There’s an old expression that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, but today, we might update it to one man’s defender of democracy is another’s fascist.
There’s an old expression that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter, but today, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shocking killing last week, we might update it to one man’s defender of democracy is another’s fascist. According to Merriam-Webster, fascism is “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition,” or more generally as “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.” While the label has been affixed to President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters since he came down the infamous golden escalator in June 2015, its usage exploded in the run up to the election and across the last seven months. Pick a policy, almost any policy, and the President’s detractors will decry it as fascism. Immigration enforcement? It’s a fascist override of due process and other fundamental rights driven exclusively by racism and white nationalism. Inner city crime and violence? A fascist attempt to override state and local authority and establish a police state to punish black and brown people which also serves as a simultaneous test run to suspend the presidential election in 2028 and keep President Trump in power forever. Cut funding to extremely wealthy colleges and universities that have allowed rabid antisemitism in recent years? A fascist assault on the First Amendment. Reduce the number of government employees and stop or slow certain kinds of spending? A fascist take over of Congress’ constitutionally defined powers that will literally kill people, presumably not white ones though. Three weeks ago, the chair of the Democrat National Committee, Ken Martin claimed that the goal of all this and more was to “march” the United States “toward full-on fascism.” “What we’re seeing right now is just a full-on attempt by this authoritarian regime to march us toward full-on fascism, and we have to stand up right now in this moment as Democrats,” he said on MSNBC’s “The Weeknight.” “There is a fascist in the White House—and we have to throw out our old playbook,” he claimed a few days earlier on X. “Democrats cannot be the only party that’s playing by the rules anymore.” Last Tuesday, The Nation opined on “Trump’s Petty-Tyrant Brand of Fascism,” claiming “The GOP president is both a dire threat to democratic governance and a clownish mob boss.”
There are dozens of similar claims over the past month, likely hundreds over the past year, thousands in total, but quite conveniently, almost all of them pretend that the raw exercise of executive power in service of racial and national ends is unique to President Trump. In reality, Presidents in both parties have felt compelled by their respective bases to wield sometimes unconstitutional power to advance their agenda and please their constituents, complete with putting race above the individual and fostering an us-versus-them nationalism. Progressives, perhaps needless to say, would vehemently dispute this, but it was President Barack Obama who claimed he couldn’t wait on the niceties of Congress, so he’d wield his pen and his phone instead to forge the nation he sought and protect the people, largely Hispanic illegal immigrants, he favored to the collective cheers of his progressive supporters. Promptly, he used these previously non-existent powers to unilaterally rewrite immigration law in what amounts to prioritizing certain races above others in service of the open borders, multiracial utopia progressives seek. Though President Obama himself had previously claimed he didn’t have such authority, Democrats didn’t react by accusing him of an authoritarian power grab. Instead, many suggested he didn’t go far enough in usurping the power of Congress. As Roll Call reported in 2014, “While Republicans in Congress aren’t holding back on their criticism of President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration, some Democrats are trying to navigate a more difficult position: Supporting the president’s action while also arguing he could have gone further. Some of the strongest congressional proponents of an immigration overhaul — Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, D-Ill., Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Sen. Robert J. Menendez, D-N.J. — held a conference call Monday to discuss the president’s action. And while all three were effusive in their praise, it was also clear they believe Obama could have put forward a more ambitious executive order.” The Hill reported that Democrats “praise Obama’s ‘courageous’ first steps.” “Democrats hailed President Obama’s move Thursday to halt deportations for millions of immigrants living in the country illegally. But the lawmakers were quick to frame the executive actions as merely the first step on a much longer path toward overhauling the immigration system, a move they say only Congress can take. “It’s bold, it’s courageous, it’s as good as it can be under the law,” explained then House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Representative Raúl Grijalva described it national terms, claiming it was “a turning point for the nation” but “not all-encompassing.”’ Notably, the Internal Revenue Service under President Obama targeted conservative groups as well, fulfilling the criteria for forcible suppression of the opposition.
