As of Friday, September 18, 11 AM

It’s hard to keep up with the endless madness and atrocities of the zone-flooding Trump fascist regime. Here is an abbreviated compilation from the last week.

I.  AUTHORITARIANISM

Fascist FBI Director Kash Patel Tells Senate He’s Ready to Interfere in the Midterms

On Tuesday, Trump’s corrupt fascist F.B.I. director, Kash Patel told US Senators that he is prepared to send FBI agents to polling places during the upcoming midterm elections, boasting that “we have [tellingly mislabeled] election crisis coordinators manned at all 56 field offices” (the actual term is “election crime coordinators”).

Patel’s statement contradicted earlier testimony in which he indicated he would not send federal agents to polling places around the country. When US Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) asked Patel to “pledge not in any way interfere in the will of the American people when they go to the polls in November,” the contemptuous Trump toy Patel said, “I pledge unequivocally that I will not participate in your charade of lies.“

Federal Charges of “Illegal Voting” Announced in Texas

As part of the Trump regime’s effort to undermine faith in US elections by falsely claiming that those elections are plagued by rampant illegal noncitizen voting, the Trump Department of Justice on Tuesday announced charges against a grand total of seven people for alleged illegal voting in federal elections or falsely claiming citizenship.   

House Closed Early to Protect Fascist War Chief Hegseth

The Christian fascist Trump toy and US House Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson ended House voting earlier than normally scheduled Wednesday to prevent a House vote on Trump opponent and libertarian Republican House representative Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) bill to impeach Trump’s deranged Christian white nationalist Pentagon chief (“Secretary of War”) for violating the 1973 War Powers resolution, for criminally seizing a foreign sovereign head of state, for carrying out extrajudicial executions, for suppressing free speech, and for ignoring laws requiring the minimization of civilian casualties.

Loyalty Tests Persist in Defiance of a Federal Court Order

The Daily Beast reported Tuesday that the Trump regime is defying yet another federal court order by continuing to advertise jobs with a query about “loyalty” to the president. The job application’s third question asks, “How would you help advance the President’s Executive Orders and policy priorities?” Another application question asks applicants to “identify Trump initiatives that were personally ‘significant’ to them—and explain how they would put them into effect if handed the roles.”

Kennedy Center Threats

Frustrated by federal court refusals to approve Trump’s executive order to put his name on the venerable Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (and no doubt by the refusal of many artists to perform there since its board fell under Trump’s control), the regime announced last Monday that it is closing the center.

In a photo taken AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski late Wednesday, Trump can be seen through the windows of Air Force One holding a placard with visible text saying “KENNEDY CENTER DEMOLISH” above a picture showing a construction vehicle dredging up rubble from a torn-down building.

The Republicans’ Neo-Nazi Problem

Times columnist Jamelle Bouie noted Wednesday that neo-Nazism is chillingly common among younger operatives in the Trump government and the Trumpified Republican Party.

A Freudian Slip

Speaker Johnson made a Freudian slip last Monday by referring to the Trump regime as, well, a regime – a term Republifascists never use to describe the Trump government because it is strongly associated with authoritarian and not democratic rule.

II.  RACIST ETHNIC CLEANSING

Third Country Human Trafficking

Also on Tuesday, NPR reported that the Trump47 regime has so far sent more than 25,000 predominantly Latino human beings to over 29 countries they’re not from. The destinations are commonly despotic regimes with horrific human rights records where people snatched from their lives in the US have no connections, documents, citizenship, means of support, or chance of escape. This includes places like Liberia, Guatemala, Rwanda, South Sudan, Guyana, Ghana, the Central African Republic (CAR), Sierra Leone, and Honduras. Many of the detainees are removed suddenly from ICE concentration camps without due process, passports, or identification documents.

Savi Arvey, director of policy for refugee and immigrant rights at Human Rights First, told ABC News this week that the Trump fascist regime has spent $50 million on third-country “deportation” deals whereby “the Trump administration is sending refugees to the most dangerous countries in the world, countries run by corrupt autocrats where they’ve been arbitrarily detained and sent to persecution and torture,” demonstrating that the Trump regime has “complete disregard for due process, for international law and for human dignity.”

