I’ve not posted on this blog for some while because of illness, but I want to communicate my thoughts about the rise of fascism in the US.   Despite being evidently an individual activity, thinking is intrinsically communal: we gain our ideas by interacting with others and their language, written, spoken, broadcast, streamed or in any other mode.  It’s the communal aspect of thinking that I want to focus on today.  

A recent post (above) on the White House website exemplifies one of the basic themes of George Orwell’s 1984: the rewriting of history.  The site claims that the attack on the Capitol on January 6 2021 was marked by “minimal violence”: that the police officers trying to prevent the mob from greater violence weren’t brutally assaulted but instead “allowed” the “protesters” into the Capitol.  Video evidence, the site claims, shows “officers inexplicably removing barricades, opening Capitol doors, and even waving attendees inside the building—actions that facilitated entry—while simultaneously deploying violent force against others. These inconsistent and provocative tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos.”  The site makes no mention of the five police officers who were killed, or of the 140 who were injured so severely on that day that they were hospitalised.  Jon Stewart on The Daily Show gives a darkly satirical account of the disparity between reality and the site’s account: https://youtube.com/shorts/k7SoBI7wlY4?si=7cKpVl4xPX9fAifp

Trump and his acolytes have also rewritten the killing of Renée Good on January 7th 2026 by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Renée Good was in a lesbian partnership; she and her husband both spoke in a civil and friendly manner to the agent before the attack.   It is clear from the videos taken by the agent and others at the scene that the justifications for the killing given by Donald Trump and  Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, are baseless.  Noem alleged that the ICE agents had been attempting to dig themselves out of snow (there was no snow on the ground) and Trump declared that Renée Good actually ran over one of them .   The ICE agent was never endangered and had no justification for shooting Renée Good.  To protect the Trump administration’s version of events, Stephen Miller, Trump’s Chief of Staff, has put the FBI in charge of the case.  On Monday, Minnesota  Reps. Ilhan Omar, Angie Craig, and Kelly Morrison were forbidden to enter the ICE HQ in Minnesota to exercise oversight. 

The presence on city streets of heavily armed and masked officers charged with arresting alleged illegal immigrants reflects Trump’s visceral belief, enacted by Stephen Miller, that greatness entails the dominance of white heterosexual masculinity and the exclusion or even elimination of others.   Trump has confidence in his capacity to impose his world view on the US – and indeed other countries he intends to annex.  He claims that he is constrained only by  his “own morality”, and not by law, national or international.   ICE agents have similarly expressed their disregard for violating the law.  The agent who shot Renee Good called her a “fucking bitch” as she died and another agent in Minneapolis warned protestors they would face the same fate as the “lesbian bitch”.

Cruelty is part of the purpose as well as the method of fascism.  Between 1930 and 1936, Germany’s democracy was replaced by dictatorship: a system of language and ideas backed up by brutal physical oppression.  In Orwell’s 1984, the authorities maintain power by similar means.   Orwell based his novel largely, though not exclusively, on Stalinist Russia.  In 1945,  after making a joke about Stalin in a letter, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, a decorated Soviet officer, was sentenced to eight years in the Gulag.   He shovelled frozen concrete until his hands bled, but was paradoxically inspired to write because prison showed him the truth of the regime in its purest form. After his release, Solzhenitsyn lived under constant surveillance, writing secretly and memorising much of what he wanted to say.   When The Gulag Archipelago was first published in Paris in 1973, it showed that to refuse to say what you know is false is the first and most dangerous act of resistance.

Currently there is strong communal resistance in the US to the shooting of Renée Good and Trump’s narrative that she was a domestic terrorist.  More than a thousand demonstrations across the country were held last weekend. Despite the resistance, however, many people in Minnesota report “We are not OK.”   One woman wrote on Threads:

“My sister just called me on her drive home from teaching at a predominantly Somali school in Minneapolis. They had an emergency meeting today about protecting their families. About going virtual for the safety of their kids. Multiple other schools were on lockdown in the district. ICE was in the neighborhood, parents were too scared to come pick their kids up.

“After a pause, her sister added: ‘I can’t be alone in my car. I think I’m going to have a panic attack.’

