The biggest and most frightening challenge is Americans have had it so good for their whole lives and for almost all our history they just assume it can't happen here. They can't imagine the United States of America could ever have a Hitler like dictator and fascist government like Nazi Germany. When that is almost wilful blindness by this point because it is happening right before their very eyes. And the wannabe dictator Trump and the fascists can win without firing a single shot through the apathy of Americans fooling themselves into thinking it can't happen here.

All of us need to wake up. Just look at the number of treasonous conservative/America Hating/Republicans we have right here on our little forum.


Cassidy Hutchinson Gives Dark Reason Why ‘Everybody Should Vote For Joe Biden’
Josephine Harvey
Tue, November 21, 2023 at 5:53 AM MST·2 min read
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Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson urged Americans to vote for President Joe Biden in 2024 if they want democracy to continue.

Hutchinson, who served as a top aide to Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was asked by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Monday how she’d vote in a hypothetical Donald Trump-Biden matchup.

“I will say that my door is completely shut to voting for Donald Trump,” Hutchinson said. ”And the only reason that I will not endorse a candidate right now is because I still am hopeful that Donald Trump does not end up being the nominee next year. I think our country will be in a much better place overall.”

“But what I will say, too, though, is I think everybody should vote for Joe Biden if they want our democracy to survive,” she added.


Hutchinson has been critical of Trump since serving in his administration. She testified before the House Jan. 6 committee last year about the former president’s actions surrounding the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, earning rebukes and attacks from Trump and his supporters.

She has since published a memoir containing damning claims about Trump and her experience working for him.

In September, she told CNN’s Jake Tapper she believes Trump “is the most grave threat we will face to our democracy in our lifetime, and potentially in American history.”

Despite facing 91 felony counts across four criminal indictments, Trump is miles ahead of his rivals in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/cassidy-hutchinson-gives-dark-reason-125355353.html

 

you care nothing about democracy

you and the left only care about control

fuck you and your propaganda vomit

 

Just more stupid ignorant psychological projection that you cannot even define let alone defend or debate. You just squawk out blind brainwashed fear hate and anger spoon fed to you by the right wing false propaganda noise machine. When truth, facts, reason, and logic easily proves you wrong.

Just like this. It is not just the left that recognizes Trump and the fascist movent you are a part of as the biggest threat our country has faced since the civil war.



Prominent conservative lawyers band together to fight Trump threat
Martin Pengelly in Washington
Tue, November 21, 2023 at 8:30 AM MST·3 min read
284



Photograph: Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

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Three prominent US legal thinkers have announced a new organisation to champion conservative legal theory within the rule of law, to fight the threat of a second Donald Trump term.

“Our country comes first,” the three wrote in the New York Times, “and our country is in a constitutional emergency, if not a constitutional crisis. We all must act accordingly, especially us lawyers.”

Related: ‘I’m more worried today than I was on January 6’: top conservative’s warning to America


The authors were George Conway, an attorney formerly married to Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s White House counselor; J Michael Luttig, a retired judge and adviser to Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, who became a prominent January 6 witness; and Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia.

The authors also rebuked prominent rightwing groups including the Federalist Society for not resisting the former president and his authoritarian ambitions.

Their new group, the Society for the Rule of Law Institute, would “work to inspire young legal talent … focus on building a large body of scholarship to counteract the new orthodoxy of anti-constitutional and anti-democratic law … [and] marshal principled voices to speak out against the endless stream of falsehoods and authoritarian legal theories … propagated almost daily,” they said.

The Federalist Society and its chair, Leonard Leo, played a key role in Trump’s judicial appointments, installing three hardliners on the supreme court who helped hand down rightwing wins including removing abortion rights and loosening laws on gun control, affirmative action, voting rights and other progressive priorities.

Conway, Luttig and Comstock emerged among prominent conservative opponents of Trump, warning of his authoritarian threat before and after January 6, when rioters attacked Congress in an attempt to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

Ninety-one criminal charges and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, Trump is now the clear frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination while polling strongly against Biden in battleground states.

“American democracy, the constitution and the rule of law are the righteous causes of our times, and the nation’s legal profession is obligated to support them,” Conway, Luttig and Comstock wrote.

“But with the acquiescence of the larger conservative legal movement, these pillars of our system of governance are increasingly in peril. The dangers will only grow should Donald Trump be returned to the White House next November.”

Trump, they said, would stock a second administration “with partisan loyalists committed to fast-tracking his agenda and sidestepping – if not circumventing altogether – existing laws and long-established legal norms.

“This would include appointing … political appointees to rubber-stamp his plans to investigate and exact retribution against his political opponents; make federal public servants removable at will by the president himself; and invoke special powers to take unilateral action on first amendment-protected activities, criminal justice, elections, immigration and more.”

Saying Trump tried such attacks when in power but was blocked by lawyers and judges, the authors said the former president would if re-elected “arrive with a coterie of lawyers and advisers who, like him, are determined not to be thwarted again”.

Though they said the Federalist Society had long been “the standard-bearer for the conservative legal movement”, they said it had “failed to respond in this period of crisis.

“That is why we need an organisation of conservative lawyers committed to the foundational constitutional principles we once all agreed upon: the primacy of American democracy, the sanctity of the constitution and the rule of law, the independence of the courts, the inviolability of elections and mutual support among those tasked with the solemn responsibility of enforcing the laws of the United States.

“This new organisation must step up, speak out and defend these ideals.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/prominent-conservative-lawyers-band-together-153045839.html

 

more paid off propagandist, globalist vibes

 

Christian nationalists party at Mar-a-Lago and warn of God's wrath if Trump loses again

Brad Reed
November 21, 2023 11:35AM ET



Jesus Christ and Donald Trump (Renata Sedmakova / Shutterstock.com, Gage Skidmore/Flickr)


A group of Christian nationalists who believe that their religious faith should have dominion over the American government spent time partying at former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort as they openly fantasized of returning to power and crushing their foes, according to a report.

Rolling Stone wrote that notorious theocrat Lance Wallnau and MAGA pastor Jim Garlow were guests at a Mar-a-Lago gathering, held by the America First Policy Institute, at which plans to create a theocracy in the United States were discussed.

"We don’t just ‘preach Jesus,'" said Garlow, according to Rolling Stone. "We preach what Jesus preached. He preached the Kingdom... What’s the King over? Everything. Everything. Including the governmental and political realm."

ALSO READ: Marjorie Taylor Greene declares war on Republicans

And these ambitious Christian nationalists believe that they have found their true champion in Trump, who currently faces 91 different criminal charges including fraud charges related to hush money payments he made to an adult film star, Rolling Stone reported.

