Ten Signs of Fascism. America has all of them

> actual autocracies that crack down on this kind of speech

The ball is rolling. Action against media organizations is already underway. You already couldn't publish this message via CBS, WSJ or the Post, for example. They likely wouldn't even interview the author.

But yeah, it takes time, censorship is hard in practice, and random substacks are fairly far down the list.

But pretending that this is a "healthy" democracy at this point is pretty strained reasoning.

Just to be clear: Are you twisting the fact that America hits every metric for fascism into saying it must therefore be a healthy vibrant democracy full of free speech - because someone pointed that out? In a flagged story, that isn't anywhere near mainstream news?

... You know we have people getting thrown in camps and deported for saying maybe genocide is bad, right? And like, students and faculty in Ivy league schools getting beaten and/or fired for saying maybe we shouldn't be complicit in the mass murder of children?

Apologies if I've misread your remarks - deep and biting sarcasm doesn't always play well in text.

The problem is that America is not in a terribly healthy democratic state, and pretty much all of the indicators show it. At best, America is a "flawed democracy" ala The Economist. The worst evaluations label America as a "hybrid regime" / "competitive authoritarianism" / "electoral autocracy" or many other terms to describe a democracy-on-the-surface that has, in reality, become heavily titled in favor of one party rule.

The problems extend well beyond one party (see: Citizen United), but to me, the "fascism"-ish stuff is mostly concentrated on one end. It has been clear for a long time that the Republican Party has embraced the "illiberal democracy" model of Viktor Orbán. Orbán's government never got to the full-on violent oppression used in actual autocracies, but instead used many of the tools that the Republican party uses today to attempt to stay in power. That being: gerrymandering and other aggressive vote meddling; media manipulation (not full on censorship, but attempting to ensure that dominant media voices were party line); propaganda using social / culture war rhetoric; and government pressure on institutions (schools, businesses, etc.) to destroy independence, and force conformity to the party line.

There are differences between the two -- Orbán never attempted anything like ICE or the immigrant detention camps, but Orbán was able to capture the judiciary better than Republicans have so far. But it's the closet comparison I can think of.

Some of the characteristics of the "Orbán style" do share some similarities with fascism... however the "Orbán style" lacks classic fascism (along with the more direct cousin of "the Vladimir Putin style")'s full on authoritarianism. But as the above demonstrates, there isn't a term right now that neatly encapsulates hybrid governments at the moment, so I guess that is why folks are running with the term everyone knows. Besides, there is always the danger of a hybrid regime backsliding into an authoritarian regime. Russia, who many do see as a modern flavor of authoritarian fascism at present, was rated as a "hybrid regime" in The Economist in 2006.

Its sad thing but in every society there appears to be a significant portion of people who support the tenants of fascism. The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.

"yes" heh. more a human problem i'm slowly figuring out, spend enough time on this earth and it's honestly tiring. social media and modern new cycle prob just accelerates it.

The problem with needing to experience fascism to worry about it is that the lesson will fade too quickly to be useful. 5 generations, maybe, before the majority have forgotten.

Doesn't help sadly, as you reckon.

Back home in Portugal, it is a similar trend, I belong to the first generation to grow in freedom after the revolution, and it is quite sad to see how right wing is taking over, as if people had forgotten all about PIDE/DGS, the kidnaping and killings, crossing to France over the mountains and Spain, Tarrafal prison, the colonial wars.

I guess never again was uttered countless times across the ages, only to be uttered countless times for the ages to come.

Germany's current political course is a replay of the Weimar Republic. Including the people wagging their fingers about the dangers of fascism. You'd think the people telling us not to repeat history would read a history book.

The midterms will be a landslide if allowed to run fairly.

Trump’s response to that landslide will tell us whether there’s hope.

I don’t expect Civil War levels of violence because the country is mostly united in its hatred of how the GOP is running it. No large group of people will pick up arms to support Trump’s right to invade countries and ruin the economy.

He is hurrying, but his $1.7 Billion militia and ICE will soon be fighting behind an El Cid propped up rider. It looks like he has had repeated strokes. Not the golf kind.

But fight they will because he will fully become a chatbot. FIRST DECEASED LEADER.

The Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency[0]

Tue, Apr 29th 2025 09:34am - Mike Masnick

> We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration.

> But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.

