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Democracy, dictatorship, Donald Trump, fascism, fascism-of-republican-party, fascists, Politics, Project 2025, Republican party, republican-party-nazism, Russia, trump-wannabe-dictator, Ukraine
From twitterX, this wonderful parody account shared this –
Russia:
Invades Moldova ‘92
Flattens Grozny ‘99
Uses polonium UK ‘06
Cyber attacks Estonia ‘07
Invades Georgia OTD ‘08
Invades Crimea & Eastern Ukraine ‘14
Downs MH17 2014
Flattens Aleppo 2015
Uses Novichok 2018
Invades Ukraine more 2022
Elon: Why do Russia’s neighbors fear it?
And there is another good one, if you have time –
Suspicious deaths of Russian businesspeople (2022–2024)
“On 3 June 2022 the Dutch NOS news network described the phenomenon as “a grim series of Russian billionaires, many from the oil and gas industries, who have been found dead under unusual circumstances since early this year.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_Russian_businesspeople_(2022%E2%80%932024)
There’s a list on this page and across several news stories that have been accumulating the stories.
Is this what our country can look forward to when Trump and the Republican Party run by Russian disinformation and MAGA extremists take over our government and the running of our country whenever that is, even if the 2024 election yields for them?
To get a better picture of how the organizations that have gone from being part of the conservative Republican Party movement backed by Koch Brothers money and maybe even Russian money became this fascist authoritarian white Christian nationalist theocracy agenda –
The Threat of White Christian Nationalism – Part III: The Power Worshippers with Katherine Stewart Feb 15, 2024In the third episode of “The Threat of White Christian Nationalism”, host Reed Galen is joined by investigative journalist and author Katherine Stewart. They discuss how the white Christian nationalist movement is driven by a cohort of leaders and organizations that form a deep organizational network, how the attack on public education is part of a larger project to destroy democratic institutions, and what members of the pro-democracy movement can do to fight against the advancement of white Christian nationalism. If you’d like to hear more from Katherine Stewart, be sure to pick up her latest book, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and find the documentary, God & Country, at a theater near you. For more from Reed Galen, subscribe to “The Home Front”.
The power worshippers is an apt description of it. Through the World Congress of Families meeting in Hungary and hosting various far right speakers including those from Russia and attended by the conservatives and Christians of the Republican Party over the years, it is obvious how quickly and easily inroads were created to establish a very pro-Russia, pro-authoritarian dictatorship, pro-fascism ideology into its present position in the US and throughout one of our major political parties. In fact, now that movement is entirely built out with complete ownership and control of the Republican Party and its sister organizations that supported the conservative movement since Paul Weyrich and the Young Republicans of the 80’s.
42} Thnx @FredClarkson . NYT reports the Family Research Council has activated its network of 15,000 churches, half of which have “culture impact ministries” to organize towards the fall elections. https://nyti.ms/2Hoa5Fy Here’s more on how they do it:
politicalresearch.orgA Manual to Restore a Christian Nation that Never Was
THEY ARE NOT SERIOUS? AFTER BEING ERADICATED, WAGNER IS BACK IN UKRAINE || 2024
QUOTE that I noticed from the video just now – (at 4.49) Delia Estonia investigation that Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov – makes about what Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity made at FoxNews for pushing the same talking points from the Russian disinformation and propaganda mill. From the transcript –
“for medona reports with reference to the Delia Estonia investigation that Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov receives 1.5 billion rubles $16.1 million annually for information and ideological war. This is the price of patriotism and turning people into murderers and cannon fodder well [ __ ] hell to finish the …”
found in video link above from Warthog Defense
It all seems like such a tight knit little family listening to the words of Putin come out of the mouth of Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville like a perfectly exact verbatim parrot. Or to listen to Senator Ron Johnson from the floor of our Senate insisting that Putin will win, that he must win, implying that there’s no other option and to help Ukraine is a useless effort – it couldn’t have been written more exacting to Russia’s position if Putin had written it himself. Whose side is Ron Johnson on? It isn’t the US.
“Putin won’t lose. He will not lose. He’s not gonna lose,” Johnson repeatedly warned in the interview, just hours before he voted against giving more aid to Ukraine.
Echoing Putin’s talking points, Johnson also baselessly claimed U.S. economic sanctions against Russia threaten the supremacy of the U.S. dollar by forcing Russia to trade with foreign currencies.
Without referring specifically to the $60 billion earmarked for Ukrainian military aid, which has divided the Republican caucus for months, Johnson inveigled against “so many people in Washington ignoring [Putin’s comments] … making people believe that Ukraine can win.”