In fact, Wallnau was so enthused by the prospect of a second Trump presidency that he believed a victory for the GOP front-runner would be a sign of divine blessing.

"I swear, if God wants to have mercy on America, this guy will have four more years!" he gushed.

Things turned a little darker when Wallnau contemplated the consequences of another Trump defeat in 2024, which he said would evoke God's wrath, while adding that, "The sheer stupidity of the leadership decisions that are happening is a form of judgment."



https://www.rawstory.com/trump-christian-nationalist/

 

.... and guess what?
No one burst into flames at Mar a Lago.
That tells us no heathen despicables slipped in.

 

Trump knows he's stoking violence — and he 'will keep pushing': Cassidy Hutchinson

Matthew Chapman
November 20, 2023 10:17PM ET



Cassidy Hutchinson (Photo: Screen capture)


Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson warned MSNBC anchor and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Monday evening that former President Donald Trump is fully aware of the violence he is encouraging with his words — and will continue stoking it if he keeps getting the chance.

"I wanted to talk to you about Trump's words," said Psaki. "That was essentially their argument. Jan. 6 was a clear example of people following — does he recognize the impact of his word?"

"Yes, I absolutely believe that he knows the impact of his words," said Hutchinson, who captivated much of America with her Jan. 6 testimony last year. "I think that is evident from just how he has been able to get away with how often he has tweeted and the rhetoric of his tweets. Trump knows the impact his words have. He knew he would put out the tweet on Dec. 19th, 2020, when he summoned the mob to come to Washington, D.C. that he was going to expect a crowd. That is why he continued pushing and pushing and pushing that rhetoric and pushing those invitations to all of his supporters that ended up coming to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6th."

"So, when Donald Trump says something, I think that we as a nation do a big disservice to our own constituents and our neighbors when we don't take what he says at face value," Hutchinson added.

"There are a number of you who have spoken out," continued Psaki later in the segment. "Are you talking together? ... How do you engage about what you are going to do to prevent him from becoming president again?"

"No, I think at least in my position, I haven't been very involved in with — to my knowledge, at least, there is not an organized effort, although I would love there to be one," said Hutchinson. "But also, I think like on a larger scale, this isn't just a Republican Party issue. I think right now it is so important for Democrats and for Republicans to come together, to bring light to this issue."

She made it clear that she doesn't see it as being about political parties.

"I hope that there is a day where I can sit at this table and we can talk policy and have a productive policy conversation. Because I'm sure that we would be able to hopefully have a very productive conversation on that," she continued. "But this next election we're looking at a ballot where we are fighting for our democracy where the candidate we are voting for, Americans have to vote for, is either going to be able to sustain our democracy or is going to let it die."

She also warned that she fears if Trump wins the 2024 election, "I don't think we'll be voting under the same Constitution as if Joe Biden were elected in 2024."

Watch the video below or at the link here.



https://www.rawstory.com/cassidy-hutchinson-trump-violence/

 

AUFERA!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

All though the article was poorly written & with the intent of manipulation, intelligent people can read between the lines.

You on the other hand dont have the fortitude of any compression because your an illiterate!

And If you had read the Bible, at least once, you would have understood the message of the article.

 

‘Openly authoritarian campaign’: Trump’s threats of revenge fuel alarm
Peter Stone in Washington DC
Wed, November 22, 2023 at 5:00 AM MST·8 min read
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Photograph: Mark Felix/AFP/Getty Images

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Donald Trump’s talk of punishing his critics and seeking to “weaponize” the US justice department against his political opponents has experts and former DoJ officials warning he poses a direct threat to the rule of law and democracy in the US.

Trump’s talk of seeking “retribution” against foes, including some he’s branded “vermin”, has coincided with plans that Maga loyalists at rightwing thinktanks are assembling to expand the president’s power and curb the DoJ, the FBI and other federal agencies. All of it has fueled critics’ fears that in a second term Trump would govern as an unprecedentedly authoritarian American leader.

Trump is currently the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination for 2024 and has long maintained hefty polling leads over his party rivals. At the same time a slew of recent polls has also shown him ahead of president Joe Biden, including in key battleground states.


But scholars and ex-justice officials see increasing evidence that if they achieved power again Trump and his Maga allies plan to tighten his control at key agencies and install trusted loyalists in top posts at the DoJ and the FBI, permitting Trump more leeway to exact revenge on foes, and shrinking agencies Trump sees as harboring “deep state” critics.

Ominously, Trump has threatened to tap a special prosecutor to “go after” Biden and his family.

Trump’s angry mindset was revealed on Veterans Day when he denigrated foes as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out”, echoing Fascist rhetoric from Italy and Germany in the 1930s.

“I’m hard pressed to find any candidates anywhere who are so open that they would use the power of the state to go after critics and enemies,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and co-author of How Democracies Die.

“This is one of the most openly authoritarian campaigns I’ve ever seen. You have to go back to the far-right authoritarians in the 1930s in Europe or in 1970s Latin America to find the kind of dehumanizing and violent language that Trump is starting to consistently use.”


Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Claremont, New Hampshire, on 11 November. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Ayer, the former deputy attorney general who served in the George HW Bush administration, said: “It is appalling that a presidential candidate could suggest using the Department of Justice to go after his political adversaries, to go after Biden and his family, and to effectively make the Department of Justice an arm of the White House to be used for its political purposes.”

Facing 91 criminal charges in four cases including 17 for his efforts to overturn his loss in 2020, Trump has kept up a barrage of incendiary attacks on prosecutors, judges and critics, claiming he’s innocent of all charges and the victim of politically driven “witch-hunts”.

Trump’s revenge game plan has been palpable for months. At a kickoff campaign rally in Texas in March, Trump warned: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” and vowed that “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Similarly, Trump pledged to a CPAC gathering in March that: “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” and called 2024 “the final battle”.

On Veterans Day, Trump also warned: “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”

Trump has also told some associates he wants to launch probes into a few top former allies turned critics, including the ex-attorney general William Barr, the former chief of staff John Kelly and the ex-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, according to the Washington Post.

“US, democratic institutions are hard to kill,” noted Levitsky. “But Trump and people around him are better prepared this time. Trump learned he needs to purge and pack an administration with his loyalists.”

“Autocrats have to take state institutions and pack them. Trump has learned from experience which makes him more dangerous.”

Other scholars voice mounting concerns about a second Trump presidency.


Donald Trump speaks during the South Dakota Republican party's monumental leaders rally at in Rapid City, South Dakota, on 8 September. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
“Trump is doubling down on the most brutish aspects of his messaging, including by calling his foes and critics ‘vermin’. It’s a dark message of vengeance and retribution,” Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia’s school of international and public affairs, said. “They’re telegraphing a future authoritarian presidential regime.