> This is not the response of someone working from actual knowledge or policy understanding. Instead, it’s precisely how an LLM operates: taking a prompt (the question about job losses) and generating text based on some core parameters (the “system prompt” that requires deflecting blame and asserting greatness).

> The hallmarks of AI generation are all here

    • Confident assertions without factual backing

    • Meandering diversions that maintain loose semantic connection to the topic

    • Pattern-matching to previous responses (“ripped off,” “billions of dollars”)

    • Optimization for what sounds good rather than what’s true 

[0] https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgp...

I am reading this book now and from reading the book to me it seems there are some differences between 1930s Germany and 2026 US:

1. Germans back then were conformist people and following other Germans; especially authority figures. Americans are anything but.

2. Germans did not know what was going on; today there is a ton of media.

3. Nazi party took care of the “good” Germans: Nazis gave Germans jobs (anyone else, Jews, Romas, communists had to fend for themselves). Trump and his goons openly shit on American people.

4. It took about 8 years from boycotting Jewish businesses to burning synagogues, then another 2 years to start implementing the Final solution. Trump’s goons shot and killed Americans less than 1 year since taking power.

(Also important is that Adolf Hitler became chancellor at 44 years old, Trump’s most consequential presidency started when he was 79.)

Similarities to today’s situation that I got from the book are charisma both Hitler and Trump have, and how people seem to identify themselves with Hitler and Trump (for ex: which other American president had people put his name on flags, tattoos, cars, houses?)

Freedom is fragile and needs constant support. Trump touched a raw nerve but he is too vain, greedy and old to follow through with a full blown dictatorship. The goons around him are dangerous but lack his charisma and connection to the average person (do you see JD Vance filling up stadiums while spouting non-sense?)

While some* of that is true, does that matter to the argument being made by the author? And yes, that author also opposed fascist forces in the Netherlands.

: Former prime minister Schoof was was not* a fascist, but basically just an independent bureaucrat hired to attempt to hold a very brittle coalition together. He failed at that miserably. Also, the 'main reason that stopped' was that the PVV party went from 23% of the votes to 17% of the votes in the next election, and none of the other parties was willing to work with them again in a coalition.

We’ve turned off the flags.

The story was flagged by many users. The problem with articles like this is the discussions are repetitive and predictable. We rarely see anyone approaching them with genuine curiosity. The topic of whether this president and administration are befitting of particular labels and historical analogies has been continually discussed (in broader society and on HN) since about 2015. And in the discussions we generally just see people trying to justify why they believe what they already believed about the topic, sometimes quite belligerently.

This is why discussions about politics are generally bad on online forums (and considered to be best avoided at dinner parties); it’s a domain in which people’s belief about the topic is deeply entangled with their identity, and by definition, people get defensive and hostile when their identity is thrown into question. Thus, they work much harder to justify why they were already right about the topic, instead of seeking to learn anything new.

The kind of politics discussion that would be good to see much more of on HN would explore the question: if we were to agree that the state of politics globally is terrible (I certainly do), what actions can ordinary people like us working in technology do to make things better?

I guess it falls under "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics".

My thoughts exactly.

And it's not even possible to vouch fot it

Just because you've used three times the amount of words, doesn't mean you've offered anything beyond the standard Republican rationalizations.

I'm a libertarian who was both sidesing up to 2020 or so, but at this point I'd be a fool to continue. My only real question for people who still support Trump is which of your positive-constructive ideals has he actually succeeded in furthering? Not intermediate steps that are promised to bear fruit any day now, nor goals framed in the negative-destructive like remove illegals, start wars, or owning libs - but actual constructive-positive ideals? Because I've been unable to get a clear answer and I haven't been able to come up with anything myself besides destruction.

I've long described the bureaucratic authoritarian corporatist state as building fascism from the other direction, ala inverted totalitarianism. But your list is a conflation of a lot of things - some valid critiques, straightforward responses to the open fascism of the Republican party, and some flat out straw men (eg there are no significant numbers of people "dreaming of the lost socialist utopia of USSR"). And right from the start you've set up a motte and bailey with "terminally online far leftist". So this list reads more as partisan flamebait/rationalization of the current open fascist dynamics rather than a serious critique aimed at any kind of reform.

Which countries? Can you be specific about two or three of them?

And what point are you trying to make?

The fascism is worldwide now.

Reddit-style spin posts leaking into HN.