Quack like a fascist 🦆🥊 #000.6
Punchline: Sen. Tim Scott announced he's dropping out of the GOP presidential primary to spend less time answering questions about his girlfriend.
Welcome to the latest edition of the Punch Weekly newsletter! If you have questions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at nick@sometimesweekly.com.
Weekly Jabs
Tired of Winning: Last Monday, I wrote about the Democratic consulting class’s overreaction to a single NYT/Sienna poll released more than a year before the 2024 election. The following day, similar to the 2022 midterms, Democrats outperformed expectations across the country.
In fairness, there’s a distinction between the performance of Democrats now and how Joe Biden will perform in 2024. In 2020, for example, we saw Republican voters in some parts of the country split the ticket—voting against Trump but for other GOP candidates down-ballot. This should be a serious concern for Biden and Democrats.
But, there’s no reason to think Biden believes Democratic voters will blindly support him. Instead, he will need to continue engaging with voters and fight for their support while telling his story. It’s a compelling story, if you’re willing to listen and consider more than just his age. But there is nothing guaranteed about Biden’s reelection.
Senator Snowflake: Earlier today, a large man-child and GOP Senator challenged the head of the Teamsters Union to a fight during a Congressional hearing. These delicate Republican snowflakes are getting desperate, and beginning to lash out when their empty bravado is questioned.
Bye-bye: Sen. Tim Scott announced he’s dropping out of the GOP presidential primary. It turns out doing absolutely nothing to distinguish yourself from a crowded field of candidates was not the path to victory.
Tim Scott’s Upshot: Having done nothing to address the cancer of fascism consuming the Republican Party, his campaign to be Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential Lapdog is ongoing.
The Main Event
If he quacks like a fascist…
Over the past week, the establishment press has started to take notice of Donald Trump’s open embrace of fascism. It seems that plagiarizing Adolf Hitler was, even for them, a bridge too far. Trump’s embrace of this darkness is, of course, not a new phenomenon, but there has been hesitation to directly confront his embrace of this un-ideology for some time. Whether or not the establishment press has the attention span to continue to explain what we’re up against is unclear, but it’s a good start, and I’ll take it.
The hesitation to call a spade a spade remains shocking to me, especially following the January 6th insurrection, when mobs of Trump supporters descended upon the Capitol and, through the use and threat of violence, successfully delayed the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in United States history. This lynch mob was sent by their cult leader and his enablers, and were given express permission to use violence to overturn the election results for weeks before the January 6th attack.
Back in December 2022, I wrote about the growing threat of fascism:
That is the point of fascism: to advance feelings of isolation, of loneliness, of nihilism, and supplant those feelings with anger and fear, in order to consolidate power among a small ruling class of elites while oppressing minority out-groups like migrants, ethnic minorities, and the LGTBQ+ community.
Taking a look at our current political environment, we can see the deep impact that the spread of fascism has had on our discourse. We can see the attempts to slowly break reality, create confusion, and fill the vacuum with fear and darkness.
It may be easier for some to conceptualize fascism as a virus rather than a coherent political ideology, since it is not and has never been a coherent political ideology. Indeed, the contradictory nature of fascism allows it spreads like a virus, infecting susceptible individuals who have retreated into themselves as they reject reality around them for one reason or another. The virus infects indiscriminately, but society has found an effective vaccine against fascism in education and hope. That is why fascists seek to ban books while sowing despair. They target these elusive cures so that the virus continues to spread. They combat any attempt to quarantine the virus by undermining our institutions and reality itself, so that naming the virus becomes a polarizing and political act. But combatting a virus should not be seen as a political act, it should instead be seen as the obvious and morally correct thing to do.
We have a long road ahead of us, but I’m certain there more of us—those who believe in democracy—than there are of them—those willing to embrace darkness in an endless pursuit of wealth and power. For that reason, I’m certain we will win this battle.
Godspeed & talk soon,
Nick
Binghamton, NY
November 14, 2023
