As of Thursday, October 22, 2006, 11 AM CT

As usual, I am close to overwhelmed by the dizzying madness of the zone-flooding Trump fascist assault on decency, democracy, and the rules of law and reason. Here are some more sickening news items from between my last “This Week in Fascism” and the morning of Thursday, October 22, 2026. This report comes one day earlier than usual due to circumstances that will keep me off computers and the media (imagine!) for the rest of today and all of tomorrow.

Friday, October 16: The “Muslim Radical” Enemy

+ The deranged fascist leader Trump (hereafter “the DFLT”) issued an executive order blocking numerous sanctions on Russia two days before they were due to be enforced. The sanctions were passed by the US Congress and signed into law by Trump in September.

+ Newsweek reported that the DFLT has absurdly claimed that the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and thus a “Muslim radical” enemy of the United States.

Saturday, October 17: “Of Course” They Want to Deport Ilhan Omar

+ The DFLT’s ICE Gestapo thugs broke the arm of US citizen Rodrigo Gonzalez in Long Beach, California. A video of the attack shows the fascist gendarmes kneeling on Gonzales’ back, pushing him face down into a gutter while he is handcuffed.

+ A 100-pound woman said “moratorium” during a public meeting over a data center ordinance at the Utah County Planning Commission meeting in Provo, Utah. A burly county sheriff responded by slamming her to the floor, leaving her with a concussion and severe bruising. “That man could have killed me,” she said.

+ The DFLT said that the “renovation” of Washington’s East Potomac Golf Links will start on November 15, despite a judge’s orders halting Trump’s ecocidal tree removal and requiring prior notice before construction. The announcement came after the DFLT had already removed 500 trees and failed to win dismissal of a preservationist lawsuit against his golf project. The DFLT is seeking the removal of the judge who ruled against him.

+ The DFLT’s corrupt and fascist “border czar” Tom Homan said that the Trump regime can “of course” strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her. “Homan’s comments during a Saturday appearance on Fox News,” The Guardian reported, “were the first remarks explicitly mentioning denaturalization and deportation in connection with Omar that were attributed by name to a top Trump administration official since federal agents raided the Minnesota US House representative’s home on 12 October.”

+ The Guardian reported that the DFLT’s corrupt and fascist Attorney General Todd Blanche has been appearing at Republifascist campaign events in defiance of longstanding norms separating federal law enforcement from partisan politics.

+ The fascist Nerd Reich tech billionaire and DFLT ally Mark Zuckerberg’s company Meta suspended the No Kings movement’s Instagram account during the moderate coalition’s No Kings “day of action” on Saturday.

+ The No Kings “day of action” amounted to little more than a call for early voting, ostensibly “nonpartisan” but objectively for Democrats – this despite abundant evidence that the Trump fascist regime is already moving to steal the midterm elections. Indivisible/NO KINGS advanced the dysfunctional idea that the American people can rely on the midterms to stop fascism. As Refuse Fascism activists politely but forcefully explained to Saturday’s No Kings Day participants:

‘The Trump regime holds federal power, is suppressing the vote and moving to subvert the elections. Even a Democratic Congress leaves Trump in power. They tried to overturn the 2020 election and unleashed violence when they lost. This time, they’ve purged those who might stand in their way, flout Congress, bent federal power to their will, and have the Supreme Court at their back. This is a rolling coup. THE TRUMP REGIME MUST BE DRIVEN FROM POWER. The force that could do it is millions refusing to go along.”

Sunday, October 18: “This is Not Just Fascism, it’s Nazism”

The brilliant expatriate former Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley pointed out on Instagram that Trump’s ongoing effort to denaturalize and deport US Representative Ilhan Obama is “not just fascism, it’s Nazism.” As Stanley explains, the Nazi Party denaturalized Jews in the name of defeating “Judeo-Bolshevism,” a phrase that merged genocidal racism with fervent anti-communism through the claim that Jewish Marxists were working to “destroy the nation” by replacing Germany’s white Christian volk with foreign nonwhites and non-Christians. The Trump regime and party have updated this sick narrative with the notion of Muslim communism, claiming that a “Red-Green alliance” of Marxists ad Muslims is trying to replace white Christian Americans with nonwhite immigrants. “At the heart of Nazism,” Stanley notes:

“was the idea that communism had a racial face. We’re seeing the same kind of racialization of socialist and the left in the United States from the Republican Party. The idea is that just like there was Judeo Bolshevism now there’s Muslim Bolshevism. They want us to believe that Islam and communism have come together, that Muslim communists are coming to seize your private property, raise your taxes, to open the borders and to flood the country with non-white, non-Christians to replace the white Christian population. And just like the Nazis used the Nuremberg laws to denaturalize German Jews, so this regime is using the same kind of conspiracy, the racialization of the left to denaturalize Congresswoman Ilhan Omar….”

“Trump’s Ilhan Omar probe,” Stanley says, “is blatant Nazism.”

Monday, October 19: “Migrants, Jihadists, and Communists” Want to “Extinguish Western Civilization”

+ At a hate rally in Kansas, the DFLT offered evidence for Professor Stanley’s thesis by using the civil unrest in France to rail against “migrants and communists.” The depraved US president told his frothing supporters that a Democratic victory in the mid-terms will lead to the US being “conquered, looted, and burned to the ground by migrants, jihadists, and communists…When you see burning steeples and raging fires in France,” the DFLT added, “just remember that is what the radical Dumocrats want to do to America.” The DFLT added that the Democrats will “decimate Kansas farms.”