“Trump is using Proud Boys rhetoric and glorifying the January 6 insurrectionists. And he’s promising them pardons for the insurrection. This is about giving power to an autocrat and letting his id take over.”

Naftali added: “Trump’s loyalists are looking for gray areas and weaknesses in the U.S. constitutional system to accumulate power for Trump and for themselves in another term.”

“Trump is counting on having a more robust and experienced inner circle of loyalists, which will lead to more illegal actions and abuses in areas such as his loose talk of “weaponizing” the justice and the FBI to go after his enemies on the left and the right.”

To craft a more powerful presidency, Maga loyalists at a number of well financed conservative thinktanks led by the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Renewing America have produced an almost 1000 page handbook, dubbed “Project 2025”, to help guide a second Trump term – or potentially another GOP administration should Trump not get the nomination.

Key components of Project 2025 include slashing funding for DoJ, dismantling the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and killing the Education and Commerce Departments, moves that MAGA allies champion to shrink the “administrative state” and the “deep state” they see as bloated and politicized.

One ominous plan Project 2025 has been weighing would allow Trump to invoke the 1871 Insurrection Act on his first day in office, green-lighting using military forces against political foes and demonstrators protesting a new term for Trump, according to the Washington Post.

Jeffrey Clark, the former DoJ official who schemed with Trump about ways to overturn his loss in Georgia and other states and who the Fulton county district attorney has indicted along with Trump and 17 others, has been “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025”, the Post has reported.

A Heritage spokesperson told the Post that there are “no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act of targeting political enemies”.

Still, ex-Trump adviser and media pugilist Steve Bannon, who was convicted of obstructing Congress for flouting a subpoena from the House panel that probed the January 6 insurrection which he is appealing, has been a Project 2025 cheerleader on his War Room podcast and hosted Clark who works at the Center for Renewing America a few times, and others working on Project 2025.

Project 2025 also envisions schemes for changing federal service rules that would allow Trump to cut tens of thousands of civil service workers and replace them with ones deemed loyal to Trump’s agenda.

Former DoJ officials are appalled at some of the proposals issued by Project 2025.

“Project 2025 seems to be full of a whole array of ideas that are designed to let Donald Trump function as a dictator, by completely eviscerating many of the restraints built into our system. He really wants to destroy any notion of a rule of law in this country,” said Ayer.

“The reports about Donald Trump’s Project 2025 suggest that he is now preparing to do a bunch of things totally contrary to the basic values we have always lived by. If Trump were to be elected and implement some of the ideas he is apparently considering, no one in this country would be safe.”

Other DoJ veterans say Trump and his loyalists pose unprecedented dangers.

“The plans being developed by members of Trump’s cult to turn the DoJ and FBI into instruments of his revenge should send shivers down the spine of anyone who cares about the rule of law,” said Michael Bromwich, a former inspector general at DoJ.

“Trump and rightwing media have planted in fertile soil the seed that the current Department of Justice has been politicized, and the myth has flourished. Their attempts to undermine DoJ and the FBI are among the most destructive campaigns they have conducted.”

Bromwich’s point was underscored when days after Special Counsel Jack Smith unveiled a four count criminal indictment of Trump involving his multi pronged efforts to subvert Biden’s 2020 election victory, Trump posted: “If you go after me, I’m coming after you.”

Former federal prosecutor and Columbia Law professor Dan Richman also sees big trouble ahead for the rule of law if Trump is elected again. “Trump’s past efforts and future plans to use federal criminal prosecutions as a tool of personal retribution are flatly inconsistent with any notion of the rule of law and of prosecutorial independence,” he said.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/openly-authoritarian-campaign-trump-threats-120027769.html

 

'I’m your macho leader': Expert explains what Trump’s 'contempt for the rule of law' shows

Maya Boddie, Alternet
November 20, 2023 5:47AM ET



Donald Trump holds a baseball bat while looking at exhibits during a Spirit of America Showcase in the Entrance Hall of the White House July 02, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)


Former President Donald Trump's history of racist rhetoric has been amplified over the course of his political career. In an August report, PBS News notes the 2024 MAGA hopeful "has used terms such as 'animal' and 'rabid' to describe Black district attorneys. He has accused Black prosecutors of being 'racist.' He has made unsupported claims about their personal lives. And on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump has deployed terms that rhyme with racial slurs as some of his supporters post racist screeds about the same targets."

During Sunday's episode of MSNBC's Velshi, guest host Charles Coleman Jr. spoke with Yale University professor of philosophy Jason Stanley about the ways race has shown up amid Trump's legal troubles.

"Donald Trump is no stranger to attacking his political enemies," Coleman said. "But is it fair to say — because this it's something I've watched and other people have noticed — that when it comes to people like [Manhattan District Attorney] Alvin Bragg, like [Fulton County District Attorney] Fani Willis, like [New York Attorney General] Leticia James, for example, that his attacks carry a different level of vitriol than when it comes to talking about a [ex-Vice President] Mike Pence, for example, or even a [ex-House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Is that a fair observation? And if so, what does that tell us?"

Stanley replied, "Contempt for the rule of law, in the first instance. Race, of course, the idea of a woman holding him to account. Because there's a kind of hierarchy in Donald Trump's vision. It's the hierarchy that he's appealing to, and it's very appealing. Patriarchy — the idea that a wealthy white man, macho businessman, should be able to do what he wants, is above the law, is not subject to white people, to women or African Americans. Because that violates what he regards as the natural hierarchy, and many of his supporters do too. And this brings in both men of any race, and it brings in white nationalists.



He continued, "This idea of hierarchy — democracy is committed to the rule of law, and what that means is that anyone, Black or white, woman or man, non-binary person, who is in that position as a judge, is and has the sacred duty of democracy and protecting the rule of law. So the contempt that he is showing is an attack on the equality that democracy, that democratic rule brings. The attack on the rule of law, and he's saying it's racial and gender hierarchy, 'and me, I'm your macho leader who is the real law.'"

Watch the video at this link.



https://www.rawstory.com/trump-macho-man-2666312575/

 

This is not the first time fascists have tried to establish a Hitler like dictatorship in the US. The Nazis came very close to that in the lead up to World War II. And for those not afraid of being educated this is very informative.




