President Brandon and a cavalcade of lesser flaks have been referring to about half the population as “Fascists“, and people who want to destroy democracy.
Remember this?
In 2020, a group of activists tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus on the Capitol mall in Saint Paul.
Although the entire episode was carried live in TV, only one person was arrested; that person was “sentenced” to teaching elementary school kids about the evils of Columbus, which is a little like sentencing drunk driver to teaching mixology to high school kids.
This happened, even as the person in charge of the Capitol Architecture Commission, Peggy Flanagan (have you heard she’s Native American?), had the power in her hands to remove the statue via due process – which is slow and boring, compared to having your activist buddies do it for you.
And lefty social media was clogged with addlepated lefties nodding and going “rules, schmules; at least it’s gone”.
One needn’t imagine what’d happen if some non-DFL group decided to tear down a statute of their bete noir; I’ve thought about how fun it’d be to rip down the statue of noted authoritarian socalist Floyd Olson. I don’t suspect I’d get “sentenced” to teaching high school kids about the evils of socialism.
This episode highlights three facets of the sort of authoritarian government that is, in fact, the sort of “fascism” that Big Left is trying to paint the right with:
- The Rule of Law is for Other People: Don’t want to go through the Capitol Architecture Committee – or get your Student Loan Redistribution passed by Congress, or have to convince the American people and their state legislatures of the rightness of your cause, or convince Republicans of their wrongness? Just have your buddies tear it down, or declare $10K null and void with no statutory authority, or pack the Supreme Court, or send your “Anti”-Fa crowd in to bust some heads. Rules are for peasants.
- Different Versions of Justice For the Political “Haves” and “Have Nots”: Lois Lerner will never go to jail for gang-raping the First Amendment. Not only did the Ramsey County Attorney’s office not actually punish Woody Kane for leading a planned, coordinated assault of Republicans, they may as well have sent him off with a voucher for a hooker and dinner at the Saint Paul Grill.
- The Ends Justify The Means: If your idea of government, like the people approving of the tearing down of the statue, is “to get the things I want done, done”, or the shorter but more cynical “move things forward” – whether good, evil or indifferent – then you don’t really get self-government, and likely don’t want to.
“But Trump did all those things!”
Are you sure you want to make “our leadership is doing the same thing the person we call ‘literaly Hitler’ did” your lede?
Just A Note Before We Go
We’ve talked about four attributes of authoritarian government – defining boogeymen, circumventing the rule of law, and making one’s ends justify one’s means.
There’s one more; wrapping ones side in some larger cause, be it “history” or nationalism or, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess, “the soul of the nation” – about which President Brandon will be talking today.
So that’ll be the next part.
Unbelievable that Slow Joe Biden is going to give us a lecture on what “American values” are.
You have Representative Paul Gosar has posted videos depicting him attacking the President and members of Congress.You have Representative Majority [sic] Tay- – Marjorie Taylor Greene has publicly expressed support for shooting prominent Democratic elected officials and suggesting physically assaulting transgender school officials.You have Representative Madison Cawthorn has said, falsely, “If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place, and that’s bloodshed.”And just last week, you had Governor Ron DeSantis suggested that Dr. Fauci should be physically assaulted. And former President Trump has done the same many, many times.Look, and many of your colleagues have actually talked about and reported on this dangerous trend that we’re seeing.
Recall that this absurd whine about people elected to office comes just weeks after Biden’s JD refused to enforce the law & end the protests at the homes of SC Justices, and, well, I can give many examples of Dem politicians threatening violence against conservatives. During the Trump administration, it was common place for Dem politicians to threaten to riot if Trump did something that they did not like (fire Mueller, for example).
Still more hierarchy, not hypocrisy. The Democrats do it because they get away with it and every time they get away with it they push the boundaries a little more.
I think that Biden and his team are so deluded that they actually believe that the American People are looking to Hunter Biden’s dad for moral leadership.
