The United States Is Under Fascist Occupation

There is a fascist occupation happening in our country.

The United States of America is currently occupied by fascists, up to and including the President.

That’s not hyperbole.  I wish it were.  Frankly, I’ve been saying that we’re in a state of coup for years now, but it’s finally to the point where no reasonable person can deny it.

You need to understand that this did not happen overnight, nor by accident. For forty years, fascists – calling themselves “constitutional republicans,” “christian fundamentalists,” and other dishonest labels – have been deliberately occupying every level of government in this country. It’s part of their strategy, and it’s been widely reported since at least the late 1980’s, and we all just ignored it because “it can’t happen here” and “we’re better than that.”

In 2016, they took the White House…or so you’d think, but the reality is that happened in 1980 and we didn’t notice.

None of this is an accident. It’s planned, it’s been planned, and it’s been a long time coming, and we didn’t just let it happen, we helped it happen. We helped it happen by getting gung-ho and enlisting after 9-11, we helped it happen by allowing the military-industrial complex to not just eat up a sizeable portion of our GDP but to entangle itself in the profit margins of the elite, so as to ensure they too would help advance the coup.

We helped it by deifying Ronald Reagan, who was a really terrible human being, a white supremacist, anti-environmentalist, homophobe, bigot, and misogynist…but he was so darned polite and well-spoken and affable while he did it, and it made us feel all warm and fuzzy about hating the mythic “welfare queens” and ignoring the AIDS crisis because it was a “gay disease.”

This is starting to make you angry, reading this article.  You’re thinking to yourself “hey wait a minute now, I’m not part of this, and attacking that nice old man Reagan is just a step too far!”

But I could literally hyperlink every word in this article to a different story about how this has been happening for decades, and some of the articles are decades old.  We didn’t listen.

Military contractors, police contractors, and yes even the people who produce cop shows, wittingly or unwittingly, have all been footsoldiers and communication directors for the slow rolling conversion of this nation into a fascist state.

They’ve done it through propaganda, they’ve done it through appealing to venal material greed, they’ve done it through appealing to our egos, they’ve done it through programming the very same young men and women who sign up to defend this nation to feel their fealty to a flag, a political party, icons, and symbols while slowly fading out even the most basic notions of common decency and social contract from education under the rubric of “fighting socialism.”

We haven’t just been had, we’ve been taken. I’ve got my own responsibility to bear in that – I should have been screaming this much more loudly from the rooftops decades ago, but like a fascist occupant of a group that thinks it’s a manners and common ground organization is so good at arguing, you’ve got to make the message palatable, right? Because politics done right is politics that destroys a democracy without the democracy realizing who’s firing on it. Because the only thing Occupy Democrats is occupying is their own material greed. Because people of no ethics and fewer morals can push people like me right out of a potentially good organization with manipulative claptrap like being “cognizant of my agenda,” an agenda that didn’t exist and an accusation that I should have punched in the mouth when it was made.

We’re all guilty on this one, or at least most of us, even if only by virtue of having bought in to any number of tropes and propaganda narratives designed to make us doubt the strength of our SYSTEMS when it’s not the systems but the PEOPLE who are the problem.

If we’re lucky, it’s gonna be a long ride.

If we’re not, pretty soon they’re just gonna stop even trying to pretend, and we’re going to be crushed. Including Mr. Cognizant Of Your Agenda and Mr. Occupy Democrats and Matthew “Addicting Info” Desmond and all the other accidental and deliberate double agents who have all contributed to the coup in their own way.  Usually their own way is by trying to gain money and ego boosts by destroying political discourse with pandering and shallow sloganeering and refusal to stand up and speak truth without shame under the stupid, self-serving rubric of popular appeal and “growing the page” and “getting more likes.”

I have watched organizations not just abandon their principles but allow them to be turned into weapons – and some of those I *have* warned about in plain text, repeatedly, but still pulled my punches because I have friends whose feelings I didn’t want to hurt and whose friendship I didn’t want to lose who are major players in those organizations.

I don’t think most of those folks are wittingly working for the enemy, mind you. I think they’re well-intended and mostly just like me, trying to find the best way to avoid hurting people’s feelings.

We’ve allowed calls for civility and decorum to be weaponized, and our own best intentions turned into tools of treason against our country.

I should have stood up taller, spoken more loudly, but until now, nobody would have listened anyway.

I think some people – and some of you are reading this, or at least there’s no reason you shouldn’t be – are much more ready to listen now than they were six months ago, or five years ago, or ten, or twenty.

There’s still time to turn this around and be the nation we’ve been pretending to be…but it’s going to take work, and it’s going to cost some people some friendships, and maybe worse.

Suit up, kids. This really is the “moment” I’ve been telling you was coming for a long time, and it’s gonna get uglier before it gets better.