The Trump regime's fascist agenda becomes ever more apparent by the day.
On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that had this title:
Of the text worth highlighting, this is, perhaps, key:
Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology. This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”
Before considering this, note the following statement, also in the Order:
It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.
I asked Chat GPT two questions. One was 'Is race a human construct?' This was the reply:
Yes, race is widely considered a human construct—a social, not biological, concept.
We'll break it into three key layers: scientific, historical, and social/political implications.
🧬 1. Scientific View: No Biological Basis for Race
• Genetics says we're one race: human.
The Human Genome Project (completed in 2003) confirmed that humans are 99.9% genetically identical. The remaining 0.1% explains individual variation—not racial categories.
• No clear genetic boundaries between “races”.
What people often label as racial traits—like skin color, nose shape, eye color—are just adaptations to environment (e.g., melanin for sun protection). These traits are polygenic (influenced by multiple genes) and don't occur in distinct racial clusters.
• More variation within groups than between groups.
Two people from sub-Saharan Africa might be more genetically different from each other than one is from someone in Europe. That's because Africa, as humanity's origin, holds the greatest genetic diversity.
🕰️ 2. Historical Construction of Race
• Ancient societies didn't divide people by race.
In Ancient Greece or Rome, people were often categorized by language, culture, class, or tribe—not by skin color. For example, Roman citizens could be African, Middle Eastern, or European.
• Modern racial categories formed during colonization.
European powers (15th–19th centuries) began classifying people by physical appearance to justify conquest, slavery, and exploitation:
•Africans were labeled as inferior to rationalize slavery.
•Indigenous peoples were called “savages” to excuse land theft.
•Scientific racism (think skull measurements, eugenics) emerged in the 18th–20th centuries to create a pseudoscientific hierarchy of races.
• “Whiteness” evolved as a category of power.
In the U.S., the definition of who was “white” changed over time. For example:
•Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants weren't originally seen as white.
•They “became white” as they gained access to rights and privileges.
🏛️ 3. Social and Political Implications
• Race may be a social construct, but it has real effects.
•It affects access to housing, education, healthcare, jobs, and justice.
•Systems like redlining, mass incarceration, and immigration policies are built on racial hierarchies.
• Racism is the enforcement of this construct.
•It uses race to create and justify systems of advantage and disadvantage.
• Even if race isn't biologically real, racism is socially and institutionally real.
• Intersectionality adds depth.
Think of race intersecting with gender, class, sexuality, religion. For example, Black women experience racism differently than Black men or white women—a concept pioneered by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw.
🔄 Summary
• Race is not a biological reality but a powerful social invention.
•It was created, refined, and enforced to maintain systems of control.
•The goal today isn't to be “colorblind,” but to understand and dismantle the unjust systems built on this construct.
I share this view.
In my opinion, what Trump is making is a declaration of white, racist, colonial supremacy. It explicitly ignores the history of racial abuse in the USA. It deliberately stokes division in US society today. It is an explicit attack on the rights of the majority of people in the USA by an, albeit powerful, minority. Nothing can excuse that.
I then asked ChatGPT to summarise the substance of the Order made, which is primarily, but not entirely, directed at the Smithsonian. It suggested this, which will do:
This directive outlines the Vice President's and key officials' responsibilities in implementing federal policies concerning the Smithsonian Institution and American historical representation.
The Vice President, in coordination with senior advisors, is tasked with removing perceived ideological bias from Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo and recommending further necessary actions. Together with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), he must ensure congressional appropriations exclude funding for exhibits that divide Americans by race or conflict with federal values, while emphasizing the celebration of women without recognizing men as women in the American Women's History Museum.
The Vice President is also directed to collaborate with congressional leaders to appoint like-minded individuals to the Smithsonian Board.
I would, however, remind those reading this of the claim in the second paragraph noted above, which suggests that the USA has made 'consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and an unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.' It is hard to imagine anything further from the truth than this claim, and yet this is the 'truth' which it is now required that the Smithsonian promote.
1984 has arrived. In Orwell's book, the Ministry of Truth was the government department responsible for propaganda, historical revisionism, and the dissemination of lies. Despite its name, it did, of course, deal in falsehoods with its primary function being to rewrite historical records, newspapers, and documents to fit the ever-changing party narrative. This is precisely what is now required of the Smithsonian. The aim was and is simple: it was to control not only people's actions but also their memories and understanding of reality.
The Trump regime is now full-on fascist.
Trump is still Starmer's 'reliable friend'.
Why?