This is not “deportation,” which involves a legal process. It is fascist and racist human trafficking, with US taxpayers remunerating authoritarian governments who have agreed to receive prisoners the Trump regime is ethnically cleansing from the US to Make America White Again.

This is an epitome of the dehumanization at the heart of fascism, as is so much more.

Trump’s Ongoing Physical and Psychological War on Haitian Americans

Last Tuesday, NPR reported on the once vibrant Haitian community of Miami, Florida, describing how it has become a terrorized “ghost town” since the Trump regime ended Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitians living inside the US. A Haitian registered nurse tearfully told NPR’s Sergio Martinez-Beltran that fear of ICE prevented her from opening her door for a salesman who asked for water on a scorching day: “That’s not me. I’m a nurse. I help people. But I couldn’t even give him some water because I didn’t trust him.”  A local Haitian minister told NPR that many of his parishioners are dealing with depression thanks to the Trump regime’s “psychological warfare” against Haitians. .

The Trump regime falsely claims that “conditions have improved” in the deeply impoverished and violence-plagued island nation of Haiti, thereby “justifying” the deadly “remigration” – this as the US State Department has told U.S. citizens to not travel to Haiti because it’s too dangerous! Martinez-Beltran spoke to a former Haitian broadcaster who says that “going back to Haiti now would be a death sentence.”

Teens Beaten by ICE on the Way to Enlist in the Marines

In the fascist-ruled state of Texas, two Latino teenagers heading to enlist in the US Marines were pepper-sprayed, beaten, and detained by ICE agents. The attack occurred when the teens, both US citizens, stopped to record Trump’s Gestapo forces who were intimidating parents and children outside an elementary school. One of the teenager’s mother says her son is reconsidering enlistment. “How,” the mother says, “are they supposed to serve a country that doesn’t even uphold their rights?” Good question!

Human Cages in the Fascist Torture Camp “Alligator Alcatraz”

It was reported Monday that the notorious Alligator Alcatraz concentration camp run by Trump’s fascist Department of Homeland Security and Florida fascist governor Ron DeSantis’ Florida Division of Emergency Management confined migrants in “small metal enclosures.” Facility staff absurdly told government investigators that “detainees asked to spend time” in the cages.

The Openly Racist Texas Candidate Bo French

Last Sunday, Bo French, the fascist Republican candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner (a key position for the regulation of the state’s oil and gas industry) posted on X photos of South Asian University of Texas students cheering the Texas football Longhorns’ victory over Ohio State the day before. In a caption to one of these photos, French wrote  “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Texas Republifascists told French to delete the post but say they’ll still vote for him.

III.   ATTACKING PUBLIC HEALTH, SCIENCE, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN

Antivax Lunacy in Federal Power

Amid a deadly measles outbreak tied to declining child vaccination rates, Trump’s deranged, eugenicist, and anti-science pandemo-fascist Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. told a Washington gathering of anti-vaccine lunatics (a conference of his former organization Children’s Health defense) that they “have a friend in the White House.” The wildly orange-brushed Kennedy repeated debunked claims about childhood vaccinations causing autism, ADHD, diabetes and other conditions.

Abortion Bans Fueling Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths

On Wednesday, NPR reported Propublica’s finding that Christian fascist abortion bans enacted in the wake of the Trump Supreme Court’s destruction of women’s right to an abortion have contributed to a significant increase in female deaths from ectopic pregnancies.

Cleansing Science Texts of Climate Science

The fascist state government of Florida’s Department of Education is pressuring publishers to “reduce or eliminate coverage of climate change as a condition for getting on the approved list” of Florida science textbooks. This is consistent with the anti-science and pro-fossil fuel imperatives of American fascism. An English teacher from the Tampa Bay area worries about a growing “culture of self-censorship” on the part of teachers afraid of Florida’s fascist Big Brother authorities.