Saturday Report 1/8/22: "Is Trump Just a Warmup Act?"

The Best of the Rest of the News

— How Do We Memorialize January the 6th? When Guy Fawkes tried but failed to blow up Parliament during their opening session on November 5, 1605, the Brits declared November 5th as a day of remembrance and celebration for the fact that their nation wasn’t overthrown from within. Should we do the same? Call it “Sedition Day” (along the lines of the British “Guy Fawkes Day”)? Or “Democracy Day”? Following the old dictum that those who control history control the future, the Australian billionaire Murdoch family’s business Fox “News” is already reinventing what happened that day. This is a critical moment for genuinely patriotic Americans to seize the narrative, write the history, name the day, and define whether it’ll be a day of celebration or somber memorialization like with 9/11. What say you? Leave your thoughts in the comments at the bottom and I’ll revisit them next week on the air.

— Is Trump Just the “Warm Up Act”? Canadian fascism scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon warns that Trump is nothing unique; he’s running the early stages of an old script used by despots, dictators and kleptocrats who’ve destroyed otherwise functional governments and societies over the ages. “By 2025,” Homer-Dixon wrote, “American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.” Particularly troubling is how corporate America, after a public moment of pause on bribes political donations, has resumed pumping money into the pockets of Republicans in Congress who openly support fascism and oppose democracy. Given that the dictionary definition of “fascism” is “the merger of state and business leadership combined with belligerent nationalism” this shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s nonetheless alarming. These neofascist billionaires and corporate leaders believe — based on their own past experience — that it doesn’t matter what they or their wholly-owned politicians do, so long as they can dump a few million dollars into local TV and social media ads just before the elections to swing public opinion, and