023

Erdman also said that all of the aborted fetuses “could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies.”

Erdman’s argument delivers a nice one-two punch of racism and misogyny. First, he thinks that abortions should be banned to force more white people to have babies. But it’s actually people of color who are hardest hit by abortion restrictions. Not all states report the racial and ethnic data of people who get abortions, but those that do found a disproportionately high number of people of color seek the procedure.

America, it just gets nuttier and nuttier.

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Normalizing corruption by ignoring blatant conflicts of interest: Washington ethics watchdog CREW writes:

Trump made up to $160 million from foreign countries as president

Donald Trump made up to $160 million from international business dealings while he was serving as president of the United States, according to an analysis of his tax returns by CREW.

Throughout his time in office, President Trump, his family and his Republican allies repeatedly assured the public that his refusal to divest from his businesses wouldn’t lead to any conflicts of interest. Americans were promised that Trump would donate his salary, which he did, until maybe he didn’t—all while siphoning millions from taxpayers that more than offset his presidential pay. When it came to foreign conflicts of interest, Trump and his company pledged to pause foreign business. They did not.

Trump’s presidency was marred by unprecedented conflicts of interest arising from his decision not to divest from the Trump Organization, with his most egregious conflicts involving businesses in foreign countries with interests in US foreign policy.

The full extent to which Trump’s foreign business ties influenced his decision making as president may never be known, but there is plenty of evidence that Trump’s actions in the White House were influenced–if not guided–by his financial interests, subverting the national interests for his own parochial concerns.

Since Trump still claims he had no conflicts of interest, he has to have redefined conflicts of interest as not corruption. That made the problem go away. 

And this is what the Republican Party is going to nominate for president in 2024. 

America, it just gets more and more corrupt.

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An opinion The Guardian published considers the Republican belief that the Democratic Party is fascist:

US Conservatives love to warn of creeping fascism. Do they understand what it is?

Trump, a shrewd opportunist, has understood tendencies in American culture that most of us would prefer to ignore or deny

A few years ago a former student of mine, one for whom I had particular respect, stopped me on the street and handed me a copy of The Road to Serfdom by the British-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

This fine youth was starting out on what most would consider an enviable life, free as precious few of his fellow mortals are or have ever been. Yet he was excited by a new insight, that there was a plot afoot to plunge us into serfdom, fascism, Nazism. This alarm has surged, and now we have men in combat gear standing around at public events, absolutely defying anyone to take away their freedom. 
These “enemies” against whom they are armed are Americans who disagree with them.

I am trying to describe a Trumpism that anticipated and continues to enable Trump, that makes a kind of sense of his wild rhetoric and the reaction to it among his loyalists. A historically privileged group – whom it is, sadly, fair to call Republicans – indulge in a fear amounting almost to panic, which has become endemic, stimulated continuously by the presence of those Americans who differ from them, for example about whether the ready availability of guns is related to the criminal use of them.

Once the peril was that one morning we would all wake up communists. It was a furious and intractable debate that led to character attacks and so on, but no one mentioned civil war. There is a virulence in our present divisions that hardens and sharpens them radically. It comes with the insistent association by Republicans of Democrats – the plurality or majority of the American people, a huge, unorganized swath of the population – with perversion involving children. 

History proves that solid-seeming populations do succumb to fascism. The word “serfdom” in Hayek’s title suggests that people would be passively subjugated, succumbing to a dirigiste economic order. But his real subject is fascism, whose worst cruelties always depend on the active participation of a significant part of these populations, even though they sacrifice what they might have thought they valued in order to be bound up in the unity the word “fascism” promises. Fascism is not a politics, it is a pathology compounded of nostalgia and resentment.

European fascism has had clear markers, three being white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and, of course, charismatic leadership. In using the word “pathology” I put aside the idea of politics as usual. Other patterns are easily discernible within our American strain of this virus.

It is classically fascist to influence opinion by the threat of violence. We have actual violence that lacks rational motive, but which is strikingly consistent over all in that it targets – not a metaphor – the tenderest places in our society, elementary schools, churches, outdoor festivals. It targets custom, community, contentment and hope to very great effect, dispossessing us of much of the pleasure of our national life. Weighing one thing against another, presumably, we are to accept this. At the same time the example we offer to the world of constitutional democracy is disgraced.

Fascism is an autoimmune disease. Under the banner of patriotism it hates its nation and people and oversteps all civilized limits in its zeal to bring about fundamental change, whatever the damage. Something of the kind is discernible in the talk of secession, national divorce, civil war.

So, here is a criticism that American radical right authoritarians, fascists in my opinion, level at liberals, Democrats and targeted out-groups, e.g., non-Christians, non-Whites and non-heterosexuals. 

Qs: Which is more fascist, America's radical right, or liberals, Democrats and targeted out-groups? Or, is there no such thing as America's radical right because the right generally is merely old-fashioned pro-democracy conservatives?