Ron Johnson Says Dumb Thing Before Casting Pro-Putin Vote, https://newrepublic.com/post/178965/ron-johnson-putin-war-ukraine-vote-against-senate-bill
Looking at the money funding these rightwing talking points that have become entwined with misogyny, racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ, anti-DEI, anti-democracy and pro-Putin, pro-Russia, pro-fascism, pro-Nazi, pro-Christian Nationalism and pro-white supremacy, it’s easy to find the lines of money streaming into it.
But if you’re a fan of Mark Levin’s radio show, you’d have just as much cause to believe that Americans for Prosperity, a FreedomWorks rival, was the most effective conservative advocacy group. And, if Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity are who you listen to, you’d be hearing a steady stream of entreaties to support the important work of the Heritage Foundation.
That’s not coincidence. In search of donations and influence, the three prominent conservative groups are paying hefty sponsorship fees to the popular talk show hosts. Those fees buy them a variety of promotionaltie-ins, as well as regular on-air plugs – praising or sometimes defending the groups, while urging listeners to donate – often woven seamlessly into programming in ways that do not seem like paid advertising. [. . . ]
The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s – and considers it money well spent.
Limbaugh, who has been a paid Heritage endorser since 2009, said the reversal did nothing to detract from the “profound … respect for Heritage. Heritage is the gold standard. Heritage was every bit as involved in Reaganism as Reagan was, and nothing’s changed.” [etc.]
And the integration of sponsors and their causes into the content of conservative talkers’ shows is not unique to advocacy groups and think tanks, as Beck demonstrated in 2009 when he melded his frequent warnings of impending economic collapse with his promotion of gold, generally, and the precious metals retailer that sponsored his show, Goldline, specifically. […]
The increased willingness of non-profits to write big checks for such radio endorsements – which appears to have started in 2008, when Heritage paid $1.2 million to sponsor the talk shows hosted by Hannity and Laura Ingraham – seems to be a primarily, if not entirely, a conservative phenomenon. [ …]
“I wish more of the grassroots knew the reality that this wasn’t Rush or Sean or Beck saying these things out of the goodness of their hearts,” said the leader of one group who inquired about ads on various radio shows, but decided they were both too expensive and ethically suspect. “If the grassroots found out that these guys were getting paid seven figures a year to say this stuff, it might leave a bad taste in their mouth.”
Heritage pioneered the sponsorships in 2008 partly as a way to broaden its appeal outside the Beltway. In 2009, it dropped Ingraham and added Limbaugh, and – according to its tax forms – paid $3.3 million to Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicated Limbaugh’s show and also had picked up Hannity’s show.
Top radio talkers sell endorsements, https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/top-radio-talkers-sell-endorsements-056997
Back during the Clive Bundy standoff with the federal govt – from a 2014 article, it makes clear what the agenda is behind the scenes funding the talking heads of the “conservatives” for rightwing audiences and using them for their own fascist and profit-driven purposes –
Hannity has promoted Bundy’s anti-government rhetoric, arguing that the federal government owns far too much land and pushing Bundy’s claim that not only does the federal government not have land-ownership authority but that they don’t need or use the land they claim to own. On the April 23 edition of his show, Hannity attacked the government for owning too much land, agreeing with Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano that they do not have the constitutional authority to own any of the land. Throughout the land battle, Hannity continuously argued that the government is irresponsibly fighting for land they have no intended use for — such as building hospitals, schools, or roads — and should focus their efforts elsewhere to rapists, murderers, criminals, and pedophiles. [ . . . ]
Bundy’s anti-federal agenda is closely aligned with that of Charles and David Koch, major Republican donors who have been pushing for states to gain control over federal lands – so they can be sold or leased to people like the Koch brothers in deals.
Fox News Network and Sean Hannity have a particular interest in the promotion and realization of such Koch interests because their funding depends on it — Hannity receives major funding and large ad buys from Koch-affiliated Heritage and Tea Party Patriots.
Hannity’s Koch-affiliated funders have a long history of promoting the privatization of public lands and condemning the federal ownership of land. Tea Party groups have supported local efforts to transfer federal lands. Heritage has advocated shrinking the U.S. government’s control by selling its physical assets such as “huge swaths of land (especially out west).” Heritage was also a loyal promoter of the Federal Land Freedom Act of 2013, advocating for the transfer of federal land management to state regulators for energy resource development. [etc.]
The Koch brothers have been covertly funding right-wing organizations such as Heritage Action and the Tea Party Patriots through the non-profit business league Freedom Partners whose tax code status as a trade association allows the organization to conceal its donors. Freedom Partners is one of the largest donors of conservative groups and its board has deep ties to the Koch brothers with many of its members being longtime employees of Koch Industries and the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
The Koch-funded Freedom Partners made grants of $236 million in 2011; among many conservative groups its recipients include Heritage as well as the Tea Party Patriots. Heritage Action received $500,000 in 2011 from the Koch brothers through Freedom Partners and additional funds from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. In 2012, the Tea Party Patriots received $200,000 from Freedom Partners.