The Secret Nazi Plot Inside America
Rachel Maddow
Sat, November 25, 2023 at 7:41 AM MST·25 min read
1.3k

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s new book, “Prequel,” delves into the dangerous rise of fascism here in the United States in the Thirties and Forties. Picking up the story from her hit podcast “Ultra,” Maddow explores the forgotten history of what amounted to a fifth column on the home front. The book is essential reading in our perilous political moment. As Maddow recently told “Rolling Stone”: “Trump is saying immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of America. He’s saying my political opponents are ‘vermin.’ He’s saying, I want my critics in the media and the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff put on trial for treason — the punishment for which he then reminds us, explicitly, is death. He wants, according to ‘Washington Post’ reporting, to invoke the Insurrection Act to be able to use the military against civilians on Day One. It’s as inflammatory as anything he’s ever said in the past. And he’s sketching this out as the grounds on which he wants to be running for the Republican nomination, and for the presidency. This is the territory that we’re in.”

In this exclusive excerpt from the book, Maddow tells the story of a poet and bon vivant turned agent of the fatherland and his shockingly effective Nazi propaganda campaign executed from Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. The parallels to today are bone-chilling. “Prequel” is a revealing account of exactly how it can happen here, and just how close we came to the brink just 80 years ago.

The House of the Vampire arrived in 1907, with a pinch of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a dash of Swinburne, and a major crush on Oscar Wilde. Two of the novella’s main characters, Jack and Ernest, were named after the split-personality lead character in Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. In The House of the Vampire, the hero, Reginald Clarke, is a handsome middle-aged boulevardier, bon vivant, and night prowler. Clarke is also a magnet for impressionable and gifted young males, often ones with fetchingly long eyelashes, and always with “subtler, more sympathetic, more feminine” ways than the general run of men. The book’s twenty-two-year-old author, George Sylvester Viereck (he went by Sylvester, which sounded more continental), was himself a pillow-lipped and self-professed sensualist who said he worshipped Wilde as one of his three life models, alongside Napoleon and Christ. “Wilde is splendid,” he wrote. “I admire, nay I love him. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid. I love all things evil! I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption.” Sylvester, at age seventeen, had struck up an apparently romantic friendship with Wilde’s most notorious paramour, Lord Alfred Douglas. Young Viereck also loved to show off the framed violet he said he had plucked from Wilde’s grave.


The House of the Vampire is seen today by precisely no one as the world’s greatest gay vampire
fiction, but it does have the distinction of being the world’s first known publication in that now ample oeuvre. Viereck’s hero vampire, Reginald, swaggers through the book seducing younger men, gently tugging them away from the unerringly difficult or hag-like women who otherwise seek their attentions. “A tremendous force trembled in his very fingertips,” Viereck wrote of Reginald. “He was like a gigantic dynamo, charged with the might of ten thousand magnetic storms.” In Viereck’s voluptuous, pretentious, deeply stupid romp, Reginald is seeking not blood — like Bram Stoker’s original vampire — but something more rarefied. He squeezes from his prey every drop of literary, musical, and aesthetic juice they possess, “absorbing from life the elements essential to artistic completion,” as the hero explains. By the novel’s close, everybody is drained but vampire Reginald.

“In every age there have been great men — and they became great by absorbing the work of other men,” Viereck wrote of his first novel. “My vampire is the Overman of Nietzsche. He is justified in the pilfering of other men’s brains.”

Viereck loosed his genre-pioneering book on the world in 1907 with considerable hopes. “You’ve heard of the ‘great American novel’?” Viereck wrote to one critic. “Well, I’ve written it.”

The critics did not agree.

“The style of the book was quite impossible,” wrote one, “keyed from the first word to the last in the highest pitch of emotion.” Still, though, the book did sell some copies, and it even had its own brief run on the stage, in an adaptation by a man who later co-wrote the screenplay for The Wizard of Oz.



VIERECK HAD BEEN born in Munich and immigrated to America with his parents in 1896, when he was eleven years old. He had always been drawn to the memory and the landscape of his birthplace. There was mystery and intrigue in Sylvester’s family history in Germany, including unproved claims to royal lineage. Viereck’s father, Louis, was rumored to be the issue of a brief affair between a famous stage actress in the Prussian royal court and Kaiser Wilhelm I. The kaiser, if he was indeed the father, was in no position to acknowledge this son, and he never did.

Royalty or not, Louis ended up a Marxist, joining the anti-monarch Socialist Party in Germany, and possibly getting involved in a plot to assassinate the kaiser. This tale seems a tad on the nose, in the Oedipal sense, but it is true that Louis was run out of Berlin and then Munich and then all of Germany, on account of his Marxist proclivities. He landed in New York, but not exactly on his feet. Sylvester’s father never found much success in the New World. He organized German Americans in support of the presidential candidates William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, wrote a forgotten monograph on German-language instruction in American schools, and gave the occasional lecture on German culture and society. For his young son, rife as he was with artistic gifts and a robust, unerring self-confidence in those gifts, Louis was a distant and feckless father. While Louis eventually ended up putting his tail between his legs and going back to Berlin to finish out his days giving lectures, this time about American culture and society, Sylvester, naturalized citizen of the United States, decided to stay put in New York, an electrified city in an up-and-coming country — a place with a trajectory matched to his own arcing ambition.

By the time he was in his mid-twenties (the commercial and critical flop of The House of the Vampire notwithstanding), Viereck was recognized as a rising star in American literature. He had published a volume of well-regarded poems. Whispers that he was maybe the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm I were probably good for sales, and also for contributing to the almost inexplicably fawning publicity he had a knack for attracting. He was “the most widely discussed literary man in the United States today,” one glossy middlebrow magazine wrote of Viereck, “unanimously accused of being a genius.”

Whatever his gifts in the realm of literature, poetry, or self-promotion, where Viereck truly distinguished himself was as an advocate to the American public for his beloved fatherland, a cause that he took on with crusading passion at the advent of World War I. When a German U-boat torpedoed a New York-bound passenger liner in May 1915, drowning 1,200 civilians, including 124 Americans, Viereck defended Germany for doing it. “The facts absolutely justify the action of the Germans if the Lusitania was, indeed, torpedoed by a German submarine,” Viereck wrote in a statement to reporters. “Legally and morally there is no basis for any protests on the part of the United States. The Lusitania was a British ship. British ships have been instructed by the admiralty to ram submarines and to take active measures against the enemy. Hence every British ship must be considered in light of a warship.” Germany “means business,” Viereck explained to his fellow Americans, and “does not bluff.” It was, to say the least, an unpopular stand in a country enraged by the loss of civilian life on that torpedoed ocean liner.