Regardless, nothing in recent or perhaps all memory compares to the pandemic when all of the required traits were on full display – and then some. Though the initial restrictions originated in the expert class, rank and file progressives quickly transformed lockdowns and masking into a populist, us-versus-them crusade, where those who refused to conform to their desires were branded unable to understand what’s good for them, subject to speech controls and censoring on social media. Simultaneously, a certain state nationalism crept in, pitting lockdown blue states like California with open blue states like Georgia, which was branded an experiment in human sacrifice for the temerity of opening hair salons earlier than they believed safe. This was accompanied by what can only be described as a rampant authoritarianism complete with the suspension of fundamental rights. People were no longer allowed to gather, churches and schools were closed, hospitals barred from visitors, public spaces policed for anyone defying these edicts, and a combination of masking and distancing policies were strictly enforced – until it became politically expedient not to, when another favored racial group desired access to the public square. After the death of George Floyd became a cause among key progressive constituencies, the same public health experts who had been demanding authoritarian obedience to all of their edicts, suddenly reversed course to grant dispensations to certain racial agendas. Mass gatherings were both allowed and encouraged if they served the specific purpose of Black Lives Matter and their variously progressive, racially motivated concerns. “We should always evaluate the risks and benefits of efforts to control the virus,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins epidemiologist, tweeted at the time. “In this moment the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” “The injustice that’s evident to everyone right now needs to be addressed,” explained Abraar Karan, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician who exhorted coronavirus experts to amplify the protests’ anti-racist message to Politico. “While I have voiced concerns that protests risk creating more outbreaks, the status quo wasn’t going to stop #covid19 either,” he also tweeted. In other words, the goal of reimagining the country to eliminate the vague, ill-defined spectre of “systemic racism” outweighed other risks to the public and therefore favored groups were entitled to special privileges denied others. If you doubt this, consider the reaction to earlier conservative protests against the lockdowns which were immediately tied to white nationalism. As the BBC described it, “While protesters in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and other states claim to speak for ordinary citizens, many are also supported by street-fighting rightwing groups like the Proud Boys, conservative armed militia groups, religious fundamentalists, anti-vaccination groups and other elements of the radical right.” Later in the same article, they claimed “The pattern of rightwing not-for-profits promoting public protests while still more radical groups use lockdown resistance as a platform for extreme rightwing causes looks set to continue in events advertised in other states over coming days.” In other words, some protests are more equal than others based on who is protesting and for what reason.
When President Joe Biden assumed office in January 2021, these trends continued or even accelerated. After declaring it wasn’t the federal government’s role to mandate vaccines, he proceeded to do precisely that resulting in those who objected to the policy losing their job while he engaged in the active demonization of states which disagreed. Texas was a victim of “Neanderthal thinking.” Those who didn’t comply were going to be subject to a “winter of severe illness and death,” as in “For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you had your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death — period.” Those who lost their jobs and their livelihoods deserved it as the goal was the greater good, not the rights of the individual. The so-called Journal of Medical Ethics published a research paper on “The ethics of firing unvaccinated employees,” not surprisingly reaching the conclusion that it was completely and totally ethical to do so. Dr. Anthony Fauci began making similar claims about the differences between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated a few months earlier. “When you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among under-vaccinated regions, be that states, cities or counties, you’re going to see these individual types of blips,” he said. “It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.” This us against them mentality, which in other circumstances almost everyone would agree is a key element of fascism, was accepted and widely promoted in the mainstream media, where blue states were regularly pitted against red ones, and some even cheered the occasional death of a prominent conservative. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson described the situation in early 2021, he imagined an “An emerging scenario, for instance, of a nation divided by Covid — between vaccinated Democratic states and skeptical and sickened conservative bastions — is deepening an already bitter political estrangement.” After the Supreme Court ultimately ruled the vaccine mandate unlawful, as it should have based on the President’s own previous comments, progressives didn’t applaud them for standing up for freedom, individual rights, or democracy. Instead, they savaged the Justices who opposed the mandate for killing people and playing politics. The Alliance for Justice tweeted that “The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has chosen to prolong and deepen the misery of the pandemic. The people need their courts back. #ExpandtheCourt.” Occupy Democrats also took the opportunity to push the court packing scheme while Brad Woodhouse, a former Director of Communications for the Democrat National Committee was more direct about conservative intentions, “Republicans want to prolong the pandemic – have more people get sick and die – so they can blame Biden and win an election. And the Supreme Court just helped them. Disgraceful.” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State, apparently one with no understanding of the law, claimed “The Court is willing to let people die in the name of indefensible formalism. The president should take the Supreme Court to task for this abomination.”
Needless to say, progressives would protest that this wasn’t fascism. Instead, they would claim that all of it and more were necessary responses to deal with an unprecedented emergency, whether the topic is the fate of Dreamers under President Obama, the danger posed by systemic racism, or an illness that threatened the country itself as they saw it under President Biden, but the same logic necessarily applies to Republicans. To President Trump’s supporters, an open border is an imminent threat to the safety of the public, the financial stability of our cities and towns, and the future of the country itself. Crime in our inner cities and the seeming inability of progressive politicians to confront it effectively is another crisis that needs to be addressed to save lives and restore order. The increasing progressivism of our higher educational system and how it is funded to an unreasonable extent by taxpayer dollars, as is the seemingly never ending growth of government causing never ending deficits and ever increasing debt. Whether we are right or wrong in these and other matters is irrelevant to the reality that we feel this is the case and we elected President Trump to address these issues, directly and forcibly, and we expect him to do so – the exact same way Democrats expected their chosen politicians to address what they perceived as urgent priorities. Crucially, most Republicans didn’t agree that these progressive priorities constituted emergencies or that the powers used to purportedly address them were appropriate. We believed much of it constituted a massive overreach and that the leaders enacting these policies used racial, regional, and yes, nationalistic resentment complete with the silencing of their opposition to do so – once again, the exact same things progressives are accusing President Trump of right now. Since that is the case, are we all fascists and hidden inside every American is fascist just waiting to come out, or is it just that all of us want to use the powers of the government to advance our goals?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 