So in 2018 an amendment in Florida was passed allowing convicted felons to vote. There were two exceptions to the law which still prohibited people convicted of sex crimes and murder. People caught wind of this and assumed they were now able to vote, so they went through the process and the State of Florida issued them a voter registration card:
Most of these people are black of course. They appear to be nothing more than political prisoners to help serve Ron DeSantis' fascist agenda. He sets up a system that is now designed not only to entrap people into thinking they can vote, but his statewide campaigning about these arrests now serve to intimidate anyone from voting who might have doubts as to whether or not they're eligible. Because Florida is so incompetent, the citizens cannot even trust their own state to tell them whether or not they're eligible. This is by design, so Ron can go to the podium bragging about cracking down on "voter fraud" without providing any details as to who and why they were arrested.These Floridians say they had no idea their crimes made them ineligible to get back their voting rights, in part because the state approved their applications and issued them new voter registration cards. They say they learned of their legal jeopardy only last month, nearly two years after casting ballots, when police showed up ― in at least one instance, in the form of a SWAT team banging on their door.
“We don’t think that people should be prosecuted while the state has a system in which the state itself is unable to verify voting eligibility on the front end,” Neil Volz, deputy director of the Florida Restorative Rights Coalition, told HuffPost.
One likely reason these Floridians got their voting cards is that the state agency in charge of elections has been overwhelmed trying to make the new system work. And that’s in no small part because of a law that DeSantis and his allies enacted after the constitutional amendment passed. The law requires felons to pay off old court fees before they can get voting rights; figuring out who owes what has been an administrative nightmare.
“If the state was doing its job, those individuals would have been alerted they were not eligible and removed from the rolls before they even had the chance to vote,” Patrick Berry, counsel in the Brennan Center’s democracy program, told HuffPost in an email.
Even some Republicans think officials should go easy on prosecutions until the system is working better: “I think it’s really up to law enforcement and state attorneys to exercise a level of grace and mercy where they believe that their intent was not to defraud,” Jeff Brandes, a GOP state senator from St. Petersburg, told the Herald.
It Matters That Joe Biden Used the F-Word
"The president made waves when he referred to the Trump-drunk GOP as “semi-fascist.” Republicans have earned it—and more."
I do not hope to provide a comprehensive scheme for discerning fascists from nonfascists. Fascism, after all, is not merely a political program. In more modern language, fascism is also a vibe. It is ultranationalistic in nature, with adherents fantasizing about the return to a national idyll that supposedly existed in the hazy recent past. Responsibility for deviations from that ideal are usually attributed to ethnic, religious, and sexual minority groups. Upon them are heaped the blame for the nation’s supposed moral, cultural, political, and economic decay.
Trump, for his part, inaugurated his presidential campaign in 2015 by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and vowing to build a wall to keep them out. He insisted that a Chicago-born federal judge could not fairly oversee a lawsuit against him because the judge’s parents were born in Mexico. He began his presidency by trying to fulfill a campaign pledge for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration into the United States. He told four Democratic women lawmakers of color that they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” His administration repeatedly sought to deny civil rights protections to LGBTQ Americans.
If bigotry were the only salient feature of fascism, of course, then it would be a superfluous term. Historical fascists also argue that the problems they identify cannot be solved through the usual political means. Fascists typically regard their country’s democratic mechanisms as insufficient to the crises and enemies that they perceive around them. They view parliamentary government as part of the national decline and therefore regard it as an obstacle to be overcome rather than as a legitimate means to exercise power. That power should instead be wielded by a great leader, someone in whom the state can invest all of its authority to responsibly guide the national rebirth.
Trump does not believe in American democracy or support its continued existence. He routinely describes American elections as illegitimate and corrupt when he loses or thinks he is about to lose them. When Mitt Romney lost in 2012, he tweeted, “Lets fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us.” In 2016, he pledged to jail his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and led “Lock her up” chants at rallies. When he lost his reelection bid in 2020, he orchestrated a two-month campaign to overturn the results by pressuring local officials and mounting bogus legal challenges. Those efforts culminated in January 6, 2021, when he incited a mob to attack Congress and disrupt the counting of electoral votes in a bid to stay in power illegally.
There are disturbing echoes of January 6 in the histories of fascist movements. The seminal moment in Mussolini’s was his march on Rome in 1922, which was orchestrated as an insurrection but instead ultimately led the Italian regime to peacefully name Mussolini as prime minister. Other fascist movements tried similar measures with less success: Adolf Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch the following year was consciously modeled on Mussolini’s seizure of power, while the Irish government cracked down on the Blueshirts’ attempt to march on Dublin in 1936. Those incidents reflected, among other things, fascism’s willingness not only to legitimize political violence as a means to an end but also to glorify its use.
Biden’s use of “semi-fascism” to describe Trumpism is apt on two levels. For one, it avoids the nitpicking and incongruities that come with comparing one political movement to another across time and space. Like fascist and other semi-fascist leaders before him, Trump claims to be a champion of the working class while also fiercely opposing labor unions and what passes for socialism in the American political landscape. But Trumpism does not have the irredentist fantasies that formed the molten core of German and Italian fascism. Trump himself also lacks the coherence and vision to articulate a genuine policy agenda; his administration was often no different than it would have been under a President McCain or a President Romney.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, describing Trumpism as “semi-fascism” fits within Biden’s career-long desire to work across the aisle with relatively moderate conservatives. Contra Sununu, he was careful not to describe all Republicans as semi-fascists, just the “MAGA Republicans” who loyally carry out Trump’s agenda. That would not extend to Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney or other perceived apostates from the Trumpist faith. Nor would it apply to the Republican governors of otherwise blue states like Larry Hogan in Maryland and Charlie Baker in Massachusetts. If Sununu does not like the label “semi-fascist,” he should reflect on why an accurate description of his party’s leader makes him so uncomfortable.