Just weeks later, Viereck found himself at the center of an even more concentrated fury. While squiring a visiting German official around Manhattan, Viereck managed to leave behind a briefcase full of secret documents on the Sixth Avenue elevated train. The satchel was quickly grabbed by a federal agent who had been tailing them. Its contents were ferried to Washington and then — with the Wilson administration’s quiet blessing — leaked to the New York World, which released them in installments as a bombshell exposé of Germany’s designs on America. The documents in the left-behind briefcase — as showcased in the pages of the World — showed vast financial transfers by the German government into a long list of private U.S. bank accounts and detailed discussions among German officials about their efforts to keep American public opinion aligned against the United States joining the world war, to hamper our ability to help our allies, and to generally mess with us in the meantime. The documents showed that Viereck was not just a high-profile pro-German U.S. citizen; he was a paid agent of the German government, which was handsomely bankrolling all his publishing efforts.

After an ensuing furor, Viereck moved to change the name of his pretentious, well-funded, pro-German magazine from The Fatherland to the much more corn-fed-sounding Viereck’s American Weekly. But the damage was done. The documents from the Sixth Avenue El showed that the German government was spending $2 million per week (in 1915 dollars; nearly $60 million a week today) on propaganda and espionage efforts targeting the United States. They also revealed German government discussions about serious sabotage plans, including using straw buyers to secretly purchase U.S. munitions factories and military supplies to prevent that materiel from being provided to our allies fighting Germany in the war.



George Sylvester Viereck
It was a pain for the Germans to have this all exposed, and a pain for Viereck personally, particularly after the United States finally joined the war effort in 1917. Viereck had been living with his wife’s family in sleepy Mount Vernon, New York, until an angry mob descended on the house and forced him out into the night. He decided he would wait out the conclusion of the war in New York City, where it was easier to blend into the crowd. But he never really did manage to regain the small purchase he had acquired on the American literary scene.

There’s a cracking letter in the files of former President Teddy Roosevelt from around this time in which Roosevelt tells Viereck that if he’s so much more supportive of Germany than of the United States, then perhaps Viereck is being a bad citizen of both, so maybe he should renounce his American citizenship, piss off back to Germany, and join the German army, which would at least make him useful to one of the two countries. Viereck did no such thing, but you can tell from the letter how much Roosevelt enjoyed telling him to do it. (He leads off by telling Viereck he has “mental shortcomings” and is “unutterably base,” and by the end he is just hollering at him to get out: “You are not a good citizen here. But neither are you a good citizen of Germany. You should go home.”) Roosevelt also endorsed a move to eject Viereck from the roster of the Poetry Society of America — perish the thought.

After World War I, as he neared his forties and came to realize he was unlikely to ever scale the tiers of fame he desired, Viereck began, vampirically one could say, to cultivate relations with more celebrated men. He shuttled between Europe and America, seeking out famous statesmen, soldiers, doctors, scientists, businessmen, and writers, then persuading them to sit for interviews. “To me the men to whom I have talked and whose thoughts I record are flashes of the great World Brain,” he wrote in a collection of these personality profiles. “Some are incandescent in their intensity; in others the divine flame burns more dimly. Their colours are more varied than the spectrum. I am the spectroscope that reveals the stuff of which they are made, or, translating colour into sound, I am the trumpet through which they convey their message.”

His first big get was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was living in exile in Holland after his defeat in the massively deadly, epic war he had started. “In view of your years-long manly struggle for truth and right, I feel no hesitation in authorizing you to publish the impressions you gathered at Doorn as the guest of His Majesty,” the kaiser’s aide wrote to Viereck. “I do this the more willingly because I know the communications entrusted to you by his majesty will be made use of by yourself in a manner calculated to promote the true, just interests of Germany.”

Viereck became an annual visitor to Doorn and a trusted mouthpiece of the kaiser, who often greeted him, Viereck’s own son remembered, as “mon cousin.” Viereck seemed proud to be able to help the fallen, mostly despised, mostly insane German monarch make sense of why exactly God had abandoned him, the divinely chosen leader of a great nation, in his pursuit of a Christian empire in Europe. The kaiser settled on the shortcomings of the German people as the problem. “We refused in the end to face all risks in preserving faith,” Wilhelm II told Viereck. “The German people performed miracles of endurance, but, at the last, they failed. We should have fought to the very last carrot, the very last man, the very last round of munitions. The odds against us, toward the end, were twenty to one. We could still have prevailed, with complete faith in God. We should have trusted in God, not in human logic.”

Viereck ended up getting a remarkable number of Great Men to sit down and talk politics, economics, faith, sex, psychology, and general worldview: Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, Benito Mussolini, Albert Einstein, the military and political generals of the late war. I am not a journalist, he would tell them, I am a poet. Viereck was “80 percent clever and strong minded, and 20 percent an impenetrable blockhead,” the playwright George Bernard Shaw said of him. “He generally brings the 20 percent to bear on me.”

But it was Dr. Sigmund Freud who seemed to understand his interviewer best, according to an exchange Viereck recorded. “Our [psychological] complexes are the sources of our weakness,” Freud said to Viereck. “They are also often the source of strength.”

“I wonder what my complexes are?” Viereck asked.

Freud gently reminded him that a serious assessment could take two or three years of real work, but the father of psychoanalysis did have a quick take on George Sylvester Viereck. “You have sought, year after year, the outstanding figures of your generation, invariably men older than yourself.”

“It is part of my work,” Viereck reminded Herr Doktor.

“But it is also your preference,” Freud replied. “The great man is a symbol. Your search is the search of your heart. You are seeking the great man to take the place of the father. It is part of your father complex.”

George Sylvester Viereck did finally settle on — and worship — a particular father figure. The man was five years his junior, an Austrian plebeian whose rise in the kaiser’s military ranks during the war topped out low at the rank of corporal. When Viereck met him for an interview in 1923, the man had virtually nothing to say about his past and refused to be photographed for the article Viereck was writing. He appeared more poet than politician, Viereck wishfully noted, and sipped tea or cordials with the polish of a “high brow.” But when the thirty-four-year-old housepainter and wannabe messiah shouted the beauties of his new political movement — National Socialism — his listener felt an almost physical heat. “His voice filled the room,” Viereck wrote, and “cords” on his “forehead stood out threateningly.” His eyes flashed “something of the Blonde Beast of Nietzsche.” Like a gigantic dynamo, the journalist-poet might have been thinking, charged with the might of ten thousand magnetic storms. The first words Viereck wrote of the man would prove prophetic: “Adolf Hitler must be handled with care. He is a human explosive.”