And what next?
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The Nerd Reich is next.
Gaza is a blueprint.
https://www.thenerdreich.com/the-network-state-coup-is-happening-right-now/
Imagine Pol Pot come to America.
Labor is much under the same kind of monied influence. Conservatives their most ardent servants.
“And what next?” Language
By far the most interesting part of 1984 are the annexes and the discussion of language & its contraction. As Orwell observed under “Newspeak” the following would be impossible:
“We hold these truhts to be self evident…..etc”.
We can see this happening now in the USA where vocabulary seems to be contracting e.g. “cool” seems to be an everything word.
As for Starmer, publicly he still thinks the sun shines out of Mango’s bum. Wonder what he thinks privately? He is not a fool.
“remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”
All true of course, just so long as you happen to be white, male and wealthy!
Correct
“As for Starmer, publicly he still thinks the sun shines out of Mango’s bum. Wonder what he thinks privately? He is not a fool.”
Anyone who made Reeves the Chancellor isn’t very intelligent. I hate that woman.
Something doing the rounds a few weeks ago on my Facebook patch was a picture of Orwell with the caption ” I wrote 1984 as a warning, not a xxxxing instruction manual.”
Milan Kundera wrote ‘Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’.
He lived under soviet communism and I’m sure this was a reflection on that.
Abby Innes’ productive search for what attributes American Neo-liberalism and soviet communism shared is proven to be on the button again.
I would argue that the history we think we know has always been manipulated in one way or another to achieve the agenda of the manipulator. Isn’t it the way the saying goes… History is written by the victors?
Re-writing history is not new. It is even easier with the internet, Social Media platforms, and with AI. History has become what people are willing to believe, not what is actually true.
They have already banned that book in the US George Orwells 1984 along with many other books that might educate and encourage people to question authority…. What you wrote here Richard springs to my mind of what Adolf Hitler tried to do to create a Master Race….hence why he slaughtered many jews, mentally ill, disabled, Romany Gypsy’s and many others he thought were inferior!!! His love to produce a whole nation of Aryan people who would obey the Dictator… Many died but when it was apparent Germany was losing some even in his own military thought the Fuhrer was mad…they attempted to assassinate him….Of course at the very end…Hitler took the cowards way out committing suicide rather than being captured and tried for his War Crimes … I can only hope that the people of the US and the politicians on both sides come to their senses and find some backbone to stand up to him and remove Trump and all those within his administration!!
“I can only hope that the people of the US and the politicians on both sides come to their senses and find some backbone to stand up to him and remove Trump and all those within his administration” wrote Beverley.
It’s not just the people of the USA who have to come to their senses ; it’s sentient people everywhere. I wrote in a comment the other day that the Nazis took only 9 months in power to overturn all the preceding legislation and structures and turn Germany into an aggressive fascist state where dissent became a crime. If the trend towards fascism is not now fought and reversed, it will be the ordinary people everywhere who will become the “untermenschen”.
And some of us won’t be at liberty for a lot longer.
Indeed, Richard, indeed. This ridiculously titled “Order” does lay bare the racist poison that lurks in the heart of the Trump/Project 2025 regime. The self-regarding pomposity of its ahistorical assertons about history may be as laughable as they are sinister but the barefaced assertion about the nature of “race” – ranting about it as “a biological reality” – finally locates Trump and Vance deep among the stews of late 19th century intellectual rot that fathered the biggest horrors of the twentieth century.
Yet that tragedy was warned about at the time – and in the most striking of venues. In 1872, speaking at the new University of Strassburg, the great German philologist, Prof. Max Muller, warned against misusing the new disciplines of philology and anthropology, so as to speak of ‘race’ in a manner intellectually void and morally and politically dangerous. “I must repeat, what I have said many times before, it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolicocelaphic grammar.” What the social Darwinists and the blundering abusers of philology and anthropology cross-polinated and bred, in a half century before the First World War, has now come writhing out of the mire all over again. But the swamp from which it is emerging is not the much maligned pre-Trump Washington DC, but the vacuous prejudices of a disappointed narcissist and his spiteful courtier aparatchiks. It is entirely fitting that the issue of this ghastly and revelatory order emerges on the day that his mini-me sidekick, quoted President Nixon; “Our enemies are the professors.”
Max Muller would have recognised that!
Thanks, Nigel
Richard
David Smith, the Guardian’s US editor says much the same as this blog post in his column in the paper on 31st March. He characterises the Trumpian political destruction of US political and civil life as Orwellian.