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  3. jenorafeuer says

    From Lawyers, Guns, & Money today: Trump administration 2026: Fascist dystopia or farcically incompetent clown show? (and yes, that is a trick question)

    Relatedly, left-wing journalist and ardent Trump opponent Laura Jedeed — I am told by the internet that Jedeed is an Arabic word that means “new,” “fresh,” or “innovative” — took her on its face terroristic name and flagrantly seditious Google history to an ICE recruiting event in Dallas last August, to see how far she could get in the recruiting process for what she has repeatedly called in cyberprint “America’s Gestapo.” Hilarity (of a sort) ensued:

    Yes, someone with a ‘foreign’ name, who has been actively reporting on how horrible Trump is, effectively got hired by ICE with no due diligence checks and at least some falsified paperwork on ICE’s part to pretend they had done the checks. (There were references to a physical fitness test that had supposedly already been done, but was actually listed as three days in the future.)

    Jedeed went on to suggest the “only thing ICE is screening for is a desire to work for ICE: a very specific kind of person perfectly suited for the kind of mission creep we are currently seeing.”

  6. josephb says

    John, you think that: “Fascist dystopia or farcically incompetent clown show?”
    Are mutually exclusive?

  7. John Morales says

    Yup. I sure do, josephb.
    My basis is that one has to take all the terms into account; each one is a constraint, all must be simultaneously met.

    Not just dystopia, not just fascist. Etc. Not just clown show, but farcical. That sort of thing.

    Take the initial set: “Fascist dystopia” implies high competence at repression, coordination, and control, whereas “Farcically incompetent clown show” implies low competence, chaotic execution, and inability to sustain coherent control.

    (Might as well claim it’s Keystone Cops committing genocide)

  8. jenorafeuer says

    The writer of the headline in question certainly didn’t think they were mutually exclusive. Hyperbole, perhaps, but far from exclusive. Fascist dictatorships tend to avoid or eject anybody with enough expertise in a subject to be able to contradict Dear Leader, after all, and the U.S. is certainly heading rapidly in that direction. There’s a reason that Trump deliberately hired toadies and sycophants for his assistants, and part of the plan even back in 2020 was to gut the non-partisan civil service as much as possible: so he didn’t have to deal with anybody telling him he couldn’t do something.

    Also, the thing that John is missing is that under circumstances like these ‘chaotic execution’ actually helps with ‘repression’, because if nobody else is sure where the actual boundaries are and what slip-up could get them shot and declared an enemy of the state post-mortem, people are more likely to engage in ‘pre-obedience’, keeping their heads down and trying to keep the madman happy.

  9. John Morales says

    You’re thinking Kafkaesque, not Fascistic, jenorafeuer.

    “[…] so he didn’t have to deal with anybody telling him he couldn’t do something”.

    Everything he has done, he could obviously do. Else it would not have been done!

    More prosaically, he cannot do what he cannot do, that’s definitional.

    “because if nobody else is sure where the actual boundaries are and what slip-up could get them shot and declared an enemy of the state post-mortem”

    Then that is not a clown show. And it is not incompetent.

    For a bit of levity:
    Here’s another bit: a clown show is just that, right?
    But an incompetent clown show would mean a clown show performed incompetently, that it, not clownishly.
    To be properly clownish, it has to be competently so.
    And to be farcically incompetent at being a clown show, well…

  10. Militant Agnostic says

    Anyone familiar with WW II history (and Mao’s Great Leap Forward) should be aware of incompetence of authoritarian regimes. It is fortunate that Stalin finally realized that he needed to let the Generals run the war.

  11. John Morales says

    Anyone who knows headlines knows there is a temptation to keep gilding the lily.

    If authoritarian regimes are perforce incompetent regimes, then padding it with “farcically incompetent clown show” is at best hyperbole. And if they’re incompetent at fascism, then they aren’t very fascistic, are they? Yet somehow they have achieved dystopia despite their alleged incompetence.

    Militant Agnostic, I grew up in Spain in the 1960s, and everyone tells me it was an authoritarian regime.
    cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_miracle

    (China has not done that badly, either)

  12. John Morales says

    Vox article: https://www.vox.com/politics/475199/ice-shooting-renee-good-trump-white-nationalist-memes-dhs-dol
    ↓ excerpt ↓
    The federal government can’t stop posting white nationalist propaganda
     
    In this context, one might think the White House would be bending over backward to make the goals of its immigration policy appear as benign as possible: If you want to persuade voters to accept ICE’s radical methods, you’d presumably want to assure them that it has mainstream objectives.
     
    Instead, the administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan.
     
    Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline, “​​One People, One Realm, One Leader.” Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

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