Hitler was already a divisive figure in his native land, but Viereck suggested the rising pol was welcomed even by his countrymen who were shy to say so. “There is no one in Germany who does not recognize the importance of his emblem, the ‘Hakenkreuz,’ the ancient swastika, sometimes standing by itself and sometimes superimposed on a cross or a shield, a mystic symbol of militant Germanism,” wrote Viereck. He drew applause across the social strata, Viereck claimed. “He overcomes them with his eloquence. He storms their reserve with his passion.” Hitler spoke to Viereck of the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles, which settled World War I and clipped the kaiser’s drive for empire, hemming Germany into newer, narrower borders. He then turned to the communist doctrine that now ruled Russia. “The Peace Treaty and Bolshevism are two heads of one monster,” Hitler insisted. “We must decapitate both.” Decapitating Bolshevism, in Hitler’s calculus, required ridding Germany of the “alien in their midst” — the Jews. When Viereck suggested to the younger man that perhaps his sweeping antisemitism might displace many great artists, scientists, manufacturers, and generally esteemed citizens, Hitler disagreed: “The fact that a man is decent is no reason why we should not eliminate him.”

In the face of that ominous forecast, Viereck remained neutral on Hitler’s politics, but not on his personality: “If he lives, Hitler, for better or for worse, is sure to make history.”

Almost ten years later, as Hitler was about to ascend to the chancellorship of Germany, Viereck recycled his interview for the popular U.S. magazine Liberty (“America’s Best Read Weekly”), with added touches on Germany’s need for physically healthy citizens, for the re-expansion of its territories, and, above all, for an arousal of the national spirit, the national pride, the national might. When Hitler’s army began to storm across Europe in 1939 and 1940, Viereck was all in. Finally, a Germany that seemed prepared to “fight to the very last carrot.” Viereck was quick to warn his fellow Americans of the futility of challenging the führer’s military machine. Viereck had gazed into Hitler’s “magnetic blue eyes,” he would write. He deemed it unwise for the United States to test the man’s resolve.


THE FÜHRER’S PORTRAIT now held pride of place in Viereck’s home office on Riverside Drive in New York City. Of the three dozen photographs of famous acquaintances — including Albert Einstein, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Marshal Foch, and Kaiser Wilhelm II — Hitler’s was the largest. Hitler, by Viereck’s lights, was first in the pantheon of the Great Nietzschean Overmen. “There must be a great crop of oysters before one pearl is born. Millions of flowers grow in the garden to achieve one matchless rose, and billions of men must be born to produce one superman like Goethe, Napoleon, Da Vinci or Hitler,” Viereck said, later adding that Hitler “out-Napoleons Napoleon.”

By 1940, Viereck had become what he so wanted to be: a reliable servant to his father figure from the fatherland. After his incompetent but earnest try at it in World War I, now in the second war the long-ago poet had positioned himself as the mastermind of one of Hitler’s crucial plans for America; he was the center wheel of a propaganda campaign, funded by the German government and its agents in the United States. “Propaganda helped us to power,” Joseph Goebbels announced at the Nazi Party congress in 1936. “Propaganda kept us in power. Propaganda will help us conquer the world.”

Hitler explained the plan in typically blunt terms: “Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself.” Viereck had literally written a book on the subject in 1930 (dedicated to Dr. Sigmund Freud of all people), assessing the weakness of the kaiser’s propaganda campaign in America during the first great war. “We were pikers,” Viereck claimed to have been told by one downhearted German officer. “What was a million dollars compared to the stake for which we were playing? For centuries to come, the German people will have to pay for our stinginess We lacked the vision, the authority, and the inexhaustible funds of the Allies.” Viereck specifically castigated his German paymasters for the debacle of the suitcase full of secret documents that he and his visitor left behind on a subway train, as if that were an expenses problem and not just his own sheer idiocy. “If the German Government had provided [the visiting official] with an automobile or a bodyguard, this disaster would have been averted. Governments, reckless in some matters, are at times prodigiously stingy.”

But that was last time around. The lead-up to this next world war would be different: lessons learned, no expense to be spared. Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into dividing the American polity, hoping to keep the United States and its arsenal of democracy out of the war in Europe. “America for Americans,” as Hitler said in an interview widely published in the United States in 1940, “and Europe for the Europeans.” His government blanketed America with isolationist and antisemitic literature. According to records discovered after the war was over, the German Foreign Office rained down on Americans more than 1 million leaflets and postcards, about 2.5 million pamphlets and magazines, and 135,000 books just in the single summer of 1941. The Nazis’ Special War Fund expended seemingly endless resources in the effort. When the German embassy was ordered shuttered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that same summer, the embassy vault still held more than $3.5 million — about $75 million today — in cash.

A good chunk of the German money devoted to this effort passed through the hands of George Sylvester Viereck, who used it to try to exploit a key weakness he had discerned in the American political system. “The more I study the record of foreign propaganda in the United States, the more I am surprised by the long patience of the American Government,” he wrote. “While the law requires that the ownership of a newspaper must be fully disclosed, there was nothing to prevent the German government or an individual German from making a present of several million dollars to an American sympathizer; nor was there anything to prevent the sympathizer from making his money talk — for Germany! There is no safeguard which the law can create which human ingenuity cannot circumvent.”

Viereck and other Nazi agents doled out cash to myriad publications in the United States, whose editors and publishers then helped the Germans consolidate a mailing list of friendlies and potential friendlies that may have reached into the millions. The Foreign Office in Berlin also funded Nazi shortwave radio stations around the United States, all with the same messaging, which would be nutted up succinctly by one American prosecutor after the war: “The United States is internally corrupt. There is political and economic injustice, war profiteering, plutocratic exploitation, Communist sedition, Jewish conspiracy, and spiritual decay within the United States.” American foreign policy was “selfish, bullying … and predatory.” President Roosevelt was a “warmonger and a liar, unscrupulous, responsible for suffering, and a pawn of Jews, Communists, and Plutocrats.” The German army possessed all the strength it needed for victory in Europe. America and Great Britain were sadly lacking in men, material, and morale, and certain to kneel to Germany. The United States, like the rest of the world, was “menaced” by communists and Jews.

That German propaganda campaign, by ground and by air, was facilitated by a cadre of American troops. There was Lawrence Dennis, proud to be known as “the intellectual godfather of American fascism”; his mentee Philip Johnson, later a celebrated modern architect; William Dudley Pelley, who, after founding the Nazi wannabe Silver Shirts, dreamed of being America’s own Hitler; the raging white supremacist and antisemite George Deatherage, who vowed that “religion that does not stay within the accepted bounds of Christian morality shall be suppressed.” There was also James True, who had professed his admiration for the book burners in Nazified Austria because “filthy books have been published by the hundreds, under the guise of science or ‘liberalism’ for the debauchery of youth. Quite naturally the first move of the Aryans was to destroy this mental poison. Soon, we predict, we shall have similar book burnings in this country.” There was also the handsome brawler Joe McWilliams, who set out to organize angry young men into fascist street-fighting cells. McWilliams called for “an America free of Roosevelt, free of kikes, free of Republicans and free of the Democratic Party which are only the stooges of the Jews. We want in America the same methods and same system that Hitler inaugurated in Germany.”

