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   Fred Edwards 🔻 (fedwards9965@mastodon.online)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 09:11:37 JST Fred Edwards 🔻

   Calling Trump a fascist, while emotionally satisfying and I've been guilty, is giving the man and his knuckle-dragging, slack-jawed mouth-frothing followers too much credit.

   I mean, the Nazis had people like Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Konrad Lorenz, Werner Heisenberg, Wernher von Braun, Ernst Krieck...

   What does Trump have? An idiot that enables looking up what their ex's and family are doing and an embarrassing jackass that wants to fly to Mars.

   • Embed this notice
     carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 09:11:36 JST carl marks

     in reply to

     @fedwards9965 I don't think they have to be competent to be fascists tbh

   • Embed this notice
     Fred Edwards 🔻 (fedwards9965@mastodon.online)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 11:15:27 JST Fred Edwards 🔻

     in reply to

     • carl marks

     @tillshadeisgone

     no one has to be competent to be one, but to be an actual effective fascist party in power, probably takes more than the "ideology" of Trump and his people... which is basically "Me want MY way! Do what me says!"

   • Embed this notice
     carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Wednesday, 22-Jan-2025 11:15:27 JST carl marks

     in reply to

     @fedwards9965 yeah he's definitely going to hamstring himself a lot, but he has a lot of systems of folks behind him, like the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, etc who all crafted Project 2025 for him.

     He's not going to succeed at everything he attempts but he doesn't have to. Other dictators have had similar woes. I'm no expert but I have read that in several instances, Hitler was incompetent as fuck.

     Anyway, he's had a lot of opportunities for fascism handed to him by the neoliberal power apparatus, and he's being propped up by a whole bureaucracy of legal experts with decades of experience and deep pockets of money behind them. He's very much still a fascist.

   • Embed this notice
     Fred Edwards 🔻 (fedwards9965@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 05:22:02 JST Fred Edwards 🔻

     in reply to

     • carl marks

     @tillshadeisgone

     Well, call him what you like—I’ll likely call the GOP 'Nazis' and Trump "Orange Hitler" soon enough myself.

     But, we'll have to agree to disagree on whether that's an intellectually honest or robust labelling however

   • Embed this notice
     carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 05:22:02 JST carl marks

     in reply to

     @fedwards9965 fair enough! I will just add this:

     https://www.newsweek.com/hitler-incompetent-lazy-nazi-government-clown-show-opinion-1408136

     They called Mussolini "the mad little clown". Both of these fascists were underestimated by their political contemporaries, it seems to me.

     But as you said, time will tell.