Trump, Hegseth, and the Language of Fascism

In his study of the language of the Third Reich, Kemplerer emphasizes the idea that fighting "like a fanatic" was a title that a National Socialist Party militant or a Wehrmacht soldier could hold with honor, a sum of tension of the soul, of will, of unconditional struggle without the intention of surrendering to the enemy. That physical education was a preparation for war, because physical achievements were as or more important than intellectual achievements. And that without the dark Jew, the luminous Aryan would not have existed.

It's not very different from how a United States Secretary of Defense sounds when announcing that beards and long hair are over, that he already has a type of fatty soldiers and generals with bellies because they give a bad image and that this is "completely unacceptable", that the officer who doesn'tethos "aggressive" warrior, destined to "clean up" "the toxic ideological garbage of social justice that had infected the Department of Defense" and end "decades of decadence" promoted by "foolish and reckless politicians" who had turned the military into a forcewoke.

A speech to the military (and the world) delivered as an opening act for a president who tells the generals that "we should use some of these dangerous cities (those run by Democrats) as training grounds for the National Guard." This isn't an authoritarian drift, but the policy of a government that is becoming a regime.