A phrase we should be using instead of Nazi, Gestapo,fascism and others that have become hohum rather than horrifying. We have to alert people that we're about to live in a paramilitary police state.

Click "Archive" to read companion post about political branding.

Wiki describes a police state as follows:

A police state is a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little to no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are not exclusive to simply one-party states or dominant-party states, as they can also arise in a democracy or multi-party system.

This is how Wiki describes a paramilitary force:

A paramilitary is a force or unit that functions and is organized in a manner analogous to a military force, but does not have professional or legitimate status. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the term "paramilitary" as far back as 1934.It has been used by many different political organization especially far-right politics groups and by many different organizations. Paramilitaries have widely been synonymous with violence, political repression, ethnic cleansing, genocide and crimes against humanity. Paramilitaries may use combat-capable kit/equipment (such as internal security/SWAT vehicles), or even actual military equipment (such as armored personnel carriers; usually military surplus resources) that are compatible with their purpose, often combining them with skills from other relevant fields such as law enforcement, coast guard, or search and rescue. A paramilitary may fall under the command of a military, train alongside them, or have permission to use their resources, despite not actually being part of them.

I am not suggesting that Trump isn’t well on his way to creating a modern version of a Nazi Germany fascist state with his own Gestapo. I am saying the same thing with different words.

You can also add the word “enablers” since combined with police state and paramilitary it could be used in a sentence like this:

Trump has sent his police state paramilitary enablers into (your town) to punish people who refuse to bow down to him.

This is about branding and marketing and the fact that these Nazi comparisons are bordering on becomnig passé through overuse.

We need some new words that just as accurately describe the same things and calling what Trump is well on his way to implementing is a paramilitary police state has several benefits besides being newer and the Nazi words have lost some of their impact.

One is of course that it is accurate. The other is that the Nazi comparison does not resonate the same way with many people too young to have lived through the era when depictions of Nazi atrocities were a staple of pop culture.

Here’s a quiz. When do you think the following movies were made?

Schindler’s List

Diary of Anne Frank

The Pianist

Sophie’s Choice

Judgment at Nuremberg

The dates: 1993, 1959, 2002, 1982, and 1961.

These movies were seen by millions but millions more haven’t seen them and may not even have heard of them.

The word paramilitary evokes images of people who are armed to the teeth. The phrase police state is self-explanatory as a state (i.e. country) run by an armed police force where people have lost their freedom. The police in this instance aren’t well trained men and women who want to protect and serve and go through testing to weed out the psychopaths before they even go to the police academy. Furthermore, when they are patrolling they don’t wear masks and hide their names. Their standard weapon is a semi-automatic handgun and they don’t carry military weapons except in special circumstances.

The word optics may be overused, however in it’s political context, it means the way in which an event or course of action is perceived by the public. In the past Trump and MAGA have used optics to their advantage. Currently they are suffering because optics have turned against them. This is because of the evidence we have seen with our own eyes of the brutality of their paramilitary police state. Optics, of course, is the science of sight.

When our eyes, the optics, tell us we are about to be in thrall to the potentate of a police state we should be horrifed and take whatever steps to make sure this doesn’t happen.

What we saw yesterday with the massive protests in Minneapolis and around the country shows that this may finally be happening. See: Thousands march in Minneapolis as part of another ‘general strike’ against ICE.

The headline says it was a protest against ICE, but it really was a protest against a paramilitary police state. The two terms have become synonymous.

These are the signs we made for the protest we’re going to this afternoon:

Below: The Substack that began as a footnote to this one but which I posted separately.

Afternoon update: This is just another example of why we need to rebrand what we call these people: “Internet rages over ‘horrifying’ video of agents walking in front of car with guns drawn.”

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