From the Paul Street Report

You don’t have to (a) agree with and many other analysts and activists that Trump is a fascist to (b) agree with us that Trump poses an existential menace to humanity and must be removed from office as soon as humanly possible.

You are wrong on (a) in my (not so) humble opinion but I humbly welcome working with you in accord with (b).

“The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”

Back during the first Trump administration, a prolific academic and I had a running debate with the great left intellectual Noam Chomsky on whether Trump and Trumpism were fascist. We said yes and Chomsky said no.

Chomsky’s position was ridiculous, for reasons that can be read about in the fourth chapter (titled “The Anatomy of Fascism Denial”) of my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America.

Still, my guess is that Chomsky would not engage in the same denialism regarding the second Trump presidency. And Chomsky said something very important and true about Trump45 in a January 2020 interview that was published on Truthout.

Political scientist C.J. Polychroniou: ‘The [first] impeachment trial of Donald Trump is nearly over, and what a farce it has been — something you had predicted from the start, which is also the reason why you thought that an impeachment inquiry was a rather foolish move on the part of the Democrats. With that in mind, what does this farcical episode tell us about the contemporary state of U.S. politics, and do you anticipate any political fallout in the 2020 election?’

Noam Chomsky: ‘Are the crimes discussed a basis for impeachment? Seems so to me. Has Trump committed vastly more serious crimes? That is hardly debatable. What might be debatable is whether he is indeed the most dangerous criminal in human history (which happens to be my personal view). Hitler had been perhaps the leading candidate for this honor. His goal was to rid the German-run world of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and other “deviants,” along with tens of millions of Slav “Untermenschen.” But Hitler was not dedicated with fervor to destroying the prospects of organized human life on Earth in the not-distant future (along with millions of other species). Trump is. And those who think he doesn’t know what he’s doing haven’t been looking closely.”…The list of Trump’s crimes is immense but none merit a nod in the impeachment proceedings.

Every day brings new forebodings. We have just learned, for example, that the gigantic Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica has been eroding from warm water below. The Washington Post describes this as “a troubling finding that could speed its melt in a region with the potential to eventually unleash more than 10 feet of sea-level rise,” adding, “Scientists already knew that Thwaites was losing massive amounts of ice — more than 600 billion tons over the past several decades, and most recently as much as 50 billion tons per year.” It has now been confirmed, as suspected, that “this was occurring because a layer of relatively warmer ocean water, which circles Antarctica below the colder surface layer, had moved closer to shore and begun to eat away at the glaciers themselves, affecting West Antarctica in particular.” The chief scientist involved in the study warns that this may signal “an unstoppable retreat that has huge implications for global sea-level rise.”

That’s today. Tomorrow will be something worse.

What’s causing the warmer water? No secret. This is only one of the likely irreversible tipping points that may be reached if “the Chosen One,” as he modestly describes himself, is granted another four years to carry out his project of global destruction.

We have just witnessed an extraordinary event at the January Davos meeting of the Masters of the Universe, as they are called…The conference opened with Trump’s oration about what a fabulous creature he is. The encomium was interrupted only by a comment that we should not be “alarmist” about the climate. His Magnificence was followed by the quiet and informed comments of a 17-year old girl [Greta Thunberg]instructing the heads of state, CEOs, media leaders and grand intellectuals about what it means to be a responsible adult.

Trump’s war on organized life on Earth is only the barest beginning. More narrowly, in recent days, the Chosen One has issued executive orders ridding the country of the plague of regulations that protect children from mercury poisoning and preserve the country’s water supplies and lands, along with other impediments to further enrichment of Trump’s primary constituency, extreme wealth and corporate power.

On the side, he has been casually proceeding to dismantle the last vestiges of the arms control regime that has provided some limited degree of security from terminal nuclear war, eliciting cheers from the military industry. And as we have just learned, the great pacifist who is committed to end interventions “dropped more bombs and other munitions in Afghanistan last year than any other year since documentation began in 2006, Air Force data shows.”

He is also ramping up his acts of war — which is what they are — against Iran. I won’t even go into his giving Israel what the Israeli press calls “a gift to the right,” formally giving the back of his imperial hand to international law, the World Court, the UN Security Council and overwhelming international opinion, while shoring up the Evangelical vote for the 2020 election. The prerogative of supreme power.

In brief, the list of Trump’s crimes is immense, not least the worst crime in human history. But none merit a nod in the impeachment proceedings. This is hardly a novelty; rather the norm. The current proceedings are often compared with Watergate. Nixon’s hideous crimes were eliminated from the charges against him despite the efforts of Rep. Robert Frederick Drinan and a few others. The Nixon impeachment charges focused on his illegal acts to harm Democrats.’

Chomsky didn’t need to understand Trump as a fascist – and everything Chomsky described in this long quote was consistent with Trump’s fascism – to see him as an existential menace to humanity, citing Trump’s insane war on livable ecology but also his wars on nuclear arms control, Afghanistan, Iran, and Palestine.

If the Truthout interview had taken place two months later, Chomsky would certainly have mentioned Trump’s insanely reckless and mass-murderous pandemo-fascist fanning of Covid-19.

They Want Millions if Not Billions of Us Dead

Here we are five and half years after Chomsky warned that “irreversible tipping points” of climate catastrophe would “likely…be reached if” Herr Trump got a second term.

