Politics

By Motasem A Dalloul | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – Massive demonstrations across Israel are calling for the unseating of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over corruption cases and his alleged mishandling of the coronavirus crisis. Worryingly for Netanyahu, the protests are growing, and look set to get even bigger, fuelled by hate speech […]

Epidemics

The New Isolationism and the Distrustful Citizen: Covid-19 and the end of Geopolitics

John Feffer

( Tomdispatch.com) – I don’t trust you. Don’t take it personally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a friend or a stranger. I don’t care about your identity or your politics, where you work or if you work, whether you wear a mask or carry a gun. I don’t trust you because you are, for the […]

Epidemics

Is the Coronavirus deflating the Far Right?

The Conversation

By Georgios Samaras | – In recent years, far-right political parties in Europe have capitalised on crises to build their support bases. Many have made it to positions of power as a result of these efforts. The financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis that began in 2014 and the ongoing debate around climate change […]

Donald Trump

Trump at Mt. Rushmore and other Rogues’ Galleries in an America in Ruins

Tomdispatch

By Lawrence Weschler | – The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “massive fireworks display” before a sizeable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again […]

Authoritarianism

What Will It Take to Defeat Trumpism? Learning Lessons from the End of the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and Saddam’s Iraq

John Feffer

( Tomdispatch.com) – Let’s assume that Donald Trump loses the election in November. Yes, that’s a mighty big assumption, despite all the polls currently favoring the Democrats. If the economy begins to recover and the first wave of Covid-19 subsides (without a second wave striking), Donald Trump’s reelection prospects could improve greatly. The Republican Party […]

Dissent

What – or who – is Trump’s Bogeyman Antifa?

The Conversation

By Stanislav Vysotsky | – The movement called “antifa” gets its name from a short form of “anti-fascist,” which is about the only thing its members agree on. President Donald Trump and some far-right activists and militants have claimed antifa is allegedly conspiring to foment violence amid the protests sweeping the U.S. In my forthcoming […]

African-Americans

Trump’s ‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’ is Classic Fascism, Classic Racism

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – “Between 18 and 20 December 1922 Turin Fascism unleashed a 3 day terror campaign on a recalcitrant anti-Fascist labour movement.” So informs us Antonio Sonnessa.* Turin (Torino) was a site of resistance to Fascism. It had a powerful labor union, dissident newspapers, a Communist Party (Antonio Gramsci was there and […]

Far Right

From Jones’s Kool-Aid to Trump’s Clorox– Can we Finally leave the Death Cults Behind Us?

Waging Nonviolence

By Michael Nagler | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – When I compared the president and his followers to Jim Jones and the “Peoples Temple” cult two years ago I didn’t expect many would go that far. In fact, I hoped events would prove me wrong. Unfortunately, the comparison has become inescapable, and other writers have […]

Cults

The Church of QAnon: Will Trumpian conspiracy theories form the basis of a dangerous new religious movement?

The Conversation

By Marc-André Argentino | – Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies. I have been studying the growth of the QAnon movement as part of my research into how extremist religious […]