+ The DFLT told voters in Kansas that “the Democrat agenda is a plan to extinguish Western civilization. They want to open the borders.” The DFLT said that nations around the world will empty prisoners into the United States if Democrats return to power.

+ The DFLT used his Truth Social platform to call for New Mexico to be renamed “New America” because “We are not Mexico” and said New Mexico might stop having “Crooked Elections” if the change was made. For Trump an election he does not win is by definition “crooked.”

+ The DFLT used the antisemitic term “Shylock” while defending the Republifascist Senator Roger Marshall (Rf-KS) against criticism over medical billing practices.

+ An elections supervisor in a heavily Democratic Florida city observed that two Border Patrol trucks were parked at the city’s busiest early voting site. As The Daily Beast reported Wednesday, “Mark Earley, Supervisor of Elections in Florida’s Leon County, says he has filed a complaint with the FBI about the brief presence of federal agents at Northeast Branch Library in Tallahassee, the state capital.”

Tuesday, October 20: “Your Son Leaves as Jimmy and Comes Back as Janet”

+ The DFLT told a reporter that US Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is “a disgrace to our country” and disparaged her African country of origin: “I think she’s a sick, a very dishonest person who hates our country,” the DFLT said, adding this: “She comes from a country that is …a real shithouse, OK?” Trump. Trump said that Omar “could be” deported and “she could also be jailed.”

+ The DFLT, the most corrupt president in US history, absurdly designated himself as the “arbitrator” in disputes over rewards in the corrupt and fascist-run US Department of Justice’s new whistleblower program

+ The Trump fascist administration proudly announced that it has revoked more than 300,000 US visas since the DFLT re-assumed power last year.

+ Axios reported that the DFLT recently said this at a hate rally in Arizona: the Democrats “can do whatever they want, and they do. Your son leaves as Jimmy and comes back home in three days as Janet, and they don’t even ask you. They can take your child out of school and do whatever the hell they want.”

+The New York Times reported  that the DFLT told former Trumpist press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in front of senior White House advisers, that her “last legacy” should be to “permanently evict” the media from the White House. The DFLT had repeatedly tried to get Leavitt to take this action before she resigned.

Wednesday, October 21 “Homeland Security” Making Home “Visits” on Voting History

+ It was reported that the DFLT’s Homeland Security thugs have for months been making door-to-door “visits” to US Americans’ private homes to ask residents about their immigration and voter registration status and their voting histories. This fascist program has expanded since September in the lead up to midterm elections the MAGA regime and party are afraid of losing.

+ The leading Trumpist attorney, plagiarist, Epstein pal, and law professor Alan Dershowitz told right-wing media that Rep. Omar is “a horrible, horrible human being, a horrible member of Congress, a horrible anti-American, anti-Semite” who Dershowitz wants to see behind bars.

+ CNN reported that the DFLT’s fascist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved testing of a military-grade heat ray called the “Active Denial System.” This so-called non-lethal weapon shoots electromagnetic waves from as far away as a half mile to create a sensation of burning skin in its human targets. The device can penetrate thick clothing and is meant to be used against domestic enemies of the fascist state the Trump regime is moving to create.

+ The DFLT told a hate rally in South Carolina that he asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai to suggest renaming either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean the “Trump Ocean.”

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Reports are widespread this and last week that the Trump regime is planning a major re-escalation of its criminal war on Iran, likely targeting energy and infrastructure sites, after the mid-term elections. We should expect that this imperialist criminality will be intimately related to and tied up with fascist attacks (legal and extra-legal) on election counting and certification in the “homeland.”

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Two highly relevant commentaries

Two very instructive bits of commentary on social media from veteran political observers this week.

+ The Lincoln Project’s Jeff Timmer:

“I’ve been saying this for two years. We are so focused on winning November 3 that we aren’t alarmed enough about what’s going to hit them between November 3 and January 3. The American public is unprepared for the Banana Republic Shitstorm that’s about to engulf them.”

+ Author John Pavlovitz:

“The No King’s Day Episode 4 went off pretty much as predicted. Cities all over America were filled with a massive, ebullient mob of families, schoolteachers, ministers, parents, grocery store clerks, college students, business owners, grandparents, and toddlers on shoulders. Highways and overpasses were lined with exuberant, sign-waving throngs of joyfully defiant human beings loudly declaring their shared disdain for a wannabe dictator. Local parks exploded in a kaleidoscopic display of disparate humanity, converging to declare their solidarity and their collective rejection of authoritarianism. Republican lawmakers’ offices were surrounded by a spirited show of resistance from pissed-off, fed-up constituents demanding accountability.

The vibes were positive. The chants were spirited. The dance lines were jubilant. The sign game was strong. And it was all, well… really nice. We gathered together. We made some noise. We gave speeches. We raised our fists. We encouraged one another. We put the Republican Party on notice. And when it was over, we all felt the emotional intoxication that events like these usually yield. But if we’re honest with ourselves, was it all the equivalent of a strongly-worded letter to powerful, corrupt people who threw it directly in the trash the moment it arrived?

Here we are after the fourth of these gatherings. The Constitutional crises are still piling up. We’re still immersed in an unnecessary, unwinnable war halfway across the world. This Administration’s disregard for legality and morality is still escalating. The complete Epstein files are still concealed, the monsters within them still evading their reckoning. ICE is still ravaging our communities with impunity and with taxpayer funding. Our traitorous, cognitively-decimated, sociopathic Predator-In-Chief is still unstable and violent. We’re still a hair’s breadth from full-on fascism…”