You say you don’t want to hear the supposedly over-used word “fascism” in discussing why, as Refuse Fascism says, “Trump must go now?” Okay, fine, let’s put that off to the side for a bit and get into the stuff that chilled Chomsky to his core in January of 2020.

As another season of epic, climate-driven Canadian wildfires produces air quality warnings across much of a United States that is experiencing yet another one of its hottest summers ever, the orange-prayed “Chosen One’s” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has just revoked the Endangerment Finding – the 2009 scientific pronouncement that provided legal basis for federal regulation of carbon emissions. Zeldin informed the world that these emissions pose no serious threat to human health while Earth scientists continue to issue dire and urgent warnings about how that the wildly excessive capitalist extraction and burning of fossil fuels is turning our planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber. Capitalogenic climate cooking could well exterminate all prospects for a decent future by 2050 if not much sooner.

Trump and Zeldin have turned the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Pollution Agency, greenlighting the eco-exterminist petro-capitalist Greenhouse Gassing project, “the worst crime in human history” (Chomsky in 2020).

Ecocide is the biggest issue of our or any time. There’s no democracy, liberation, justice, love, play, science, poetry on a dead planet.

War on Iran and support to Israel’s war on the Palestinian people? Trump has bombed Iran and protected and assisted Israel’s murderous attacks on its Persian nemesis while going beyond the criminal Biden administrations in brazen, unqualified US support for fascist Israel’s war of genocidal ethnic cleansing on Gaza and, increasingly the West Bank.

Global and nuclear war possibilities? Trump has “launched nearly as many airstrikes in his first five months in office as President Biden did during his entire four-year term” (Antiwar.com). The deranged maniac in the White House recently responded to some online bravado from a former Russian president by sending two nuclear submarines ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “appropriate regions” near Russia.

The credible suspicion that Mein Trumpf seeks to deep-six us in tens if not hundreds of millions or in the billions is further buttressed by the following news item regarding the bear-dumping antivax lunatic the Stable Genius put atop the US Department of Health and Human Services (being turned into US Darwinian Department of Disease and Destruction):

‘Kennedy cancels nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, the Department of Health and Human Services announced on Tuesday. It is the latest blow to research on this technology. In May, the Department of Health and Human Services revoked a nearly $600 million contract to the drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine against bird flu.

The new cancellations dismayed scientists, many of whom regard mRNA shots as the best option for protecting Americans in a pandemic. “This is a bad day for science,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been working to develop an mRNA vaccine against influenza.

First used during the Covid-19 pandemic by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mRNA shots instruct the body to produce a fragment of a virus, which then sets off the body’s immune response. Unlike traditional vaccines, which can take years to develop and test, mRNA shots can be made within months and quickly altered as the virus changes. The technology won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.

But it has long been distrusted by vaccine skeptics, and Mr. Kennedy has been sharply critical, once calling Covid shots “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” In a video posted on social media on Tuesday, he claimed falsely that mRNA vaccines do not protect against respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, and that a single mutation in a virus renders the vaccine ineffective.

…Scientists disputed Mr. Kennedy’s claims as inaccurate. “By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Had we not used these lifesaving mRNA vaccines to protect against severe illness, we would have had millions of more Covid deaths,” she said.

…By cutting off mRNA development, the health department is “undermining our ability to rapidly counter future biological threats,” said Rick Bright, a flu expert who was ousted as chief of BARDA during the first Trump administration and resigned from a lesser position in protest. “We’re weakening our frontline defense against fast‑moving pathogens — a huge strategic failure that will be measured in lives lost during times of crisis,” he added.’

This is sheer madness that may well and soon produce massive body counts within and beyond the imperial homeland.

Trump’s twisted history with the degenerate girl-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and the sexual exploitation of young females is contemptible and should be part of the case for his defenestration and incarceration but it would be terrible if Trump is forced out of power in ways that avoid reckoning with his master crimes of Ecocide and pandemicide (as Nixon was removed for crimes far slighter than the invasion of Cambodia, the bombing of North Vietnam, and the vicious repression of the New Left, Black Power, and Native American movements).

I’d be happy to explain how all of this and much more is darkly consistent with the fascism at the heart of the second Trump administration (see this recent PSR for my detailed explanation of where fascism and fossil capitalism toxically intersect).

Still don’t think “the-F-word” applies, like Chomsky in 2016-2020 (he may well have changed his mind after January 6, as did the noted fascism historian Robert Paxton)? Okay, I think you are wrong about that, but I hope you agree with me and Refuse Fascism nonetheless that Trump Must Go Now. This malevolent regime and its minions and allies across US government and society are out to kill us in the many millions/billions. We need to end this nightmare very, very soon, before the fascist Amerikaner Trump regime consolidates power and cements its rule.

If you are focused on elections and promoting dismal (or perhaps half-decent) Dem candidates in 2026 and/or 2028, you don’t know what time it is. It’s way too late for that now. If you are still mired in the electoral quicksand at this stage of existential Trump menace, you are like a person who comes across someone in cardiac arrest and tells the heart attack victim to take some aspirin and go see a (really bad) doctor for your regularly scheduled check-up in 15 or 29 months

Postscript/Thought for the Day

Start at least occasionally saying “the US Genocide in Gaza.” Uncle Sam funds, equips, and protects this genocide. That sick old fuck needs to own it.