The legislative efforts of such groups to transfer control of federal lands to states are “nothing more than corporate-backed messaging tools” initiated by conservative groups like the Koch-affiliates. Such efforts are rooted in the interests of the Kochs and other conservative groups to use the land in whichever way is most profitable to them such as mining, drilling, and other resource extraction. […]
The Money Behind Fox’s Promotion Of Cliven Bundy’s Battle With The Feds, https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/money-behind-foxs-promotion-cliven-bundys-battle-feds
Strangely, none of us have voted for these people to run persuasion campaigns using billions of dollars to get the opportunities to steal our national lands and natural resources for harvesting to their own profits while we both give them the land and charge a pittance for destroying it to make their private profits plus often subsidizing their operations using our taxpayer dollars and other national resources.
Isn’t that what Putin and his oligarchs have done to Russia? Isn’t it what every dictator does around the world who has used the same Hitler playbook to change democracies and free peoples into being ruled by an authoritarian-run dictatorship?
Isn’t it the same hoarding of those national resources and their profitable returns for themselves and the few they decide can receive some of it while their nation and their people suffer impoverishment, near or total enslavement, destruction of their territories into moon-like barren wastelands where the mining has occurred, polluted rivers and inland seas, squandered investment dollars, time and national resource profits put into yachts, multi-billion dollar villas, billionaire toys and political manipulations of other countries in order to do the same thing to them?
So, you think it would be great to have a dictator, rather than democracy? I’ve seen video clips of MAGA Trump supporters saying that we need a dictator. I’ve heard Republican law-makers serving Trump who implying their claim that it wouldn’t be so bad to have a dictator really. What do they think it means to have a dictator – one man with absolute and complete control of everything in our government, every resource and asset of the United States owned currently by We, the People?
Do they know what it has meant to other countries where this has happened, where democracy has been replaced by absolute autocracy, authoritarian dictatorship and sooner or later, tyranny? There are no checks and balances in it. Even those checks and balances at one time built into the nation as a democracy and a Constitutional based rule of law no longer apply once a dictatorship takes hold. Look at the corruption in Russia as a prime example. But why stop there, when dictators around the world have proven the fact that power unrestrained by the nation’s people and by institutions to serve the people and the nation which are capable of keeping tyrannical rule and its absolute power in check, results in horrific and dire outcomes every single time.
This twitter-er on X was nice enough to put these things on his social media back in 2018 –
From twitterX –
Replying to @Opinionrupter94) Charles Kesler, at an event held at The Heritage Foundation, is cooking up the idea that there is more than one Constitution. He speaks of defeating the Liberal Constitution,or it could lead to Succession or War. BEWARE. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Heritage_Foundation#Climate_denial… … http://rightwingwatch.org/post/conservative-scholar-warns-failure-to-defeat-liberal-constitution-could-lead-to-secession-or-war/… …
Believe it or not, considering the current situation – this is from 2020 and Ron Johnson was busy for Russia then, too.
How Sen. Ron Johnson’s Investigation Became an Enabler of Russian Disinformation: Part I
by Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa
August 11, 2020Part II of this two-part series is now available here.
Earlier this month, Johnson defended himself on a local Wisconsin news station saying, “What have I published, what have I reported on, that is not true, that is any form of Russian disinformation? There has been nothing.” Similarly, in his 11-page letter, Johnson asserted, “It is neither me, Chairman Grassley, nor our committees that are being used to disseminate Russian disinformation.
”The senator surely knows better, and his 11-page defense of his actions reveals it. Published on Monday, Aug. 10, the letter itself contains apparent products of Russian disinformation. And while Johnson denies taking information directly from two specific Ukrainians linked to Russia and its disinformation efforts, he makes no mention of his staff taking information directly from one of those individuals’ principal collaborators, which reportedly occurred over the course of several months.
https://www.justsecurity.org/71947/how-sen-ron-johnsons-investigation-became-an-enabler-of-russian-disinformation-part-i/
Every American and especially Republicans with their heads in rightwing media should get the information in that article – every bit of it. Current news would be well served to bring it to the public especially considering the new information about Smirnoff and the illegal arms dealer that are known to be the whistleblowers in the materials Russia was giving to the Republicans to infiltrate our Congress and throw sand into the gears of our functioning democratic republic in order to dismantle it.
Here Anthony Davis of Five Minute News talks with Lev Parnas who describes what he experienced serving Trump falsely believing he was doing it for the good of our country and to destroy the evil “deep state” that fascists around Trump are so convinced about. needing to destroy.