Yea, and on Tuesday, Pedo Pete admitted that the 2020 election was stolen. He babbled that “We must make sure that an election can’t be stolen again.”
“Fascists“, and people who want to destroy democracy.
Democracy™, as practiced in the US since the dawn of the 20th Century has brought us to where we are today. How ya liking them apples? Hope you do, because now that Democracy™ is really rolling, there is no stopping it from rolling all the way off the cliff.
Of course, our Democracy™ isn’t the democracy the founders left us. They had brakes built in to keep it from rolling off the cliff. We needn’t have taken their brakes completely out to include more worthy people from voting, just loosening them a bit might have kept it on the road. But no. Every drug addicted bridge troll, every mentally unstable degenerate, every ward of the state, every 75 IQ, 3rd world refugee that swears allegiance has the same franchise we all do. And here we are.
Simply having maintained the requirement for people who want a say in how the country is run to have first put a stake into it would have the country in a fundamentally better place; financial or sweat equity would suffice.
Like a pinch of bitter salt makes the soup taste better, a dash of Fascist Nationalism would have improved Democracy, IMO.
(btw, for all you Patriots out there with your jaws agape at my temerity, before you lose your minds, remember: “America First” is a Fascist statement.)
I can give many examples of Dem politicians threatening violence against conservatives.
Remember when John Thompson lynched the wife of a Mpls cop in effigy…in front of the cops house?…Schumer and Pelosi lost their minds on MSNBC and the WaPo ran a 5 part investigative series.
Good times.
Seems to me the Democrat strategy is tactical only to get thru November (and if they can hold both houses that is a stunning result, given Biden’s early missteps). They rely on interest groups who normally don’t turn up in midterms. Trump makes the GOP candidates more extreme and he also helps the Democrats get the vote out. The net result is good for Biden.
But surely the Democrats also realize that running Biden in 2024 is a disaster for them. I don’t subscribe to the senility crap but anyone can see that they need a new torchbearer. Harris is not the answer. They need an early 2024 announcement that he is not running and a wide open primary to beat DeSantis.
One of the problems with nationalism as a guiding political philosophy is that its pedigree is short.
In the wake of WWI Wilson proposed nationalism as a way to end all wars: self governing ethnically and linguistically homogenous nations would peacefully coexist within internationally recognized borders. The previous system, with European Empires ruling all of the world and competing among themselves for resources had led to WWI, or so the theory went.
The nationalism fostered by Wilson didn’t end all wars, after all.
Nationalism, specifically the part that says that a nation is the highest level of sovereignty, is as much a creation of modernism as international communism. Probably for economic reasons, the dominant mode of governance seems to be empire, even if we don’t call it that. The words “neo liberalism” and “colonialism” are virtually interchangeable.
I don’t subscribe to the senility crap
You are deluded, then.
Watch a youtube of Biden debating Paul Ryan, unscripted, in 2012.
Then watch a recent youtube of Biden attempting to deliver scripted remarks.
Biden gaffes, speaks in non sequiturs, and slurs his speech.
Fascism is not an easy concept to define, I’ve had to look it up. Here is a commonly accepted definition, by Stanley Payne, that focuses on three concepts:
1.) “Fascist negations” – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
2.) “Fascist goals” – the creation of a nationalist dictatorship to regulate economic structure and to transform social relations within a modern, self-determined culture, and the expansion of the nation into an empire.
3.) “Fascist style” – a political aesthetic of romantic symbolism, mass mobilization, a positive view of violence, and promotion of masculinity, youth, and charismatic authoritarian leadership.
(Source: Wikipedia, citing 4 academic texts)
I will leave others to debate whether Trump (or the ideology of Trumpism that has grown up around him) fits any or all of this framework.
Surely you can find a better source than Wikipedia, Emery!
Fer God’s sake, Josef Stalin exhibited every characteristic of #4.
Maybe read Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932)? It’s right here:
https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf
The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State. Instead of directing the game and guiding the material and moral progress of the community, the liberal State restricts its activities to recording results. The Fascist State is wide awake and has a will of its own. For this reason it can be described as “ethica.”
