Fascist Nihilism 2.0

There were a thousand outrages that took place on Inauguration Day 2025, but one really cements several fundamental truths about contemporary American politics, and that is the blanket pardon of 1,500 January 6th terrorists and putschists.

Elon Musk doing the Führergruß a couple of times at a DC hockey arena was just the most visible of the outrages. And when Trump/Musk apologists start in with the “it wasn’t a Hitler salute” or “he’s just got Autism/Asperger’s” or some other form of deflective gaslighting, just go watch the video. You saw it. You see it. It is what it is. It is what you know it to be.

And the Republican Party in its MAGA formulation is little more than a mirror image of everything they like to tell you about their bogeymen Black Lives Matter or Antifa. For all of their relentless and breathless bleating about “woke”, their WWE production yesterday was just sad. The pageantry and tradition of yore transformed into a fetid swamp of grievance and hatred. Anti-woke is the new woke. It is tired and reductive and dumb.

So, just as we can call Musk’s salute what it is – a Führergruß – we can call what happened in December 2020 and January 2021 a Republican coup. It wasn’t an attempted coup – it was the real thing. Although it initially failed, the Republican refusal to denounce and walk away from its coup attempt allowed Trump to return to office, triumphant and out for revenge.

The MAGA Coup of 2021 centered around what had hitherto been a purely ministerial device – the certification of the results of the electoral college. Typically, a formality, Republicans conspired to object to the certification of certain states’ electors under the pretext of manufactured claims of voter fraud. In 2020, a lot of people voted by mail and via absentee ballots in 2020 because of Covid. Turnout was high. When turnout is high, Republicans lose. When people vote, Republicans lose. That is why the narrowing and minimization of voting rights is such an important ideological goal of the Project 2025-ers. In 2021, the idea was to have Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over this joint session of Congress, delay the certification of the electoral vote and help steal the election for Trump. “Voter fraud” was the pretext.

This MAGA Coup of 2021 had three main fronts. On the one front, you had the “Stop the Steal” rally and subsequent storming of the United States Capitol. The genius of Roger Stone is to label the thing you’re doing as the thing you’re trying to prevent the other side from doing. In other words, if Roger Stone is planning on, say, robbing a bank, he accuses his opponents of being bank robbers. When Roger Stone is helping to plan a coup, he accuses Democrats of launching a coup. The facts underlying that supposed Democratic coup? Voter turnout which they characterized as voter fraud.

The second front of the MAGA Coup of 2021 was what we now recognize to have been the fake elector slates. So, say your state voted for Biden. You get as many electoral votes as your state has House representatives. So, say New York got 29 electoral votes and all of them went for Joe Biden. If there was going to be a scheme to steal that election, the Republicans would put up a phony electoral slate and count on the Vice President to certify that one rather than the actual slate. To do it right, the Justice Department would declare that there had been massive voter fraud in certain swing states. Republicans in those swing states would put up fake elector “alternative” slates and certify those through the Republican-led state legislatures, and thereby steal the electoral votes from that state with connivance from figures in Washington. This all took place as part of a Trumpworld conspiracy in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The third front was the willing participants in Congress – people like Ted Cruz and Mo Brooks and Josh Hawley. The idea was that they would take a false DOJ declaration of massive voter fraud and run with it, objecting to electoral college results based on that, and substitute in the fake electors with the help from the VP.

That whole process was interrupted by the violent storming of the Capitol, where thousands of MAGA followers convened to batter police, halt the transfer of power, steal the election from Biden, and do real physical harm to anyone who would stop them. It was a shocking display of violence unseen before in contemporary American politics.

In any normal country, there would have been bipartisan condemnation of such a coup. For a day or two, there was. But Trump being Trump, he saw these people as his loyal supporters and when they were arrested and prosecuted for their crimes – and in many cases convicted either by plea or jury of their peers – Trump called them “hostages.” That rather than cop-batterers, they were “political prisoners.” That they were somehow good guys to be lauded for their bravery.

The MAGA Coup of 2021 was a national disgrace, and every one of its myriad perpetrators deserved prosecution and punishment if found guilty. Trump just pardoned them all.

Needless to say, if Democrats attempted something like this (they wouldn’t, because they believe in the rule of law), there would be furious reaction from media and the right. We would never hear the end of it. But MAGA gets to do a coup and just four years later, poof it’s like it never happened.

They tried to steal an election. There was minimal blowback. We just re-elected the guy who did the coup, and for whom the coup was planned, with his approval, knowledge, and involvement.

This country is cooked. It is finished. It has become a lunatic asylum. MAGA are well on their way to turning the greatest country built out of the Enlightenment and turn it into a dark and cruel dictatorship. I hate what MAGA have done to this country, and how they are systematically dismantling our country’s traditions, freedoms, and norms.

They can say that they’re “making America great again” but what they’re really doing is transforming America into a right-wing dictatorship with unchecked power for the right and years of wilderness for anyone else.

And the response from the left, with an infinitesimal number of exceptions, has been shamefully ineffective and silent.