Don’t Call Them Socialists!

We’re constantly hearing warnings about the one-party regime in Washington, that they will propel the country into socialism. While it obviously aspires to significantly increase the power and scope of the federal government, the Bidenistas do not appear to be socialists. They are not calling for the nationalization of industrial production or for a planned, i.e., command, economy. For these people, moving American industry offshore is more advantageous than nationalizing it. No doubt, some on the party’s left fringes would like nothing better than traditional, Soviet-style communism, but this is not frequently expressed. For many on the Right, "socialism" has become a catch-all term to denote any form of totalitarianism. But in the spirit of "know your enemy," knowing what that enemy is and what it intends is the first step toward an effective defense.

The rhetorical situation is interesting. Republicans know that the majority of Americans oppose socialism, so it’s to their advantage to accuse the Democrats of being on the not-so-long march to a socialist America. And it’s to the Democrats’ advantage to deny this as right-wing extremist talk.

On the other hand, a great many young people express a desire for socialism, as they (mis)understand it. The Democrats want this constituency to believe they really are socialists, but that they are pretending not to be, so as to fool people on the right. However, this is further complicated because these young people don’t know what socialism is. They believe it just means plenty of free stuff for them paid for by high taxes on others. Thus, they admire the Scandinavian nations as examples of the success of socialism, because they have high taxes and generous welfare systems, while unaware that this is financed by market economies that are at least as free as that of the United States.

It is instructive that the Democratic party has been willing ruthlessly to thwart Bernie Sanders, an adherent of old-style, purportedly democratic, socialism, although in reality a fan of Cuba, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union. For all practical purposes, "Democratic socialism" is an oxymoron. If those who have power in the Democratic party wanted socialism, it seems likely they would have tried to take advantage of Sanders' popularity. It is not far-fetched that in 2016, with the party and the media behind him, he might have won.

Anti-capitalist rhetoric is fashionable in the ruling class. A Congresswoman wears a dress costing tens of thousands of dollars with "Tax the Rich" displayed on it. The children of the ruling class spend their undergraduate years virtue-signaling about capitalist oppression yet as graduation nears show up for interviews with Goldman Sachs, ready to assume their rightful places in the power structure.

It seems to me that conservatives and classical liberals who oppose the Democrats as socialists, and the young people who believe Democrats will surreptitiously usher in what they regard as socialism, are being fooled. We should recall the Italian and German fascists relied heavily on socialist rhetoric--the Nazis even labelling themselves "national socialists"--as a means to garner popular support from some sectors of the population, while stirring up fear of Russian Bolsheviks on the other.

It’s worth noting in passing that many on the Right refer to the Democrats as liberals. This is a travesty, since these so-called liberals are diametrically opposed to the political philosophy traditionally known as liberalism. This doctrine, originating in the 18th century, contends that the state’s sole proper function is to protect citizens’ natural rights. This doctrine stands behind the Constitution of the United States. All parties of the Left, whether labelled Communist, Fascist or Socialist, are profoundly anti-liberal, maintaining that rights are created by government and that individuals and society must be regimented in pursuit of the good as government conceives it. The United States, the world’s bastion of liberalism, is the Left’s natural enemy.

Precision in labelling, and thus in understanding, the enemies of the American republic is the first step toward defeating them.

Let me note that in pointing out that those who have seized political and institutional power in the United States only pretend to be socialists, and are really the latest manifestation of fascism, I do not mean to suggest that they are pretending to be something good: socialism and fascism are both unreservedly evil.

What is now displacing the American constitutional republic is a novel species of fascism; that, at least, is the recent historical phenomenon our novel "woke fascism" most resembles. In classical terms, we are now moving from being citizens of a republic to subjects of an oligarchy. We should recall that both the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis were self-described socialists. The obvious goal is an authoritarian, one-party state in which elections are meaningless, because it controls the outcomes, even if it allows a token, but tame, opposition party, what Orwell in his prophetic 1984 called the "outer party," for a veneer of legitimacy. Government rules in tandem with its crony capitalists. American leftists have learned from the Chinese they admire and whose support they rely on. The CPC eventually figured out that socialism is the sure road to economic ruin, so today's Sinofascism deploys the old leftist rhetoric while capitalism’s wealth enriches a powerful ruling elite. It politicizes all aspects of life, it controls all means of mass communication so as to silence meaningful opposition, and it seeks to control thought by abusing language, policing speech, and subjecting the population to constant propaganda. (As others have pointed out, the point of propaganda is not to instill belief, but to intimidate, forcing people to give lip service to what they know are lies. Thus, the more preposterous the lie, the better.) The attempt to force an Orwellian "Newspeak" on the population, in which, for example, the term "mother" must be replaced by "birthing person," and invented personal pronouns proliferate. These are laughable, but that is the point: the more ridiculous, humiliating things people feel compelled to go along with, the better. "Men can get pregnant!" The regime attempts to control schooling, replacing genuine education with indoctrination. It solidifies its power by engendering hatred between different groups so it can present itself as protector of official victims, who at this point encompass well over half the population.

What can be fairly described as "rule by hoax" is the grand strategy of ne0-fascism. Large segments of the population are taught, by endless repetition, wildly false claims intended to mobilize opposition against the constitutional republic. For several years, lies about Donald Trump being a Russian asset were confidently asserted by fascist politicians and their subservient media. Falsehoods about climate change, that the planet can be saved only if we surrender our personal and economic freedoms to the woke fascist state, proliferate. We are taught that the United States is "systemically racist" and that redemption can be found only by granting woke fascism absolute power. We are told that police killings of unarmed Black men are common. We are told that the greatest threat to the nation's security comes from "white supremacists." So says the shameless party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow. That there is virtually no evidence for these claims, and plenty of evidence against them, readily available to anyone who bothers to look, does little to staunch the flood of disinformation. The strategy is essentially that of Hitler's "Big Lie:" grab power by telling lies so outrageous that people can't imagine anyone having the audacity to tell them unless they were true.

