The Great Purge Begins as MAGA Guts GOP

Echoes of past totalitarian regimes, embrace of today’s worst dictators

RNC: Trump coup complete with loyalist as chair and daughter-in-law as co-chair

The Republican National Committee voted on Friday to install Donald Trump’s handpicked leadership team, completing his takeover of the national party.

Michael Whatley, a North Carolina Republican who parrots Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, was elected as the party’s national chair in a vote last week in Houston.

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, was voted in as co-chair. She vowed that the RNC would be run ‘just like one of the Trump family businesses’.

Since they run every business straight into the ground after they loot and bleed it and pocket the profits, this would ordinarily amuse me. I have no love for the Republican Party, but to see its infrastructure and influence commandeered by a fascist cult is not something I’d wish on any country.

Associated Press:

“Lara Trump says she thinks GOP voters would like to see RNC pay Donald Trump’s legal fees”

The Hill:

“Lara Trump says she’d spend ‘every single penny’ of RNC funds to elect father-in-law”

Lara Trump:

 “Anyone who is not on board with seeing Donald Trump as the 47th president and America-loving patriots all the way down the ticket being supported by the RNC is welcome to leave because we are not playing games.”

New Republic:

“Lara Trump Promises to Use RNC to Complete MAGA Takeover of Party”

Trump and his lieutenants will, of course, have firm control of the party’s political and fundraising machinery.

Trump’s new “leadership team” at the RNC has already started the process of ousting scores of staffers, clearing out its ranks as they prepare to bring the committee under the wing of the Trump 2024 presidential campaign.

Since it sure looks like ALL the Party’s money is slated to go toward bailing out Day One Dickhead from his assorted legal misadventures, what happens to the down-ticket candidates? Especially the ones [like Holocaust denier/NC gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson] who won their primaries, but are viewed dimly by the general electorate? Sounds like all the RNC has got for them is thoughts and prayers. Any Republican who is not a spineless trumpuppet is “welcome to leave.”

One bright spot in that their blind fealty to Dear Leader above all else may cost them seats in Congress.

As ever with Trump’s operations, the firings are part of a strategy to ensure that only staffers committed to Trump and the MAGA movement are left at the RNC as Trump tightens his grip on the party.

MAGAs have no intention of allowing a fair election that they might lose again. As with the RNC, they have purged local election boards nationwide — including insufficiently MAGAfanatic Republican officials, and an army of their cutthroat lawyers are already prepared to contest any election they don’t win.

Rabid coked-up squirrel Donnie Trump Jr says the old Republican Party is dead now that MAGA has taken over the RNC: “That Republican Party no longer exists. The moves that happened — that’s the final blow. People have to understand that MAGA is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”

Steve Bannon said, “We gotta see the building purged... all the buildings gotta be purged — 100% purged.”

This rhetoric, and aspirations of the magafanatics directly echoes actions of murderous dictator Joseph Stalin, who executed thousands of his fellow Russians, in order to cement his brutal reign over the USSR in the 1930s.

The Great Purge, or the Great Terror was Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin’s campaign to consolidate his power over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet state. The purges also sought to remove the remaining influence of Leon Trotsky.

Starting in 1936, the NKVD [USSR secret police] began the removal of the central party leadership, government officials, and regional party bosses. Politicians who opposed or criticized Stalin were removed from office and imprisoned or executed. Eventually, the purges were expanded to the Red Army and military high command. The NKVD targeted ethnic minorities, who were subjected to forced deportation. Throughout the purge, Stalin sought to strengthen control over civilians through fear, and frequently used imprisonment, torture, violent interrogation, and executions.

Sound familiar? Did you hear about this? “Former President Trump’s violent rhetoric toward Gen. Mark Milley is raising fears he will use a second term in the Oval Office to seek retribution against his enemies.

Trump suggested that Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who is stepping down from his post at, deserves the death penalty for allegedly betraying him and committing an act of treason.”

Our lazy national media didn’t find this important enough to waste space on. This, however was a front page headline last week: the Biden scandal of—”mysterious new shoes.”

