hex_m_hell

Money is leveraged into power, and power is stored as money. Remember this. It is the autopoietic cycle of domination within capitalism.

If we want to break the fascist machine, we need to choke the engine of power by draining the fuel. In their scramble to consolidate power, the fascists have left a lot of victims. They have broken families, injured people, and murdered them, directly and through stochastic terrorism. Their terror has been helped along the way by those who are enthusiastic about the cause of injustice, and by those who have more greed than morals.

While I don't believe that punitive “justice” works to prevent most humans from doing bad things, since humans aren't really rational actors, there absolutely is a group for which the fear of retribution does work. Companies do make cold financial calculations when they decide to carry out evil or not. The ultra-rich tend to be rich because they use those same calculations.

This is why a key part of de-Nazification in Germany (which, as we can see, should have been far more aggressive) involved fines. Companies and rich people make decisions based on risk calculations. Certain people looked at Trumpism, and they saw an opportunity to make money, others bent the knee because they thought that the risk of not doing so was greater than the reward of resisting. If we don't want this to happen again in our life times, we have to make the consequences of collaboration with fascists so dire that no one ever considers doing it again.

I'm not going to pretend it wouldn't be gratifying to see Trump, Musk, and the whole group up against the wall or hanging upside-down. Sure, it might actually put the fear back in the fascists. But, from a strategic perspective, there's something far better. When you kill a fascist, you remove one fascist. In the long run, they are replaceable. You haven't taught them to stop. You've taught them to be more careful. If you actually want to destroy fascism, as an ideology, you have to interrupt Its cycle of reproduction. You have to interrupt that autopoietic cycle of money to power and power to money. You do that by taking the fucking money.

Fascists, like Trump, Musk, and Thiel are relying on the American capitalist ratchet. That is, it only turns one way. Once you turn power into money, the money is safe. It's the way Neoliberalism works too. Once you privative something, the 5th amendment keeps it from being returned to the people. When fascists loot the coffers, they protect their loot with that clause of the 5th amendment:

nor shall any person […] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

But this looting, from Trump and others, has been carried out largely by hurting people. Those people should be compensated. Congress has the power to create a reparations fund for victims, and to use it's power to fill that fund by seizing the assets of the perpetrators. Not only does this remove power from fascists and change the calculus for future collaborators, it directly shits power (in the form of money) to those most directly harmed by Trumpism.

Many of the Trump deportations were illegal under international laws and treaties that are also codified in US law. Deportation in spite of a withholding of removal order is illegal. Everyone involved in that crime can be held financially accountable (meaning that shit isn't protected by the 5th, motherfuckers). This includes everyone from the President, with all his billions in crypto bribes, down to every penny paid to CBP and ICE agents who hunted people down. Every massive signing bonus taken by every ICE agent belongs in the pockets of the families of the survivors of their victims.

A lot of ICE agents are Nazis. I don't mean this as a derogatory term; I mean it as a technical description. Patriot Front is a Nazi organization that can be traced back to Vanguard America through various re-brandings. Why did they re-brand? Because the Nazi who murdered Heather Heyer was a member of Vanguard America. Patriot Front had this tactic that might be familiar. See, they'd load into a moving van so they could get somewhere without being noticed, and load out for a sunrise march. Oh, that's an ICE tactic? Yeah, after the big ICE recruitment push Patriot Front stopped doing that and ICE started. Weird coincidence, isn't it?

ICE recruiting Nazis isn't just about ethnic cleansing. It was about power. It was about transferring public money into the pockets of small-time fascists. Those fascists can then turn that money back into power. There it is, the autopoietic cycle again. Fascists helping fascists, the circle of life.

Congress has the power to break that cycle. There needs to be an immediate investigation into deportation, freezing as many as possible, getting as many people back as possible, and compensating the families of those who have been tortured and killed during these illegal deportations. American citizens have been deported. People with withholding of removal orders have been deported. People have been murdered by ICE agents. This all needs to be investigated. ICE, as an agency, needs to be abolished and every single person employed by ICE should be forced to repay their last two years of compensation.

But this machine was also supported by tech. Just like IBM was forced to pay for their collaboration with the Nazis, so should the tech companies that materially supported ethnic cleansing in the US under both Trump administrations. But the IBM fines obviously failed. They failed because they were too small. A company can simply calculate the potential losses versus gains and, like IBM, decide that the risk is worth the reward. They lost that gamble, but it didn't ultimately hurt them. No, we must make a real example today. We must make sure no company ever makes that calculation again. We must liquidate all companies that were complicit in America's ethnic cleansing. Size the stock, nationalize them, strip them and sell them for parts. Make the investors scream until they vote responsibly. (And when it comes time, we do the same for those complicit in the genocide in Gaza, to pay the survivors and the displaced.) I'm talking about Palantir. No fines, simply the corporate death penalty. Expose all internal documents, open source any software worth saving, sell off all the hardware, and fine their infrastructure vendors every penny they've made by working with such a company.

