David Neiwert follows the neo-Nazi right carefully from Seattle, near some of their most fertile breeding grounds. On July 3 he visited Olympia, where a dozen neo-Nazis served notice on their plans for a fascist America from the steps of the State Capitol.

Today Neiwert connects the dots between the July 3 rally and the shocking (and under-blogged) report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) about hundreds - possibly thousands - of neo-Nazis in our military. Neiwert writes about Shawn Stuart (photo left), an Iraq War veteran who spoke at the Olympia rally.

Shawn Stuart is just the first of these faces to be returning home from the Iraq War. If the SPLC report is any indication, there will be many more.

Some will have joined the neo-Nazi cause in the military. Some will have developed attitudes sympathetic to theirs and join later. But we can certainly expect to see more Shawn Stuarts, and they won't all be up on podiums.

If we look five years down the road, a disturbing picture begins to take shape: After the war ends in general failure, as seems almost inevitable now, there will be a raft of angry returned veterans back in country. They will have been told, as they are being told now, that the cause of the failure is all those liberals and terrorist sympathizers roaming the landscape. That they were "stabbed in the back" by the "enemy at home."

Sound familiar?

Already, right-wingers are developing "Targets of Opportunity." Already, they're justifying Radio Rwanda tactics for anyone who dares dissent. Just how much better is it going to get in five years' time?

This, folks, is the very real threat of fascism I've been warning about for some time, rearing its truly monstrous head. You know it when you see it -- and seeing it, perhaps, some of my readers (who keep wondering when I'm going to declare the American right truly fascist) will understand why I'm insisting we're not there yet -- that what we are currently coping with is a kind of pseudo-fascism whose chief threat is that it will give birth to the real thing.

What pseudo-fascism is all about, really, is the end justifying the means. And when the end justifies the means, there are always a thousand untold consequences. We are beginning to glimpse them now.