“President Biden's mysterious new shoes provide 'maximum stability': report

His shoes are designed for ‘comfort while walking, hiking”

Okay, that was Fox, but the NYTimes is not much better. This is all within two weeks in February. Front page. Liberal New York Times, right?

Biden’s Age and Memory Rise to Center of 2024 ...

Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump

For Voters, When Does Old Become Too Old?

Opinion | Biden's Age as a Major Campaign Issue

How Old Is Too Old to Be President? An Uncomfortable Question Arises Again.

Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post — one of the few responsible remaining American journalists still working:

This is not “polarization.” It is the authoritarian capture of much of the GOP by a right-wing movement bent on sowing chaos. Turkey, Hungary and other countries with autocratic strongmen are not polarized; democratic forces try their best to prevent their country’s ruin and collapse into total dictatorship. Our political scene, sadly, has come to resemble the global authoritarian assault on democracy.

Responsible reporting should not cover for Republicans. The MAGA Republican Party has become shockingly irrational and radicalized, fully embracing totalitarianism, white nationalism and radical isolationism.

America is divided not by some free-floating condition of “polarization” but by one party going off the deep end. And that’s a threat to all of us."

Right on the heels of the MAGA takeover of the RNC follows the latest media atrocity — the ‘mainstream’ network NBC hired Ronna McDaniel as a ‘political analyst.’ For $300,000 a year.

McDaniel was the RNC Chair until Trump got her canned. Like all his most slavish cultists, she committed crimes for him — outright bribery, for one. She was part of that phone call on Nov 17, 2020 where Day One pleaded with members of Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the election. Ronna helpfully claimed “if you can go home tonight, do not sign it... we will get you attorneys.”

And now, as a reward for seditious conspiracy, one of the biggest TV networks in America gave her a platform and very big bucks to continue to kiss the butt of Dear Leader and further subvert democracy.

But, oh dear. Ronna’s first performance, in an interview on Meet the Press, was so embarrassing, so groveling, gratingly godawful—outrage from viewers and network staff forced the corner office to tearfully kiss her goodbye.

Of course, McDaniel expects to be fully paid out for her contract — two years at $300,000 annually — since she did not breach its terms, according to a person close to McDaniel. That means that her single, not-quite-20-minute interview could cost NBC more than $30,000 per minute, or $500 per second.

But Ronna is pissed. She’s a victim, you know? She is “pursuing her legal options, such as potential defamation and hostile work environment torts.” Well, of course she is.

This is what working so hard for the braindead, insurrectionist election-denying vote, gets you, NBC. Why don’t you try, like, reporting the actual news, instead. It would be a refreshing change. What does the US media think is going to happen to them under a fascist regime?

Trump/MAGA is promising, is bragging about what they want to do, what they PLAN to do. The language and tactics of past authoritarian regimes is rooted in the careful study of them, by the deranged “brains” behind Trump — men like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — in order to emulate them.

Did you know who the first people sent by Nazis to their original concentration camp in the town of Dachau? Jews? Actually no. The very first inmates were the Nazis’ political opponents — “foes,” as this AP report describes them.

Camps Used By Nazis to Convert Foes

18,000 Germans, Mostly Socialists and Communists, to Be Held in Political Camps Until They Become ‘Fit Citizens’

Heinrich Himmler, police president of Munich, officially described Dachau in 1933 as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” Primarily German Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. Over time, other group such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), gay men, as well as “asocials” and repeat criminal offenders were captured, as the net of ‘enemies’ ever widened — as it always does with paranoid tyrants with too much power.

And who does Trump identify as his enemies? Right now, he seems determined to resurrect red baiting as a political tactic. Calling his political opponents communists has become a regular feature of his attacks on the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, and virtually anyone who criticizes anything he does.

He wants his followers to fear what the people and institutions he calls communist will do to those who don’t share their world view — including to himself. In 2019, he called Sen. Bernie Sanders, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, “a socialist-slash-communist ... He’s going to tax you people at 90 percent; he’s going to take everything!”

It’s no accident that Trump reacted to his arraignment in the classified documents case by waving the bloody flag of communism and describing the threat it allegedly poses.