And let's go back to that stochastic terror. I was shot by a fascist who was radicalized by far right media. I'm not alone. I've met dozens of people, and know of dozens more, shot, stabbed, and run over by unstable people who consumed fascist media. Sure, Tucker Carlson should flee to Russia while all the assets he can't physically carry are seized and sold to pay survivors of right wing terror. But, like so many other terrorists, my shooter was radicalized on Facebook. Facebook has been complicit in genocide in multiple countries. It's not enough to fine them. Meta must be liquidated. All company stock must be seized, the company dismembered, and all assets sold to pay the victims (not only American victims, but international victims).

Fascist tech is a reservoir of power, both in terms of capital and simply as it is. Twitter is a tool of Nazi radicalization and a place for Nazis to organize. Seize it and liquidate it. DOGE was a criminal enterprise organized and run by Musk. Cuts to USAID alone are calculated to have killed almost a million people already, with millions more to die over the few years. Elon Musk must be forced to pay, out of pocket, to fix everything he broke. No amount of money can bring back the dead, so every single penny that can be squeezed out of him should go to those he's killed and to preventing more deaths. Liquidate Twitter, liquidate Tesla, seize SpaceX, nationalize it, and give the whole thing directly to Ukraine. Size every crypto asset he has and sell it for pennies.

The cryptocurrency industry has been a big supporter of the fascist cause for a long time. The fun thing about blockchain is that it's not really as anonymous as it seems. You can trace transactions from wallet to wallet. If you seize someone's computer and can get access to their files, you know their wallet iD and therefore every wallet they've paid and been paid by. When fascists use cryptocurrency to launder money, you know who has been involved.

Any asset directly owned by Musk can be seized, if he can be captured. But if you can capture enough people linked to him, you will eventually get that wallet ID anyway. From there, you trace the money. Any wallet with a transaction that has come from a wallet associated Musk, Trump, or any of the fascist looters can be identified. Wallet IDs can be advertised with associated funds amounts, and anyone with the wallets can either pay back the funds or have the wallets deemed illegal. Anyone caught with an illegal wallet can be fined the value of the ill-gotten property, and their assets can also be liquidated to pay for their complicity.

Congress doesn't need a super majority to begin this process. They can begin setting up the commission to investigate, to calculate the harm, to codify the actions that need to be taken, and to figure out the strategy. They will need a super majority to remove every supreme court justice who ruled in favor of Trump in Trump v. United States.

But that may well be possible, and becomes more possible if the investigation focuses on the involvement of remaining right wing congress people have been complicit in Trump's corruption. Investigate each of them personally, and expose their financial crimes. Expose how many were invested in Geo Group when they voted to give money to ICE. Find out how many of them have made money off of Trump's crypto scams. Make it public record, so that it's available to their challengers in two years. Identify those who could be removed earlier to push closer to that 2/3s majority. (I bet you can find 11 House Republicans who could be impeached, for which failure to do so would put the other 33 in a challenging place next cycle.)

But you can start the whole thing with individual ICE agents, sizing all their assets to pay for their crimes. Bring Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez before congress and hold them accountable for the murder of Alex Pretti. Take their money, all of it, sell everything they have, and give it to Pretti's family. And then, do it again for Renee Goode. Then Salgado Araujo. Then Joan Sebastian Guerrero. And keep going. Investigate the illegal deportations, and hold the officers personally, individually, liable for their crimes. Fire them all. Liquidate their assets, give the money to the victims. Find the people who enforced the “Zero Tolerance” policy in 2017, and hold them accountable. Individually. Personally.

Over the next several years, starting as soon as possible, we must systematically take capital from powerful fascists and give that money to the marginalized people they hurt. Then we should go harder. Pardon everyone who fought Nazis in the streets. Send a clear message: if you are doing the right thing, even if it is against the law, you will be safe in the end. Anti-fascists are the immune system of a society. That immune system needs to be strong. Often that work can be done by simply exposing fascists. But occasionally, fascists need to be hit with baseball bats or bike locks. Sometimes fascists need to be afraid for their lives. Because when they aren't, millions of people die. Pardon everyone who fought fascists in the streets so they can do it again, if needed. Pardon them, and pay them for the time they spent in prison. Pay them back for their legal fees. Pay back the communities that defended them.

This is not about revenge. These are simply the steps you take to make the fascists think twice, to sear this into their memory, so no one tries this again as long as any of them are alive to tell the story. And they should be kept alive. You want the fascist to be a reservoir of terror. You want them to spread fear within their networks. You want them to warn everyone they know to not whisper a word of their beliefs to anyone, for fear of further retribution.

You want that fear in their networks, because that fear prevents them from restarting the autopoietic cycle. You want a living, speaking, warning their network to never invest in fascist power again.