"At the conference on Friday, February 14, Vice President J.D. Vance launched what The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour called “a brutal ideological assault” against Europe, attacking the values the United States used to share with Europe but which Vance and the other members of the Trump administration are now working to destroy.
Vance and MAGA Christian nationalists reject the principles of secular democracy and instead align with leaders like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. They claim that the equal rights central to democracy undermine nations by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. They want to see an end to the immigration that they believe weakens a nation's people, and for government to reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal values.
Vance attacked current European values and warned that the crisis for the region was not external actors like Russia or China, but rather “the threat from within.” He accused Europe of censoring free speech, but it was clear—especially coming from the representative of a regime that has erased great swaths of public knowledge because it objects to words like “gender”—that what he really objected to was restrictions on the speech of far-right ideologues.
After the Munich conference, in Writing from London, British journalist Nick Cohen wrote that those Americans trying to find an excuse for the betrayal of Ukraine are deluding themselves. He wrote: “[t]he radical right in the US is not engaged in a grand geopolitical strategy. It is pursuing an ideological campaign against its true enemy, which is not China or Russia but liberalism. The US culture war has gone global. The Trump administration hates liberals at home and liberal democracies abroad.”
Proving his point [it's all about owning and destroying the libs], on Saturday after Vance’s speech, Trump’s social media account posted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” This message, attributed to French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte, not only claims that the president is above all laws, but also signals to supporters that they should support Trump with violence. And that is how they took it. Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec responded, “America will be saved[.] What must be done will be done,” to which Elon Musk responded: “Yes[.]”
Letters from an American Historian
Chilling, deeply shameful, incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded, I keep saying this but I really did think we were settled on the violent Nazi thing. Not good; to be avoided. Germany gets it but Vance meeting with the banned fascists and refusing to meet with the current German chancellor: WTF? Maga's bigot militias are spoiling for street protests; or Grump is alerting them to standby ready anyway. The documentary about the street protests that shutdown the the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999 was called, This Is What Democracy Looks Like. This crackdown, Trump's fascist or "competitive authoritarianism" takeover, is what toxic masculinity as political ideology looks like. Democracy in America, or more or less, has lasted about 250 years; second only to the Roman Republic in longevity, as far as I know. What are the lifespan prospects for violent authoritarian regimes these days? Seems like the longer running ones, like China, try to keep the violent repression to a minimum and on the down-low; expanding prison systems and mass forced deportations and hostile takeovers and genocides are costly and difficult to sustain, naturally. I know it's my own ingrained arrogant American exceptionalism showing but isn't making Russia or Hungary our authoritarian models kind of pathetic and disgraceful? I'm still vainly hoping significant numbers of Trump voters eventually decide violent fascist dictatorship isn't really what they voted for before it's too late. But maybe it is too late already?
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