gerrymandering is illegal in a lot of places, but here we are.

It’s an interesting point you raise. The media has mutated since the list was written, now encompassing anyone with an opinion and an internet connection. Where in the past the media was more centralised and therefore more easy to control totally, now it’s very difficult to eradicate dissent completely - the media has become more aligned to the masses than to the elites. So a different approach is needed to get to totalitarianism.

And that aporoach is widespread use of disinformation.

Another key point is the ongoing attack on the autonomy of societal institutions, like universities. Timothy Snyder has written about the importance of them in On Tyranny, and Trump behaves as if Snyder’s book was an instruction manual.

There is a German Nazi term that is perhaps useful to describe what’s happening, it is Gleichschaltung.

One popular approach is alignment of businesses and government in creating an ecosystem that is the internet for most people, like everything-apps. Musk did claim to create a WeChat-alike from X but it didn’t went far.

Weird acquisitions though are increasingly more alarming. First, Musk got Twitter as a whole company, and although we didn’t initially know who co-paid for it, there weren’t explicit commentary on what exactly Elon would do with it, you needed to read between the lines. Recent TikTok USA purchase by Ellison though not only helped by the government, it’s publicly aknowledged that it would become a propaganda tool for MAGA to affect genZ and genA.

It seems to me like the media is about the same as it was in 2017, as even in 2017 anyone with an opinion and an internet connection could gain throngs of followers online. The difference I see is that major news organizations have shifted to be moderately more conservative (previously ~centrist organizations are now moderately trump-approving, and previously conservative organizations are now far right, previously democrat-favouring organizations are now hedging their bets). MAGA is pressuring or threatening to pressure social media organizations to shift toward more MAGA content, but I think we’re not even at the inflection point for this yet.

Yeah, because in the past 150 years we didn’t have liberal democracies match these criteria and it being considered “business as usual”.

Nationalism? That’s the main way liberals distract from class and enforce unity of the people’s.

Mass media control? Yeah, mass media controlled strictly by private capitalists who always spread a handful of narratives that only serve to reinforce the dominant ideology and never going against it.

Common enemyism? Just look at geopolitics for 0.001s

Rampant sexism? Women were the property of men with no voting rights for a long time under liberalism, with fierce opposition to women’s suffrage.

And so on and so on. Also liberalism -> fascism model isn’t real, else every country would have gone fascist already. Fascism is a tool for a specific kind of situation (economic crisis + worker militancy threatening capital existentially), but often it isn’t needed and electorialism can be preserved which is the defining feature of liberal democracies. Besides, under crisis there’s nothing stopping a democratic liberal democracy from committing atrocities fascists would to save itself and the system.

Software experts consistently warn about how terrifying computer voting systems are and everyone else consistently ignores them.

Maybe, but the outcome wasn’t altered.

Now, granted, the OP didn’t say anything about corporatism, which was originally developed as a comprehensive ideology under Italian fascism. However, it’s not as simple as in the OP - “corporate power protected” and “labor power suppressed”. In fascism, both corporate and labor power are subservient to the state, and fascist corporatism involved the input of both private industrial interests and labor interests. Ultimately it was the state making the decisions, though. I suppose it’s important to remember that fascism arose as a response to class conflict in the aftermath of the industrial revolution - a third way between bourgeois liberalism and communism. In this sense, the point was to establish an equilibrium between capital and labor. Corporatism was the means to that end. In fascism, in practice, this often meant that capital simply colluded with the state, and left-radicalism in labor was violently stamped out so the workers could be brought to heel. Workers were then treated quite well, assuming they didn’t run afoul of the state because they belonged to one of the many groups that fascists considered enemies.

Many European nations still practice forms of corporatism, although today the state is more like an equal partner to the other parties. So I guess my point is that corporatism is not distinctly fascist, despite developing under fascism.

I agree with the rest of your point, but I do want to remark that communist states do entwine state and religion: they don’t leave people’s religious beliefs alone, they promote atheism and discriminate against religious people, as well as gradually hijack leadership positions of religious organizations.

genocide survivors warning of the cause of their genocide who were rescued by other capitalists and then rescued again by liberal capitalists from the other authoritarian communists

not too bright are ya?