Viereck’s homegrown American conspirators and ideological allies also included the exalted, conspiracy-minded U.S. Army general George Van Horn Moseley, the wildly popular antisemite radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, American businessmen like Henry Ford, and, more unnerving, at least two dozen sitting members of Congress. Congressmen and senators used the special privileges of government office to aid and abet Viereck and the Nazi cause; they colluded with Viereck to produce and distribute more than three million separate pieces of pro-German mailings. Many of these tracts were written by Viereck himself or by the Hitler government in Berlin, and then published in America under the bylines of the willing congressmen.

IN THE YEARS leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II, the American government, American institutions, American democracy itself, was under attack from enemies without and within. The great American fight against fascism that we have inherited as a cornerstone in our country’s moral foundation is a fight that didn’t happen only overseas in the 1940s. Americans fought on both sides of that divide here at home, too, and their stories will curl your hair. They may also bolster your confidence in our ability to win our modern iterations of those same recurring fights, not to mention the future rounds, too, when this inevitably comes up again on civilization’s big democracy chore wheel.

The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead. Their most audacious plan called for mounting hundreds of simultaneous armed attacks on U.S. government targets in the immediate aftermath of FDR’s likely reelection in 1940. Their attacks would spark chaos and panic, they hoped, and galvanize and radicalize anti-Roosevelt Americans, culminating in an armed takeover of the U.S. government and the installation of something much more like a fascist dictatorship. And as far-fetched as that sounds, these belligerents were doing a lot more than flapping their lips. They had started stealing from federal armories, and had made their plans to raid them, with confederates on the inside ready to help. They had bought weapons by the hundreds and thousands and started building and stockpiling bombs. The even more incendiary fact was that these would-be insurrectionists enjoyed an astonishing amount of support from federal elected officials who proved willing and able to use their share of American political power to defend the extremists, to derail the Justice Department’s efforts to thwart or punish them, and to shield themselves from potential criminal liability when they were found out. In the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. Congress was rife with treachery, deceit, and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who had sworn to defend the Constitution but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to end it.

We can look back now, at a distance of more than eighty years, and see that all those American fascists (along with their lies and disinformation, their Hitler love, their white supremacist antisemitic derangement) ended up splintered on a rocky embankment. But in the moment, the lead-up to World War II in America was a much more close-run affair than we want to remember. It was a fast ride through churning and dangerous political rapids, and it wasn’t clear at the time exactly who and what were going to survive the journey. A lot of powerful figures in Congress, in the media, in law enforcement, in religious leadership, were bailing hard to keep the fascist boat afloat.

CALCULATED EFFORTS TO undermine democracy, to foment a coup, to spread disinformation across the country, to overturn elections by force of arms with members of Congress helping and running interference — all these things add up to a terrible episode for a country like ours to live through, but they are not unprecedented. Our current American struggle along these lines, it turns out, has a prequel. And it turns out that the most interesting part of that story is about the Americans — mostly forgotten today — who picked up the slack in this fight against our domestic authoritarians and fascists and heavily armed right-wing militias. People like federal prosecutors William Power Maloney and O. John Rogge; federal lawmen such as Leon G. Turrou and Peter Wacks; Leon Lewis, a Jewish veteran of World War I who ran a dangerous undercover spy operation inside the dens of American Nazis; brave informants like Charles Slocombe, John C. Metcalfe, and Denis Healy, who all took real physical risks; journalists like Dillard Stokes, Arthur Derounian, and the cub reporter Arnold Sevareid; a direct-mail advertising consultant turned daring citizen investigator, Henry Hoke. These mostly unremembered Americans stood up and challenged both the fascists and the political figures who were running a protection racket for them. They were not necessarily the people you might expect to be on the front lines, but there they were, standing fast. They won. And they left stories to tell — incredible stories — about how they did it.




https://www.yahoo.com/news/secret-nazi-plot-inside-america-144146153.html

 

'Tanks rolling down Main Street': Experts alarmed at Trump's plans for military

Brad Reed
November 27, 2023 6:27AM ET



Trump not invited to 'secretive' think tank conference with GOP mega-donors: report


Former President Donald Trump and his allies have hinted that they will deploy the military in American cities in a second term to quell domestic unrest, and experts who spoke with the Associated Press expressed alarm about what that could mean for American democracy.

At the heart of these plans is the Insurrection Act, which gives the president broad powers to deploy the military to put down violent domestic uprisings.

While all presidents have had this power for literal centuries, there has been a taboo against using it that only Trump appears intent on breaking.

“The principal constraint on the president’s use of the Insurrection Act is basically political, that presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent tanks rolling down Main Street,” Joseph Nunn, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice, told the AP. “There’s not much really in the law to stay the president’s hand.”

Former Trump Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark reportedly floated invoking the Insurrection Act back in late 2020 when Trump was working to illegally cling to power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

However, these plans never got a chance to go into effect because then-Vice President Mike Pence refused the president's demands to block the certification of the election.

Should Trump win a second term, however, there would be little to stop him from going through with such an action, particularly if he and his allies are successful at dislodging career Pentagon officials who would be resistant to following his orders.



https://www.rawstory.com/trump-fascism-2666362648/

 

Bullshit! Voting for Biden is like voting for the Walking Dead! Do you want 10,000,000 more illegal aliens to come into the country during a second term? Do you want continued record high inflation. Do you want the country to continue sliding down the tubes with drug overdoses and crime and filth ridden cities?

 

Trump also doesn't believe in free elections

 

Historian begs Americans not to downplay Trump's threats to use the military against them

M.L. Nestel
November 27, 2023 8:11PM ET



Donald Trump and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead.


Donald Trump is threatening to use his second term in office to attack Americans using the military.

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss appeared on MSNBC's "The Beat With Ari Melber," guest hosted by Katie Phang, to elicit a stark warning.

"All I'm saying is: Watch out."

If Trump becomes the 47th president, Bechloss believes there is going to be a severe danger of instituting the Insurrection Act and putting soldiers on missions to police American soil.

During a rally in Iowa, the 2024 Republican frontrunner described the metropolises of New York City and Chicago as “crime dens” and vowed to move fast to bring in the country's military might.

