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In only 30 days, as they promised, they have begun to kill things and to keep their promises to kill more. Coal companies are once again allowed to decapitate mountains and dump the waste into streams. Gun rights have been restored for the mentally ill. Pruitt will try his best to smash protections for clean air and water. Look for many more Flints to occur. Senator Barrasso of Wyoming will seek to destroy the Endangered Species Act. Wolves stand to be eliminated from the West. They will be poisoned and hunted from helicopters. President Trump will concur. Republicans will pass the legislation. He will sign anything. The Republican party is evolving into a death cult with Trump as the high priest.

Look at what is in the pipeline for health care.

Look at what is coming for the generational rule of an oligarchy of the super wealthy.

All the grotesque apparatus of the corporate state will be allowed to do whatever it wants to animals and the landscape and the health and safety of human beings.

And now a new pronouncement:

A few days ago, President Trump called the media “the enemy of the American people.”

This is how it begins.

The implications of this attack are many.

Publications or news programs that report stories that describe the factual reality of President Trump and his policies are to be dismissed. They are biased because they have tried to represent reality. Only President Trump’s chosen organs of information — Fox News (with the exception of Wallace and Smith), Breitbart, Infowars, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the propaganda ministers of his administration, the apparatchiks Priebus, Conway, Bannon, Spicer and whomever else lies for him — these only present the real news of the day. Only they and President Trump possess integrity. Only they and President Trump know what is real.

This is the theme of a Mao, a Stalin, a Mussolini.

If a free press is the enemy of the American People, than anything may be done to protect the People: laws may be crafted to suppress publications; threats of violence may be made, actual violence delivered. The State alone becomes the only guardian of “the People”. Therefore, oppose the State and oppose “the People”.

How long do you think before this ‘ideal’ begins to be applied to you and me? To protestors? To elected representatives who oppose Trump?

I have not used the word fascism before. It seemed way over the top to describe President Trump’s aims, but consider this definition: “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization; (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.”

Now, after this attack on a free press and actually, on the fabric of reality itself, it seems apt.

The good news is he has no shock troops — no brown shits, no black shirts, no bolsheviks. He has apparatchiks, but no extra-legal gang to run the streets and terrorize his target populations. He can do terrible damage to others through corrupting the legal process, but the Bill Of Rights seems inviolable to jurists. That bulwark should hold.

The bad news is he has a Republican Congress eager to implement its ideas. They will kiss the ring of this emperor as long as he passes their legislation. Only a few Republican Senators have begun to stir in opposition to him. The Republican House seems populated only by cowards or true believers.

So with no help coming from Washington, the critical questions come down to those who voted for Trump:

When they are threatened by his policies, will you extend your natural kindness and consideration in your face-to-face dealings with others to those who do not look like you?

Or who practice another religion?

Or who cannot speak at all — the glorious lands of the West and of wild places and of wild animals who are our shared responsibility?

Or_will_you_turn_away?

To all those who voted for Trump and continue to support him, the time is coming very soon when you will have to make a choice. Not between the Democrats* and Trump, but between fascist practices and distortions … and reality itself.

*Who seem incapable as yet of articulating a cohesive set of ideas and policies as an alternative to Trumpian/Republican deception and theft. Right now, the Democrats are anti-Trump but little else.