Jack Posobiec speaks at the Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Florida on July 16, 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, available via Wikimedia Commons.

Jim Nelson is a retired Montana Supreme Court justice.

It has been said that: “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving the cross.”

Early signs are visible in the U.S. right now. For example, at the Conservative Political Action Convention’s recent annual meeting, right-wing conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec proclaimed during a panel discussion, “I just wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.”

Posobiec then held up a Christian cross on his necklace, adding, “That’s right, because all glory, all glory is not to government, all glory is to God.”

Jim Nelson is a retired Montana Supreme Court justice.

I am an outspoken critic of what former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney correctly describes as America’s “sleepwalk” into fascism.

Indeed, Donald Trump has defiantly laid out his plans to become our country’s first dictator. He copied his blueprints from the authoritarian playbook of corruption and venality which has informed and driven tyrants from Mussolini to the present. 

To save our democracy, voters must halt this slide toward Trump’s fascist abyss. But how? Who is responsible? Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt provide some answers in their new book Tyranny of the Minority.

Jim Nelson is a retired Montana Supreme Court justice.

Have you ever thanked God that you never lived in Nazi Germany? Well don’t get off your knees just yet; you might still find out what that was like.

Donald J. Trump is straight out of fascism’s central casting. Think Adolf Hitler (who Trump seeks to emulate and whose rhetoric he echoes), Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (whose legacy and tactics he endorses), Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (whom he supports, and who is the darling of the reactionary GOP and Fox News), and Russian President Vladimir Putin (with whom Trump is bonded).

If elected, Trump intends to be America’s first dictator in the mold of the foregoing authoritarians or “strongmen,” as Ruth Ben-Ghiat described in her book Strongmen, Mussolini to the Present.