As is laid out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, this has been a recurrent battle through the history of America.

It's all one thing, and the oligarchs and fascists aren't done yet. They want complete control of America.

When Donald Trump first ran for president, it was a stunt to squeeze more money out of NBC and to polish his brand.

But when he was unexpectedly elected, he took cues from the corrupt oligarchs he admired around the world and began a serious project to remake and remold America in their image.

The first country he visited as president, in fact, was the oligarchy of Saudi Arabia, which he effusively praised.

When he proclaimed after his election that there were 3,000,000 "illegal votes" for Hillary Clinton, he was setting up today's oligarchic takeover attempt by denigrating the American electoral system. He knew from the example of oligarchs elsewhere in the world that if he could convince enough Americans that our election system was "rigged," he could ignore elections in the future.

When he began the aggressive destruction of multiple government agencies, from Education and Social Security to the IRS and the CDC, it was to further the transformation of America into an oligarchy.

Back in 2016, elected Republicans, seeing how much money Trump could raise from America's oligarchs and how falling into line behind him would help them get reelected, jumped on board.

With the GOP signed off on his oligarchic agenda, they pushed through over $2 trillion in tax cuts for America's oligarchs. It was just the beginning.

The Federalist Society, founded and funded in part by American oligarchs, supplied indoctrinated and compliant ideologues to billionaire Trump, multimillionaire Mitch McConnell and wealthy Republicans in the Senate, who moved these young legal-shock-troops into lifetime positions in federal courts all over America.

Oligarchies tend to be unsustainable because the majority of people don't want rule by the rich, so oligarchies require either a police state from the top down (like Saudi Arabia) or a pseudo-populist fascism from the bottom up (like 1930s Germany).

Trump tried both. He federalized local police in Portland and Minneapolis, had American troops turn their weapons, helicopters and clubs against peaceful protesters across the street from the White House, all the while cranking populist fascist-leaning groups all across the country into fits of rage.

Thus, the "Trump train" that ran the Biden/Harris campaign bus off the road in Texas last year, apparently thinking Kamala Harris might be on board, was part of it. It should have been a warning to America, but when they suffered no consequence, his neofascist movement was empowered and encouraged. The oligarchs were pleased, and more money flowed to Trump and Republican politicians.

It's all one thing.

When he cheered on his supporters attacking people peacefully protesting police violence, his oligarchic fascist movement grew. Fox News, owned by billionaire oligarch Rupert Murdoch, turned "Black Lives Matter" and the anti-fascist movement, antifa, into curse phrases.

After the 2020 election, oligarch-owned media, from social media to radio and television networks to the largest conservative websites, began amplifying and parroting his lies that voter fraud was responsible for the Biden/Harris win.

It was a straight line from those lies to the January 6th violence at the US Capitol.

It's all one thing.

When Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and congresspeople like Kevin McCarthy spoke of "voter fraud," it was to further the oligarchic takeover of America.

When over half the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to reject Joe Biden's election, it was to further the oligarchic takeover of America.

The unwillingness of elected Republicans, even today, to say that the election was free and fair and Joe Biden was honestly elected is all in service of an oligarchic takeover of America.

The violence Trump and rightwing media brought to the capital building on January 6 was purely to keep a billionaire oligarch, Donald Trump, in charge of our government, even though the majority of American voters had rejected him.

It's all one thing.

The attempt to overthrow the American government on January 6, the further violence they're planning going forward, the challenges to Biden's election by people like Cruz, Hawley and McCarthy are all one thing.

It wasn't just crazed Trump followers who murdered a capital police officer and tried to kidnap and kill vice president Pence and Democratic leadership; it was also the Republican members of the House and Senate who continue to maintain the big lie of voter fraud.

They are just as responsible for those deaths as are Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the people like Ginni Thomas who organized and funded the mob in the first place.

It's all one thing.

As I lay out in my new book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, this has been a recurrent battle through the history of America.

We rebelled against British oligarchs in 1776 and fought a difficult war to establish a democratic republic.

When the South came under oligarchic control in the 1840s, we ended up fighting them in a bloody Civil War in the 1860s. We defeated those oligarchs, and broke up and sold off their plantations across the South. Robert E. Lee‘s plantation was seized and is now known as the Arlington National Cemetery.

In the 1920s oligarchs crashed the American and worldwide economies, and FDR did battle with them and their fascist colleagues around the world with such a vigor that they hatched a plot to recruit Marine General Smedley Butler and 100,000 men to kidnap and replace him. Butler blew the whistle, and FDR said, "I welcome their hatred."

And now, again, America is facing the specter of a third attempted oligarchic coup, using a fascistic grassroots-up strategy that's been tried and tested in countries from Germany to Chile to Turkey.

From Trump's madman demand that swing states "find" enough votes to keep him president, to prominent Republican politicians continuing to promote the Big Lie of voter fraud so they can further tighten the election screws in their own states, to billionaires and giant corporations cashing in on tax cuts and deregulation, it's all one thing.

And they're not done yet.

Originally posted on Medium.com

-Thom