It's A Robbery: Fascism as a Means for Plundering

Authoritarianism isn't just an ideology or political project. It's also an avenue for stealing your money

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Fascism is theft.

This gets lost. The violence is louder. Watching people being brutalized and disappeared tends to dominate your attention, but the purpose is also to steal your wallet.

The evolution from “free market” capitalism (even though it’s never actually free and always rigged) to its next form - competitive authoritarianism and then blatant authoritarianism - lies in the dropping of facade. Our entire lives have been inundated by siren calls of consumerism. Flashy advertisements selling us heaps of cheap plastic and elixirs promising connection and power. Sponsorships slapped on every free surface and the rise of omnipresent, predatory gambling. Eventually, there’s no need anymore to hide it behind a smiling veneer. It’s just a loaded gun and the demand for whatever is in our pockets.

Right now we are getting the concentrated version of this monstrosity. The Trump Administration is gleefully exercising unconstitutional power, rounding people up, intimidating and blackmailing institutions until they twist and warp to their pleasure. But, as this happens, the treasury and resources of the United States of America are being hoarded and plundered. What scraps remain after a near-half century of Neoliberalism are being gobbled up.

It happens like this. As the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” seeps its way through Congress, there are simultaneous robberies. The BBB is focused on furthering the legislative looting. Tens of millions will lose their insurance or assistance. Benefits will be drained until they go dry. The Tech Oligarchs will get their reward for backing the dictator and ICE and the military, shakedown wings of the capitalist class, will swell like overfed ticks. The circle gets smaller, the violence gets worse, and, all the while, the smaller grifts continue.

Efforts like the BBB and other administrative swindles represent the large-scale, society-shifting crimes, but gangsters aren’t too proud to steal the lint from your pockets as they make their getaway from knocking over a bank. Products like Donald Trump’s new “Fight Fight Fight” fragrances ($199 for the cologne and $249 for the perfume) join the long list of “collectible” products this charlatan has used to launder money and take the rapidly diminishing funds from his mark supporters. Sneakers. NFTs. Crypto. He slaps his name and visage as President of the United States on as many useless and embarrassing baubles as he did as host of The Apprentice. Why?

Because it adds up and fascists want everything.

The twin swindles of administrative theft and consumer fleecing form a pincer. Trump is as likely to play his supporters for a few hundred backs at a time as he is to sell off natural resources and hoard tax dollars because he and those backing him are agents of the final and ultimate movement of unchecked and unregulated capitalism. As always, capitalism is an invisible force always surging toward monopolization, and the game isn’t over until the world is flash-fried to a crisp or a single, monolithic figure holds everything. Whether it is $299 for a pair of gaudy sneakers or trillions redistributed, it does not matter.

In fact, the administrative con works the same. Fascists sell spectacle and brutality as a product, allowing supporters the illusion of power and dominion while picking their bones and damning them to worse futures. While it might seem repulsive to us, the performative nature of zip-tying children and forcing immigrants into concentration camps represents, for the diehard acolyte, a pleasing experience. They get to watch the suffering, watching the violence, and feel a thrill. As this happens, they are sold an alternate reality where they are “winning,” even as they are being measured for the next con.

It is no coincidence that escalatingly disgusting programs like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” located near the Everglades and promising immigrants who escape its confines will be devoured by alligators and pythons, hinge on the performative cruelty. The state’s GOP party is even selling merchandise ($30 for a shirt, a hat for $27, and a set of two coozies for $15) commemorating this grotesquerie, allowing supporters to express to anyone around them that they are the type of person who gets their kicks thinking about people of color being brutally mauled or murdered.

On Fox News, it’s all being played up as so hilarious. In this segment, which features two, count them two, washed-up, retired professional wrestlers, the panel tells insanely bad jokes about the fantasy of immigrants being fed to wildlife. At one point, Tyrus, a complete buffoon who used to wrestle as “The Funkosaurus,” wonders if eating those people, many of whom have been charged with no crime whatsoever, will teach the gators “bad habits.”

Trump, who was always the target audience for this barbarity, chuckled as he imagined an escaped immigrant faced with certain death, told a reporter, “We’re gonna have to teach ‘em how to run away from an alligator, okay?…Don’t run in a straight line.”

This reality is the product and the veneer. Fox News and MAGA have worked in tandem, tailoring an alternate reality where viewers and supporters can amuse themselves with fantasies of the Deep State being tamed, their enemies being devoured and destroyed, all while actual conditions worsen and their life-savings are drained. This was the genius of Fox and the modern Republican Party - recognizing a propaganda fever-dream could last a lifetime. All people wanted as they lost faith in politics and liberal democracy was a lie they could warm themselves by. It didn’t matter how transparent and foolish it was, they just wanted something. So, they get Alligator Alcatraz, a spectacle not unlike being treated to bloodletting in a colosseum while the Roman Empire fell, which will cost a projected $450 million dollars a year to operate. Nevermind the “problem” it’s solving is hallucinatory. Nevermind that what it actually serves as is a way to hand more and more money to the people who profit off human detention and torture. The TV glows and the idiots keep talking.

For all of the people who scream “it’s a distraction,” they’re half-right. Yes, it is all meant to divert your attention, but it’s all meant to do that. All of this matters, all of it is connected, and all of it functions to keep your head and eyes constantly moving and out-of-focus, but you cannot understand this, and ultimately defeat it, without realizing that it is all interconnected. Humanity, as a whole, has been altered and changed by Neoliberal capitalism, leaving us as subjects to a financialization that has erased our dignity and inherent rights. What remains is a dehumanization that not only incentivizes our dismemberment and unnatural suffering, but also greases the skids for our resources to be completely pilfered and handed over to those “deserving” life and all its wonders.

As the process continues and accelerates, some will have weddings in Venice that cost upwards of $50 million dollars and all the accompanying delights. The rest of us will be forced to endure a worsening standard of living at best and the jaws of a predator at worst. And, to our horror, millions of our fellow citizens will be watching and cheering for blood.

Let us be clear. This is an abomination and completely unacceptable. We are not doomed to live this way. We can recognize this crime for what it is and demand something different. Luckily, this monstrous present is so obviously wrong and immoral, but also shabby and sweaty and pathetic. When fascism arrived in its full, unadulterated form, it was always going to be this way. Shallow. Sad. Laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.

The realization that the answer to the question “is it authoritarianism or is it a grift?” was always a simple and unhesitant yes is the key. The ideology and the performance and the theft was and is the point. And they will not stop until they have everything and we have nothing.