With its explicit call for a political State to direct society, willy-nilly, towards ends the state desires, there is a lot there to make an American liberal uncomfortable.
The Republican approach is remarkably like the approach of the Communists in Eastern Europe after WW2: Propaganda, infiltration of administrative and social power centers, threaten enemies, all in the name of “the people”, who ended up losing all liberty and opportunity unless you sold your soul to the regime and climbed into some thankless role as an apparatchik in the nomenklatura or whatever it was called in a particular country.
Source: Wikipedia, citing 4 academic texts
👆 Tell me you’re straining an 80IQ cognition without saying it.
In the age of the internet, and big tech, leftist dictatorships don’t need to rely as much on force of arms to keep the low IQ population under control. Elections are mere formalities that can be negated with minimal effort.
Try “googling” “WND” (World Net Daily). Do it right now, lads.
Read the below, and consider that the Democrat Left controls big business, journalism, Hollywood, academia, all the federal bureaucracies, and increasingly the military.
Propaganda, infiltration of administrative and social power centers, threaten enemies, all in the name of “the people”, who ended up losing all liberty and opportunity unless you sold your soul to the regime and climbed into some thankless role as an apparatchik in the nomenklatura or whatever it was called in a particular country.
Nina Jankowicz is the definition of a person who sold her “soul to the regime and climbed into some thankless role as an apparatchik in the nomenklatura or whatever it was called in a particular country” In this case “it” was called the “Disinformation Governance Board,” which was given the task of making an official determination of truth and untruth, and distributing that information to media. In true Orwellian fashion, Ms. Jankowicz herself was guilty of spreading misinformation about the “Russian collusion” hoax.
. I have always felt that Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz’s, and Josh Hawley’s of the world would have done really well behind the iron curtain. Bernie Sanders would have ended up in Siberia. Go figure…..
UMMP, not even Pinochet had the balls to create a “Disinformation Governance Board”, and even the Natsies were honest enough to say right up front in his title what Goebbels was doing as the Reich Minister of Propaganda.
Of course neither of those regimes had a low IQ population as large as the US does today.
Blaze, I want to separate the idea of “nationalism” from “fascism.” Before WWI, the US could be described as nationalist, with a yearning to become an Empire. After WWI the federal government began to present elements of authoritarian fascism. I don’t think that there is much in Mussolini’s essay that Woodward Wilson — or even FDR — would disagree with.
Modern Fascism could not have expansion and Empire as a goal in the current year. But Nationalism is crucial to the long term survival of the nation.
FDR was a committed leftists with Communist sympathies. He used Fascist ideology as a front for leftist dictatorship; a typical Communist tactic.
The word “fascism” is so closely tied to Mussolini and Hitler that it’s impossible to separate it from the horrors they caused. And that’s what makes it tricky to use. People hear fascist, they think of Hitler, and the argument becomes “Did you just compare Republicans to Hitler?!” which is a tough argument to win.
There needs to be a better word to describe the political workings of fascism without bringing the holocaust into the discussion. The holocaust was a result of Nazism, not a feature of the overall picture of fascism.
Republicans are indeed semi-fascist, and we must fight hard to avoid them becoming full-blown.
Emery, you moronic loser, just because you cut and paste your bullshit twice, doesn’t make it stink any less.
Bernie Sanders would have ended up in Siberia.
The man honeymooned in the USSR. Considering how, as a poor public servant, he’s ended with three houses, it’s more likely he’d have a nice dacha.
How can you know something is semi-fascist if you can’t define fascism?
You can’t.
Do not forget that the be all and end all of the Democrat Party, since its inception in 1830, has been to divide Americans into classes and to award each citizen rights based on their assigned class. This was true in 1830, 1930, and it is true today.
The latest ploy is to say that these people called “Trump supporters” have no right to vote for the candidates that they choose to vote for.