Zimmer's article in The Guardian is spot on, as far as it goes. Everyone should read it - twice.

While Zimmer feels the regressives and/or fascists want to end up in the 1950's, I don't see them putting any such limit on themselves. They will go as far as they can go before they are stopped. If they can erase all civil rights legislation, they will. If they can curtail voting rights to a point prior to universal suffrage, they won't hesitate. They are prepared to nullify any Supreme Court decision and repeal or modify any Constitutional Amendment. "Any" means any.

How am I so certain? They don't necessarily broadcast these views. However, if you read the online conversations between them and listen to their conversations, you will be forced to admit that they see no limits. I try to be the mouse in the corner, so to speak. I lurk on their websites, stand close-by to their verbal conversations, let them send their vitriolic and hate-filled chain emails to me, etc. I listen (to the point of nausea) to their radio broadcasts. I'm sure of what I'm seeing and hearing.

None of this started yesterday, or even with Trump. Perhaps it's built-in. Nonetheless, one can notice certain way-points getting crossed. As an example, I well remember James Watt, Interior Secretary under Reagan saying (while serving for Reagan), "There are liberals and there are Americans." Watt crossed a bridge with that statement. He should have been fired the next day, but instead he was lauded. How minor that statement seems today, but at the time it was groundbreaking to say such a thing publicly.

They are prepared to resort to violence in many cases. Much of their writing and many of their radio broadcasts have now resorted to laying out excuses for that violence. This has been somewhat subdued for decades, but now is right up front. Anyone with an AM radio can hear it every day. Yes, it's propaganda, but the most scientific and effective propaganda possible.

What will stop this? I doubt mass protest will do it at this point, especially if those protests are sanctioned by the Democrats. Rather than the shock that the anti-Vietnam war protests caused, similar ones today would simply provide the right with a chance for public ridicule and for false-flag events. Any protests worth their name would quickly be lambasted by main-stream media, including most of (so-called) left-wing media. Serious protest would also be met by the heavy use of force to curtail it.

Guns won't save us. The right has them all, including those of the police and the military. The Right has been itching to use their guns since the Minutemen of the early 1960's. Police in the US are shot-through with the most radical of right wingers. While perhaps not as well entrenched, the military situation is similar. Some US military branches/groups are worse than others. Personally, I trust none of them.

I now feel that the only thing capable of stopping the ultra right-wing fascists is their own success. That is, at some point enough of the fascist right will realize that they've thrown the baby out with the bath water to put an end to it. Short of a miracle, I'm not seeing enough of a left-wing presence in this country to stop anything the fascists choose to do.

I hope I'm wrong about all of this, but that's what I'm seeing.

I'd comment on the Seattle Times article, but they won't let me in to see it. Perhaps there's another source somewhere?

The Democrats will save us, of course, except that the economy will sink them as an issue, and the Supreme Court doesn't look as if it will save them from the bad outcome typical of politicians (let's start with Herbert Hoover) who try to run on a bad economy.

Regression is on the agenda.

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The agenda is a religious one. It has always been about religion, in the isolated US colony.

The American Taliban will be in control for the foreseeable future. An atheist could never win an election to high office in the United States.

An excerpt from an opinion column at LiveMint that I thought laid out neatly the ideology that has captured the US:

The movement against Roe vs Wade began soon after the judgement itself. Conservative churches were appalled that abortion was legal, and they began their campaign in earnest by trying to elect politicians who claimed to take ‘pro-life’ positions, and by vetting the ideological records of potential nominees to courts and supporting only those who passed the abortion litmus test.

In some states, right-leaning legislatures shortened the term of pregnancy by when a woman could choose to abort, made exceptions even harder, and placed improbable barriers that made it expensive for any woman who sought to terminate her pregnancy. The result was that in vast parts of the US, for miles on end, there was no clinic that could legally perform an abortion.

By placing insurmountable hurdles, the American right was stripping women of their right, their agency, and their dignity, while elevating the life of an unborn child and turning the woman into a body meant for child birth, nothing more.

The effort was crass, but when the driving force is faith, little room is left for doubt.

Today, a majority of Americans agree that women should have the right to decide, and fewer Americans than at any time insist that abortion is always wrong.

Activists who support the right to abortion relied on two foundations. One was the verdict of 1973, which they thought had settled the issue once and for all; and that was based on the second plank, the idea of ‘stare decesis’, or legal precedent, which must not be overturned.

If Roe vs Wade is reversed, the verdict would not be conservative, but radical, as it would overturn precedent. Some pro-choice advocates have been wary of relying solely on a Supreme Court majority to defend a hard-earned right. All it would take, they had argued, was a right-leaning majority in the apex court, and it could spell the end of Roe, and that is exactly what may happen if the court’s leaked opinion holds.

Such a verdict will not ban abortions in the US. It will send the matter to the states. Under America’s federal system, states can have their own laws on many matters. Thus, the fight to defend women’s right to choose what they can do with their bodies will now shift to American states.

Reports suggest that Chief Justice John Roberts is desperately seeking a compromise that may retain Roe in some form. Historically, the Supreme Court has made awful judgements, such as in the Dred Scott case, which determined that descendants of slaves were not citizens in the full meaning of the term and could not be emancipated, a decision that so angered abolitionists that it paved the way for the American Civil War.

Culture warriors don’t like compromise, but don’t mind dividing people, and that’s where we are.

being more widely recognized. Thanks for posting this.