The MAGA regime is looking for a fight, they need a way to steal the next election because their dismantling of everything that’s decent in America is so unpopular that there’s no way they can win in a fair contest. So currently, their target to pick a fight with is Chicago, the city where I live. The city where my Italian grandfather came to as a young man after fighting for the Americans in WWI—at one point selling fruit to factory workers from a horse-drawn carriage in what is now Fulton Market—and raising a family on the near west side. The city where my Italian grandmother sang in her native tongue at her local Catholic church. The city where my other grandfather, after returning from WWII, drove a garbage truck for 30 years, often salvaging items and selling them at Maxwell Street and flea markets. The city that birthed House, fostered the Blues, and where artists who fled from a Fascist takeover of Europe made their mark. And here we are, almost a century after the Bauhaus movement began transforming the Chicago landscape, forever changing Architecture and Design, and the same type of fascists that drove them to America, the same type of fascists my grandfather fought in WWII, are now in control of our federal government and are threatening our major cities with our own military.
Yeah, I said it, and I’ll keep saying it. The comparisons to the Nazi regime are valid. MAGA is the new Nazi. Probably one of the best comparisons is the speed at which they are dismantling our Democracy. In the past 100 years, since fascism had a name, most authoritarians have needed years, if not decades, to accomplish what MAGA has done in mere months. That’s the fastest any authoritarian regime has been able to do it since the Nazis, who themselves managed to end the fledgling German democracy in only 53 days. That was made possible by capitalizing on the Reichstag fire and using it as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, seize power over the parliament and begin jailing their political rivals.
Trump has already convinced the MAGA base that attacking Democratic led cities with military force is both legal and justified. Of course, it’s not. He’s convinced them that opening investigations into Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook are justified and legal. They are not. MAGA Republicans have convinced the base that the Senate and the House and the Supreme Court ceding power to the Trump Administration is legal. It’s not. In many ways, our Reichstag fire was January 6th, and we failed to seize the opportunity to shore up our democracy. So instead, now, we have an unhinged Trump making his MAGA followers believe America is in some sort of crisis and civil liberties need to be suspended, political opponents must be investigated, the freedom of the press must be curtailed, and a combination of paramilitary groups and US troops must be used to quash dissent. And they did all of that without a Reichstag fire.
So what’s going to happen when they ignite some sort of resistance that they can spin into being called an open revolt? That’s their whole goal, to fuel the flames until something that at least looks like a fire ignites. Something that just appears dangerous enough to rally their MAGA base into accepting the unacceptable. Trump and his architects know their base better than anyone, and they seem to understand that they still need a little more red meat to steal the next election. That could be civil unrest, which they are actively doing their best to incite. Or it could be a terrorist attack, which, as I wrote about a couple of months ago in a piece called Cue the Terrorist Attack, they are very much inviting, because our intelligence agencies are distracted by the chaos of the MAGA regime.
So, Chicago is the next test, if we so much as throw a sandwich, they’ll call it civil unrest. And, there’s almost no chance someone around here is not going to throw a sandwich. I mean this is Chicago, we have a lot of sandwiches. But the good news is that Chicago also has a long history of protest and resistance. Chicago is where the Haymarket Affair and the Pullman Strike occurred. Those events spurred the labor movement, which eventually gave us what we know of today as normal life. The 40-hour work week, weekends, overtime pay, all of that was made possible in part by the protests in Chicago that ignited a movement. A movement led by a robust immigrant population striving to realize the American Dream. And back then, like today, we were up against similar forces in both government and in our major corporations.
But back then, even when the deck was stacked against civil rights, we still had some semblance of a government that adhered to checks and balances. We don’t have that right now. In fact, and this is important because language is important, we should stop calling Trump, President Trump. Yes, he was elected to the office, but he is not acting in the capacity of a President anymore; he’s become an authoritarian in charge of a lawless regime. Same with Republican Senators and House members. They are no longer acting lawfully in their respective governmental roles; they’re just members of the regime now. And the same goes for the Supreme Court, it has been captured, and Roberts especially is not acting in his capacity as a Chief Justice, he’s just an agent of the party. We also have to quit saying we’re sliding into authoritarianism. We’re there, our Democracy is gone, everyone’s gotta grapple with that.
But we still have a window to make this short-lived. Like any burgeoning authoritarian regime, it needs buy-in from enough of the population and the business community to fully lock down its power. And right now, they are falling short of having enough of the population willing to accept the police state they want to implement. So they need a fight. Well, they’re gonna get one, but maybe not the one they expected. Peaceful opposition to their violence is gaining momentum all over the country. You’ve probably seen events popping up in your area. Join them. Let me repeat that: Join them. Some of our most powerful business leaders, Universities, and media institutions have already capitulated. But they’ll change their mind when they see enough people in the streets, peacefully declaring that we aren’t going to just let a bunch of con men steal away our democracy. If we back down now, the opportunity to end this peacefully could be lost for years to come.
If the MAGA regime wins this round, there won’t be meaningful elections next year, or for the foreseeable future. And there will be a police state; it’s being constructed now, the money was allocated in the One Big Beautiful Bill. Detention centers are being built, and ICE and the FBI are actively recruiting. There are already talks about a civilian volunteer force being developed, I wonder what kind of people that will be comprised of. This is how the early days of the Nazi Party started. So while we failed to take MAGA to task after Jan 6th, we can’t make that mistake again. There will have to be trials. The republican party will have to be dismantled. They love to project. Check out this quote from J.D. Vance:
“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left. We need like a de-Ba’athification program, a de-wokification program… Basically, my strategy is to deinstitutionalize the left, reinstitutionalize the right”.
He’s close, but we have a better model, the Nuremberg trials, that’s how we’ve dealt with fascists in the past, and it’s our best model to deal with our homegrown fascists today.