On the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, I authored a column documenting and confirming how the Republican Party in the continuing Age of Donald Trump has become the anti-democracy party. And frighteningly enough, the resemblance of today’s Republican Party of Il Duce Trump with that of the Fascist Party of Benito Mussolini, which took control of Italy in 1922, is absolutely uncanny.
The Trumpist thugs who marched on Washington on January 6, 2021 were the violent enforcement arm of the Trumpist conspiracy to commit sedition against the United States and prevent the lawful transfer of power to the then president-elect Joe Biden. The conspiracy planned to achieve its goal through the January 6 violence, which had as its aim the prevention of the lawful counting of the electoral votes and the intimidation of the then Vice President Mike Pence, who had the Constitutional duty to perform the count.
The messages of today’s Republican Party and the Italian Fascists of the 1920s are remarkably similar. Like the Italian Fascists of the 1920s, today’s Republicans are saying to the American electorate that we will continue to deprive you of democracy, but we will make sure that your property will be protected and that your trains will run on time. And just as the Italian Fascists practiced a racist ideology against Slavs, today’s Trumpist-controlled Republican Party is a bulwark of racism against African-Americans.
Yet the Republican National Committee took this message to an even more malignant level with its passage of its Salt Lake City winter meeting resolution regarding the House of Representatives investigation of the January 6 insurrection. This measure sought to protect individuals engaged in the seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election as participants in “legitimate political discourse.“ Like the Italian Fascists of 1922 who disregarded the rule of law, today’s GOP will obstruct the rule of law in attempting to prevent any lawful investigation of the sedition conspiracy.