Beyond Passive Resistance: Against Democratic Surrender in a Time of Fascitization, by Paul Street

Image by Lorie Shaull via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Dec. 16, 2021
December 27, 2021

Sixty percent of the U.S. populace backs Roe v. Wade and just 27 percent back its undoing even as the nation’s right-wing Supreme Court is strongly predisposed to reverse the decision by next summer. Where is the call for millions in the streets to defend women’s right to control their bodies over and against this anti-democratic outrage? Where is the uprising against a government structure and social order that permits this and numerous other forms of authoritarian insanity? It’s shocking to hear liberal talking heads say (basically) “oh well there goes Roe v. Wade for a generation, until we can get the votes and a better court back some day.” Are these shrugging accommodationists aware that the nation’s right-wing Minority Rule party is actively and effectively working (in the name of “stop the steal”) to permanently suppress and nullify votes and elections and policies that don’t go their patriarchal, white-nationalist way? How do they not understand that, as the leading feminist and communist Sunsara Taylor notes:

A Dystopian Hellscape Beckons: 21 Dark Clouds Over 2021 Amerika, by Paul Street

Image by Daniel Huizinga via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Nov. 16, 2021
November 29, 2021

Some of those willing to look may have noticed that dark clouds of fascism are forming over the United States like never before. How so? Let me count the ways – 21 to be exact:

When America Was “Great”… by Paul Street + Indigenous Peoples’ History is More Complicated Than a Holiday Myth

Image by Daniel Lobo via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
Originally published November 21, 2018
November 24, 2021

“Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings… are… a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” – Frederick Douglass, July 4th, 1852

Reflections on Political Violence and Terror, by Paul Street

Image by Glenn Halog via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Nov. 4, 2021
November 14, 2021

Political physical violence and the threat and capacity to use such violence, enforce ruling class power and other and related forms of domination and oppression. Ideological indoctrination and informational bias to “manufacture consent” matter a great deal of course, but we should not forget the significant role of force.

America’s Instinctive Fascism Creeps On, by Paul Street

Image by duncan c via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Nov. 4, 2021
November 7, 2021

Recently Norman Ornstein told Salon’s Chauncy de Vega that the United States is mired in a crisis of democracy that shows parallels with Germany’s descent into Nazism during the 1930s. Ornstein is right to worry about the nation’s ongoing lethal rightward drift beyond “normal” bourgeois democracy. That is how the United States’ political life is shaping up. The signs are ominous indeed. As de Vega writes, “the coup attempt of January is only a prelude to similar events in the future, when Republicans and their allies fully intend to overthrow any election they lose, and therefore deem illegitimate.”

Chris Hedges and Paul Street: Neo-fascist Seizure of America’s State Governments

Image by Chris Barker via Flickr

with Chris Hedges
and with Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
October 22, 2021

RT America on Oct 21, 2021

On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the seizure of state government by American’s homegrown neo-fascist movement with the historian Paul Street.

The Frontier is Closed: Capitalist and Constitutional Chickens Coming Home to Cancerous Roost, by Paul Street

Image by The All-Nite Images via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Oct. 7, 2021
October 13, 2021

Much of the United States (US) is in crisis as capitalist-imperialist chickens are coming home to roost.

Multiple Interrelated Crises Rooted in Bourgeois Evil

A 9/11 Reflection: Remember “Their” Crimes, Forget “Ours” by Paul Street

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
September 14, 2021

So much we are supposed to forget or not know and/or care about, so little we are supposed to remember.

“We must never forget” 9/11, when “America was attacked” (when, as cannot be said without sounding “controversial,” the United States Middle East policy blew back on the nation’s financial and political capitals).

No Solutions Under Capitalism: Revolution is Required, by Paul Street

Image by Giorgia Colletti via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
August 23, 2021

Liberals and progressives would do well to understand that while class is not everything – far from it, as I shall argue below – there are still no real or lasting solutions to problems that rightly agitate them under capitalism and bourgeois democracy, that is, under the de facto material dictatorship of the capitalist class and its mode of production.

Joe Biden’s Hollow Resistance: Words vs. Deeds, by Paul Street

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, Aug. 8, 2021
August 10, 2021

“The president is increasingly at odds with leaders of the voting rights movement, who see a contrast between his soaring language and his willingness to push Congress to pass federal legislation.” — New York Times, July 22, 2021

From Iowa Nice to Iowa Nazi: A Report from the Friendly Fascist Heartland, by Paul Street

Image by tobika via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, July 10, 2021
July 13, 2021

The sloppy fascist Donald Trump may no longer reside in the White House but he’s back on the hate rally campaign trail selling his big Hitlerian Stolen Election Lie. Meanwhile, Trumpist white nationalism is booming in the “red states,” where Amerikaner Republicans hold the reins.

The Resistance Remains Hollow: The Weimar Ways of the Dismal Democrats, by Paul Street

Image by Matt Katzenberger via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, July 3, 2021
July 6, 2021

The Republican Party – described by Noam Chomsky years ago as “the most dangerous organization on Earth” – is now a fascist party (I will develop this point further in a future report on the state-level Republican jihad against Critical Race Theory). The sheer equivalence some “radicals” posit between the dismal neoliberal Democratic and the white-nationalist Amerikaner GOP is false. Just for starters, try to imagine the self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or for that matter, the corporate liberal Nancy Pelosi winning a Congressional seat in Kentucky, Iowa, or Wyoming and the QANazi Marjorie Taylor Green being elected to the U.S. House from Brooklyn, Chicago, or San Francisco.

No Time to Relax: Dark Clouds in Biden’s America, by Paul Street

Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, June 5, 2021
June 7, 2021

The sense of relief that came over many Americans after the malignant pandemo-fascist Donald Trump’s removal from power seems increasingly misplaced. The feeling of relaxation is understandable. The pandemic is in significant retreat inside the U.S. as summer dawns, thanks in part to the Biden administration’s vaccination efforts. The improved U.S. health outlook combined with Biden and the Congressional Democrats’ large opening stimulus package to spark some modest economic recovery and hiring expansion. Significantly vaccinated fans, shoppers, diners, vacationers, drinkers, entertainment seekers, and gamblers have returned to American major league baseball, basketball, and hockey games, beaches, bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, movie theaters, concerts, and shopping malls.

Slaves to the Constitution, by Paul Street

Image by Brad Dougherty via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street, May 21, 2021
May 28, 2021

Slavery lives on in U.S.-American life, crippling “our” supposed grand “democracy” in numerous ways. The massive wealth, income, and health gaps between Black and white Americans and the related persistent segregation and mass arrest and incarceration of Black Americans cannot be properly understood without reference to the two and a half centuries in which Black Americans were enslaved.

Chris Hedges and Paul Street: Joe Biden is Not FDR

Image by Payton Chung via Flickr

with Chris Hedges

and with Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
May 8, 2021

RT America on May 8, 2021

On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to Paul Street, history professor and author, about the Biden administration and its continuity with the Democratic and Republican administrations’ policies and programs to benefit the elite and corporate interests not working class Americans.