“If the communists get away with this,” he said in a speech later that day, “it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and future Republican candidates.”

Even normally Republican-friendly outlets like Politico are taking notice.

Whatever his motivations, Trump’s kind of red baiting has a long lineage. It is right out of the playbook of authoritarians and tyrants from the early 20th century. It was instrumental in the rise of fascist leaders in mid-century Germany and Italy.

Like them, today’s strongmen and would-be strongmen like the former president need powerful “us” versus “them” narratives, and communism is a tried and true boogeyman.

Trump’s revival of the Red Scare also draws on an American tradition that fueled the notorious Palmer Raids in 1919 and 1920, when the Justice Department arrested and deported anarchists, communists, and leftists. The raids were the climax of that era’s own Red Scare.

Trump is surely channeling his mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn served as a prosecutor in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage, and was chief counsel to Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950 hearings that alleged that numerous communists and Soviet spies had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities and the film industry.

Trump is “hallucinating” a communist threat where there is none and promoting what The Guardian columnist Richard Seymour labels “anti-communism without communism.” Seymour gets it right when he suggests that for a would-be authoritarian like Trump, communism signals a “single, treasonous, diabolical enemy.” “Rather like a racial stereotype,” Seymour wrote, “‘communism’ figuratively presents systemic crisis as … a demonic plot.”

By conjuring such demonic forces, Trump amplifies his anti-democratic claim that, as he put it in his post-indictment speech, “I am the only one that can save this nation.”

So many creepy new far-right groups are simply erupting from the woodwork now, crawling out from under rocks, emerging from dark places.

PHOENIX — As the board of supervisors for Arizona’s largest county abruptly ended a meeting late last month, a swarm of people rushed toward the dais, shouting that the members were illegitimate.

The raging mob that assailed county leaders on Feb. 28 included members of a new crackpot anti-government group that Klann co-founded, called The Peoples Operation Restoration. The group’s website features a painting of Trump dressed as a Founding Father and riding a horse.

Check it out. After you stop laughing at the comic notion of that beached whale hauling his bloated carcass onto the back of a horse, read the text— it’s naively hilarious. “We pick up our pens and write a new chapter of hope, liberty, and positive change on a global scale.”

“On a global scale.” Right, loonies. This little band of Q-anon-adjacent digital pitchfork warriors is going to change the world, you see. “Empowering you with the timeless truths that underpin our nation. In the principles of natural law, rooted in the will of God, lies the key to your birthright — liberty. “

Just below the risible image of trump on a steed is a gauzy, romanticized painting of — JFK, bearing a quote — a line of bullshit he uttered, never. “There is a plot in this country to enslave every man, woman and child. Before I leave this high and noble office, I intend to expose this plot.”

Along with the Red Scare bogeyman, we’ve got the Camp of the Saints white supremacist rhetoric about immigrants. The key theme being the end of white civilization as the West knows it — infestation, invasion, hordes of nameless, faceless migrants who come to invade the West and bring about its demise.

Throw in some “persecution of Christians” [nobody plays the persecuted victim card as fervently as right wing Christians]. Even as they gain special rights afforded to no other group in this country. Their solution— burn the Constitution and make this an explicitly Christian nation, the very thing the Founders feared most, along with king-envy authoritarian wannabes like Day One.

Fascist Dick has said he would use the Justice Department to thwart his political opponents, purge the government of bureaucrats whom he perceives as insufficiently loyal, round up undocumented immigrants and “people who don’t love America” — and build sprawling detention camps near the US-Mexico border. Gulags.

Stew this heady brew all together and you can guess who the lucky winners for a bunk at the first Camp MAGA will be. During an address in New Hampshire, Day One Dictator said, “Our threat is from within,” vowing to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

You know what he means are Democrats, non-christians—or the wrong kind, Jews, Muslims, gays, women who dare to depart from traditional gender roles, men who aren’t ‘manly’ enough by their Stone Age standards, children who don’t pray in school. Books, art, science, sanity. You and me and our friends and families. We are the ‘enemy’.

The Crazy is everywhere. Look around you.