[Note from Steve: This article begins a series of posts about the FSA, i.e., the “Fascist States of America.” There are so many now that it will take a while to get through them!]
Like most red states in the FSA (that’s “Fascist States of America,” in case you missed that opening riff), a lot of suffering people there in South Carolina (a lot of poor blacks, for example) aren’t fascists, but that state has earned its membership in the FSA because it’s controlled by fascists and always has been.
It’s the home of that infamous fascist Sen. Lindsey Graham, for example, a faithful minion of that “f&^%ing moron” (I oft repeat that this quote is from ex-SecState Rex Tillerson, not me). Worse, if you can believe it, is the hard-fisted brown-shirt control excercised by the South Carolina’s state government. Case in point (and only one of many!): They have the most restrictive anti-abortion policies in the nation!
One could argue, I suppose, that this isn’t an example of fascism but just evidence of pandering to misogynist old men who continue their efforts to make women second-class citizens like in the good ole days, now the standard dogma for far-right Christians from born-again and SBC zealots to crazy Catholics, who believe they’re doing God’s work by imposing their religious preferences on everyone else. This, of course, is a characteristic of many fanatics in the FSA.
But attacks on women’s rights, particularly reproductive ones, also are motivated by racism, and South Carolina is filled with bigots, racists, and other misinformed and uneducated white folks so worried about that “replacement theory” garbage that they’ll they use any technique, including violence, and faithfully follow any moron like the orange Il Duce, to keep black and brown people down. Again, that’s common elsewhere in the FSA, but it’s more prevalent in South Carolina.
You’d think their Christian morality (that’s an oxymoron in the FSA, of course, especially in Jim Crow’s South) would at least generate some compassion and motivation in South Carolina’s leadership to help poor women who have no help now, but no. The state budget is in the black by millions (the fascist state government there is very efficient at stealing from the people), but not a cent has been spent to add reproductive services or take care of those babies they so fervently claim to save with their faux-Christian policies.
I can go on and on: South Carolina is full of NRA gun-loving fanatics (“We have to protect ourselves from them rampaging black folk!”—of course, they’d use the N-word, not “black folk”); the KKK is full of good Christian men, Christian soldiers marching to war against the non-white hordes; our far-right militias are warriors protecting democracy; etc., etc. It’s so bad there that industries are fleeing the state and major events go elsewhere. All this should at least any sane person that South Carolina is a terrible place to live. Of coure, it’s been replete with insane people ever since the Civil War.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December, 1860—no surprise! That nineteenth-century war officially began when rebel forces took Charleston’s Fort Sumter. Racism and slavery made South Carolina fascist long before that, and it’s never stopped being a racist and fascist state, worse now than ever before (slavery is predominant, just not recognized as such to avoid legal complications with the Feds). That war was but a precursor to the one that might be coming to us real soon, a new Civil War pitting red states, aka the FSA, against blue, a war destined to finish the job of murdering democracy in America. South Carolina is such a festering pit of fascist pestilence that it will probably become the capital of the FSA (with Graham as its first president-for-life, mimicking Putin and Xi?), not Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, or Texas, although all of those share many of South Carolina’s fascist credentials. The list of potential states in the FSA is long (let’s not forget the Dakotas, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and others) and contains over half of the current fifty states.
Yes, the coming Civil War might be a bloody one, a lot bloodier than the first, or just a peaceful division of the US into sane and insane states, but it will certainly result in quarantining the insanity of fascism in the FSA to the point where sane people will have to flee if they want to enjoy democratic freedoms without fearing the twenty-first century’s version of the brown shirts.