Mar 3, 2024 THE WEEKEND SHOW with MeidasTouch
Mar 3, 2024 • THE WEEKEND SHOW with MeidasTouchReformed Giuliani associate Lev Parnas joins Anthony Davis on The Weekend Show to discuss the disgraced GOP whistleblower with Russian ties, ongoing Russian election interference and Donald Trump’s contribution to the death of Alexei Navalny.
I found this tweet about charges against a Christian run academy and thought it so purely expresses what absolute power in the hands of these religious rightwing zealots genuinely does – which in all honesty, are the stories coming out of dictatorships joined with religion, whether Christian Evangelicals of America or Eastern Orthodox of Russia or Muslim of Iran. It is the same horror stories like these that happened in a small pocket of America within a very un-Christ-like place marketing themselves under Christ’s banner.
Sadly, many of the dangers caused by, supported by and allowed by dictators and dictatorships are unfixable. They yield permanently maimed people, horrifically maimed women, lives that would have been otherwise productive and making accomplishments serving the nation’s best interests are lost or forever altered such that they can never make those contributions. The corrupt uses and diversions of national resources undermine the overall well-being of every nation that has been taken over by dictatorship as it diverts time, efforts, and money to kleptocrats to enjoy rather than to public infrastructure projects, maintenance and upgrades of existing systems and other valuable public works bettering the lives and opportunities for the people of the nation and for the nation as a whole to excel. Instead, it degrades over time to a lower and lower possibility rate until there are few minds willing to accomplish nor resources to support them.
The costs are high, the advantages of dictatorship are low. But, for those in our nation and the foreign fascist rightwing proponents plus businesses and industries desirous of a non-democracy style autocracy or outright kleptocracy pouring massive amounts of money into getting their way forced down the throats of the American people, it seems to them desirable to have an authoritarian dictator running our govt rather than us and our elected representative govt. It doesn’t have any change of their drive even when proven wrong, not even when it costs them everything as it has in Russia, in Hungary, in Turkey, in Belarus, in Sudan, in Angola, in any of the current far right iterations of autocracy.
NAVALNY FUNERAL LIVE
INSIDE RUSSIA
(People were not allowed to come to Navalny’s funeral. It wasn’t public and it is illegal to attend or show up there but people did it anyway – they are there and Konstantin says they will be arrested later – every single individual who is there.) Hundreds of people, maybe even in the thousands across the entire country were arrested for placing flowers on memorials right after the news of Navalny’s death in the treacherous Siberian prison known for its torture and cruelty that Putin had him sent to.
What kind of government would arrest people and put them in jail for laying flowers in memorial like that? A petty dictator does that. They get to do anything their selfish aggrandizement tells them to do, anything their whims and pettiness drives them to do and anything to anybody for any reason or no reason at all. That what dictators do. It is what living under a dictatorship offers. It is unreasonable, unfair, undemocratic, unfree, unproductive, untenable, unacceptable, horrendous and the opposite of what God intended for any of us.
Rick Hubbard @rickarchtx
·Donald Trump Says Local Police Will Play Key Role In His Mass Deportation Plan The front-runner in the Republican presidential primary contest said he would give officers immunity to carry out his plan. Marita Vlachou Mar 1, 2024 https://huffpost.com/entry/trump-mass-deportation-local-police_n_65e1df88e4b013678e14f39f…
That sounds just like Russia and Orban’s dictatorship over Hungary – wonder where Trump got these ideas – from Hitler or Putin?
(twitterX interaction a few days ago)
But, in case you missed it – Trump and the Heritage Foundation have a plan to install themselves into a remaking of the United States into an autocratic supreme dictator with absolute power over our government to do with as they see fit –
Project 2025: The Plan For Trump’s Second Term Is Truly Terrifying | Melissa Gira Grant | TMR
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
Mar 3, 2024 U.S. News & Events
26,354 views • Mar 3, 2024 • U.S. News & EventsLive-streamed on February 28, 2024 Melissa Gira Grant, staff writer at the New Republic, discusses her recent reporting on Project 2025.
You can go read the document – it is online. I’m not linking to it. There is nothing right about it. There’s nothing of our Constitution and founding principles in it. I’ve read pieces since 1980 and watched it become this across many years of the most extreme elements of the Republican Party and John Birch Society taking it over.
Our democracy is worth so much more than what these people and their groups bring to the table of the United States. Their caste system lays a wasteland where our nation’s opportunities are hoarded by a few based on their perceived higher rights to have exclusive access to them – case in point, Donald Trump Wharton graduate – what a joke.
- cricketdiane 03-04-2024
Threat of Trump undoing American democracy ‘very real’: Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
Mar 1, 2024 #MSNBC #Trump #democracy
Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman and MSNBC International Affairs Analyst Michael McFaul join MSNBC’s Ali Velshi to discuss the danger of Donald Trump emulating Russian President Vladimir Putin and the danger of Trump’s renewed threats against NATO.
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