This Historical Definition Of Fascism Fits Donald Trump

In 1944, with the blessing of President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace gave this definition of fascism:

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions, or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.…

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.…

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us.…

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism.… They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interests.…

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.…

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself….

Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

Half Of Trump Voters Believe The QAnon Conspiracy Is True

The definition of QAnon is from The New York Times. The chart is from the recent Yahoo News / YouGov Poll -- done between October 16th and 18th of a national sample of 1,583 registered voters, with a 4 point margin of error.

The poll shows that half of Donald Trump's voters believe the QAnon conspiracy theory is true, and 33% are not sure if it's true or not. Only 17% know that it is not true.

This is why the Republican Party is in trouble. Too many of it's members are not connected to reality. 

Most Americans Are Feminists (But Don't Know It)

The YouGov Poll recently did an interesting survey (questioning a random national sample of 1,000 American adults between July 26th and 28th, with a margin of error of 5 points). They asked a simple question -- Are you a feminist? And they received a resounding "NO". About 75% of Americans said they were not a feminist, while only 25% said they were (see the chart above).

Those are some shocking numbers, especially considering feminism is just the belief that women should have the same rights as men. Obviously, the public has accepted the GOP propaganda that feminists are wild-eyed radical who burn bras and hate men. But then the folks at YouGov did an interesting thing -- and got a very interesting result when they did it.

The read to poll's respondents a dictionary definition of a feminist -- that it designates "someone who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes". Then they asked the question again. The result is in the chart below. After hearing the definition, about 60% said they were feminists and only 35% said they were not. That 35% is about right -- because that's about the percentage of the population (composed of fundamentalists and teabaggers) that think women should be second-class citizens and submit to the authority of men (particularly White men).

It's sad that so many people misunderstand just what feminism really is. It has always been the simple belief in the equality of women and men. Yes, there were some rambunctious demonstrations as the feminist movement got started, and some bras were burned and fiery rhetoric spoken. But that was needed at the time to bring the issue of gender equality to the forefront. Those demonstrations were just a tool (like the anti-war demonstrations or the civil rights demonstrations) to get people to think about the issue -- and were never the definition or meaning of feminism.