“The next time, I’m not waiting," he said. "One of the things I did was let them run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,” he said. “Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait any longer.”

Beschloss says we should be taking Trump at his word.

"Presidents in the United States have too much power," he said. "Thus far, we've relied on the fact we've had people like George H.W. Bush or Dwight Eisenhower who know it's the possibility of the president to be restrained in using power such as martial law or the Insurrection Act."

He said the presidency's power was tested after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.

"In 2016, our luck ran out," the historian explained. "It may run out yet again next year."

Should Trump be voted back into the White House, Beschloss fears the worst because the Supreme Court favors him, as do several judges that he appointed and who remain in power on the bench.

"If that happens, just the Insurrection Act alone gives a president who is lawless or even obeying the law — and just wants to use the military and use violence to curb his opposition — enormous power," he said. "Perhaps the courts can prove it, but as you well know, the Supreme Court of this moment was already one-third appointed by Donald Trump. He appointed a lot of judges.

"He will yet again if he becomes president."

See the video below or watch it at the link here.



https://www.rawstory.com/trump-insurrection-act-2666371202/

 

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Trump hints at expanded role for the military within the US. A legacy law gives him few guardrails
GARY FIELDS
Updated Mon, November 27, 2023 at 8:15 AM MST·7 min read


WASHINGTON (AP) — Campaigning in Iowa this year, Donald Trump said he was prevented during his presidency from using the military to quell violence in primarily Democratic cities and states.

Calling New York City and Chicago “crime dens,” the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination told his audience, “The next time, I’m not waiting. One of the things I did was let them run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,” he said. “Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait any longer.”

Trump has not spelled out precisely how he might use the military during a second term, although he and his advisers have suggested they would have wide latitude to call up units. While deploying the military regularly within the country's borders would be a departure from tradition, the former president already has signaled an aggressive agenda if he wins, from mass deportations to travel bans imposed on certain Muslim-majority countries.


A law first crafted in the nation’s infancy would give Trump as commander in chief almost unfettered power to do so, military and legal experts said in a series of interviews.

The Insurrection Act allows presidents to call on reserve or active-duty military units to respond to unrest in the states, an authority that is not reviewable by the courts. One of its few guardrails merely requires the president to request that the participants disperse.

“The principal constraint on the president’s use of the Insurrection Act is basically political, that presidents don’t want to be the guy who sent tanks rolling down Main Street,” said Joseph Nunn, a national security expert with the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s not much really in the law to stay the president’s hand.”

A spokesman for Trump’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about what authority Trump might use to pursue his plans.

Congress passed the act in 1792, just four years after the Constitution was ratified. Nunn said it's an amalgamation of different statutes enacted between then and the 1870s, a time when there was little in the way of local law enforcement.

“It is a law that in many ways was created for a country that doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

It also is one of the most substantial exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally prohibits using the military for law enforcement purposes.

Trump has spoken openly about his plans should he win the presidency, including using the military at the border and in cities struggling with violent crime. His plans also have included using the military against foreign drug cartels, a view echoed by other Republican primary candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor.

The threats have raised questions about the meaning of military oaths, presidential power and who Trump could appoint to support his approach.

Trump already has suggested he might bring back retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser and twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its Russian influence probe before being pardoned by Trump. Flynn suggested in the aftermath of the 2020 election that Trump could seize voting machines and order the military in some states to help rerun the election.

Attempts to invoke the Insurrection Act and use the military for domestic policing would likely elicit pushback from the Pentagon, where the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is Gen. Charles Q. Brown. He was one of the eight members of the Joint Chiefs who signed a memo to military personnel in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The memo emphasized the oaths they took and called the events of that day, which were intended to stop certification of Democrat Joe Biden's victory over Trump, “sedition and insurrection.”

Trump and his party nevertheless retain wide support among those who have served in the military. AP VoteCast, an in-depth survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide, showed that 59% of U.S. military veterans voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election. In the 2022 midterms, 57% of military veterans supported Republican candidates.

Presidents have issued a total of 40 proclamations invoking the law, some of those done multiple times for the same crisis, Nunn said. Lyndon Johnson invoked it three times — in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington — in response to the unrest in cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

During the Civil Rights era, Presidents Johnson, John F. Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower used the law to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central High School after that state’s governor activated the National Guard to keep the students out.

George H.W. Bush was the last president to use the Insurrection Act, a response to riots in Los Angeles in 1992 after the acquittal of the white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King in an incident that was videotaped.

Repeated attempts to invoke the act in a new Trump presidency could put pressure on military leaders, who could face consequences for their actions even if done at the direction of the president.

Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank, said the question is whether the military is being imaginative enough with the scenarios it has been presenting to future officers. Ambiguity, especially when force is involved, is not something military personnel are comfortable with, he said.

“There are a lot of institutional checks and balances in our country that are pretty well-developed legally, and it’ll make it hard for a president to just do something randomly out of the blue,” said O’Hanlon, who specializes in U.S. defense strategy and the use of military force. "But Trump is good at developing a semi-logical train of thought that might lead to a place where there’s enough mayhem, there’s enough violence and legal murkiness” to call in the military.

Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan of New York, the first graduate of the U.S. Military Academy to represent the congressional district that includes West Point, said he took the oath three times while he was at the school and additional times during his military career. He said there was extensive classroom focus on an officer’s responsibilities to the Constitution and the people under his or her command.

“They really hammer into us the seriousness of the oath and who it was to, and who it wasn’t to,” he said.

Ryan said he thought it was universally understood, but Jan. 6 “was deeply disturbing and a wakeup call for me.” Several veterans and active-duty military personnel were charged with crimes in connection with the assault.

While those connections were troubling, he said he thinks those who harbor similar sentiments make up a very small percentage of the military.

William Banks, a Syracuse University law professor and expert in national security law, said a military officer is not forced to follow “unlawful orders." That could create a difficult situation for leaders whose units are called on for domestic policing, since they can face charges for taking unlawful actions.

“But there is a big thumb on the scale in favor of the president’s interpretation of whether the order is lawful," Banks said. "You’d have a really big row to hoe and you would have a big fuss inside the military if you chose not to follow a presidential order.”

Nunn, who has suggested steps to restrict the invocation of the law, said military personnel cannot be ordered to break the law.

“Members of the military are legally obliged to disobey an unlawful order. At the same time, that is a lot to ask of the military because they are also obliged to obey orders,” he said. “And the punishment for disobeying an order that turns out to be lawful is your career is over, and you may well be going to jail for a very long time. The stakes for them are extraordinarily high.”

___

Associated Press writers Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price in New York, and Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-hints-expanded-role-military-050336201.html