“Both of us [were] in shock that this is the reality of the moment.  […] This is fear and intimidation right here at home. And what makes it even worse? There are people cheering this on. Celebrating it.  […]I will never forgive those who voted for this.”

Meanwhile, Trump is doubling down on his domestic as well as is international warmaking.  ICE is reportedly investing $100 million on what it calls “wartime recruitment” of 10,000 new agents, in addition to the 20,000 already employed. This calls for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.”  This is the same call as Hitler’s appeal to citizens of Germany nearly a century ago.  As Hannah Arendt found, many people who sign up to fascism are everyday citizens who join the movement to gain an illusionary strength and protection from the “strong leader” against the supposed danger from the “other”.   This is what Arendt called the banality of evil.

The ideology of white supremacy has persisted in the US since before the Civil War, and Trump has used his skills and rallies to reactivate it. It is difficult to hold on to one’s perceptions if they aren’t supported by others. Even if one becomes part of a community of sceptics, disillusion is not far from resignation.  In Stalin’s  Russia, people used to say of the two major newspapers — Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“News”) — that “In Pravda there is no news, and in Izvestia there is no truth.”  As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the purpose of constant lying during the Nazi era was less to persuade people of the rightness of Hitler’s pronouncements and policies than to foster widespread public disorientation. 

 At the moment, however, resistance has one unexpected ally: artificial intelligence.   As part of my research for writing this post, i asked ChatGPT:  “Who are the people pictured in a black and white photograph on the recent White House website justifying the January 6 attack on the Capitol?”    (This image is at the head of this post.) ChatGPT’s almost instant response was informative and written in a way that might be termed critically literate:

“On January 6, 2026, the White House published a highly controversial webpage (on the official whitehouse.gov domain) that sought to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack and justify or defend aspects of it. That page included a black-and-white montage image at the top depicting political figures (not the rioters themselves) as part of its narrative.

“It states that, according to descriptions from news reports, the black-and-white photograph or collage prominently features Nancy Pelosi, “a central figure in Congress and later in the bipartisan House Select Committee that investigated the attack”.  It further says that the image “The image “appears to include various Democratic lawmakers (and possibly some Republicans who served on the investigative committee) whom the White House narrative criticized. These were politicians involved in holding hearings and issuing reports on the attack and Trump’s role. […]  It does not primarily show the rioters themselves in this black-and-white montage — instead the photo montage depicts political leaders and committee members whose actions or investigations are challenged by the website’s narrative.”

Most interesting, perhaps, is the context given by ChatGPT:

“The webpage was hosted on an official government domain, which is why it drew significant public attention and outrage. 

“It reframes the January 6 attack as a peaceful protest and blames Democrats and Capitol Police for escalation, despite widespread documentation showing the event involved violent breaches, injuries, and deaths. 

“Critics view the imagery and messaging as an attempt to shift blame and rewrite history, rather than accurately reflect the widely reported facts of that day. “

Chat GPT concludes: “If you’d like, I can link you to screenshots or an archive of the image so you can see it for yourself.”  It also offered to show me how to use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to pull up that exact archived screenshot step-by-step.”  It signs off: “Just let me know!”

One can see why some people report thinking of ChatGPT as a friend – in this case, a critical friend.  The ideological dominance presented in 1984 depends on a restriction of language: the replacement of vocabulary by Newspeak, which was designed to make some concepts inexpressible.  Whether or not this is a linguistic possibility, Chat GPT currently depends on its opposite:  an enormous archive of language derived from documents of all kinds from scientific papers to works of literature.   The Large Language Models that power GPT make available to powerful computers trillions of words and ideas that arguably contain a massive model of civilised discourse.   

At present, Trump and his allies attempt to influence opinion by crude lies and propaganda that can be easily challenged by reference to more reliable sources of information such as ChatGPT.   However, given Trump’s contempt for ideas that don’t align with his, he would have no compunction in taking over AI.   I don’t know how this would be achieved, and what obstacles (not least from the billionaire investors in AI) he would face, but, if it transpired, the world of 1984 would have dawned in reality – if such a concept still existed.  

14 January 2025