The FBI now encourages citizens to inform on their family members, friends, and neighbors who oppose the regime and are thus "extremists." This once revered, but now corrupted, law enforcement agency can no loner distinguish threats to the regime's power from threats to the nation. In the fantasy world of woke fascism, the primary threats are not China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or Islamic terrorism. but either "domestic extremism." i.e., support for Trump, or global warming. A current aspiration is to inflict "vaccine passports" on the population, and insofar as this is blocked by sectors of the judicial system not yet corrupt, to enlist Big Tech, with its prodigious collection of personal data, to make 'compliance a de facto mandatory. Beyond this, they hope to use other "medical emergencies," such as racism and gun ownership, as well as Federal control of credit scores supposedly to assure equity in lending, to create a "social credit" system such as in now up and running in fascist China.

Proposed legislation clearly indicates the fascistic intentions of the party currently in power, as in the “Build Back Better” law that has been passed by the House and is now (10/21) before the Senate. Along with a panoply of programs intended to make more Americans dependent on the Federal government’s largesse and entrench the Democratic party in perpetual power, there are specific items that are patently fascist, such as forcing banks to disclose to the IRS every transaction in every bank account containing at least $600, i.e., virtually every bank account in the United States. No one seriously believes this is designed to catch tax cheaters, rather than to exert greater control of the population by intimidation, e.g., your check to the NRA will earn you an audit.

Another ominous item on the wish list is a Federal government subsidy to journalists. This is focused on local news, which is currently less corrupt than the national media. No one seriously believes that this serves any purpose other than supporting pro-government propaganda which cannot be sustained in a free market.

The legislation also federalizes elections, in overt contravention of the Constitution, which accords the states control of their elections, and writes into law various mechanisms that were used to steal the presidency and the Senate in 2020-21. States will not be permitted to modify election laws, such as requiring voters to identify themselves in order to vote, banning ballot harvesting or signature verification, or resiling from the illegal “emergency” changes to voting procedures allegedly justified because of the COVID pandemic, only if they are approved by the Justice Department in collusion with radical activist groups.

Further, the astronomical amount of spending, only partially offset by pervasive tax increases, is rationalized by the economically preposterous idea that the United Government’s ability to spend and borrow is limitless, and that the economy can function as a hermetically sealed system, with currency that has no value outside the country. The proponents of this legislation are either oblivious to the economic damage or welcome it.

While this pernicious legislation is pending, the regime describes as potential domestic terrorists parents who express objections to their school boards about pointless mask requirements, the racist indoctrination and sexualization of their children. The Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia asserts that parents have no say in what the public schools teach their children. And individuals who harmlessly walked around in the U.S. capitol building on January 6 languish in prison, in some cases after having been apprehended by SWAT teams in pre-dawn raids. At the same time, persons who, with the tacit approval of the regime, attempted on multiple occasions to burn down a Federal courthouse, attacked police, pulled down statues, burned and looted hundreds of stores go unpunished.

Not every fascist act the regime perpetrates enjoys the cover of law. President Biden’s vaccine mandate is not a matter of law, or even an executive order. It’s merely a diktat from the President conveyed by the compliant media; it has no legal authority. The President has the power to require vaccinations in the executive branch of the Federal government, but he has no constitutional authority to mandate vaccinations in the private sector or for the states, irrespective of how many local governments, corporations, and other private institutions eagerly go along with the scientifically and legally unjustified mandate. Only the states and local jurisdictions have the police power to impose such regulations on their citizens, though it’s unclear what degree of judicial scrutiny such legislation could survive. However, the artificially generated hysteria generated in response to the COVID pandemic has been a godsend to public and private authorities eager to seize more power.

The woke neo-fascists have ruthlessly promulgated the idea that Donald Trump is a liar. When we ask someone to explain his hatred of Trump, the response rarely pertains to his policies. The answer most commonly given is "Trump lies." When one follows up by asking for examples, the best most can come up with is that Trump claimed that his inauguration drew the largest crowd ever. This turned out to be false. When it's pointed out that Trump, a man endowed with a large ego, may well have believed this when he said it, and thus was not lying but simply mistaken, this is received as a rather subtle distinction. If we consult the so-called "fact checkers, who eagerly expose Trump's "lies," we discover a further inability to distinguish between someone lying and merely saying something with which one disagrees. Trump is not very articulate, and his rhetorical style tends toward large generalizations, exaggeration, and imprecision, but instances of what an honest person would describe as dishonesty are exiguous. If Trump has a fault in this area, it is that, in contrast to other politicians, he says what he thinks. Nothing in Trump comes close to the egregious lying of Obama--"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"--or Joe Biden, who in launching his campaign proclaimed that he wanted to "make the country moral again" and then went on the tell the blatant lie that Trump had called the white supremacists at Charlottesville "fine people, and, later, that he knew nothing of Hunter Biden's business dealings. In the alternate reality of the fascist narrative, these falsehoods are invisible. The movement's epistemology is that if a lie is endlessly repeated it becomes part of the narrative and thus true.

We can imagine scenarios in which someone is so wicked and dangerous that lying about him is justified. However, it's incumbent on us to make sure that the reasons for thinking he is wicked and dangerous are not themselves lies. If they are, we are trapped in a self-perpetuating circle of falsehood. One could escape simply by spending some time checking out publicly accessible data, but being woke is a essentially a religious commitment, beyond reason, so for those caught up in the "great awokening" there is no inclination to do so.

The ruthlessness with which woke fascists strive to silence opposing speech suggests that

woke fascists have no intellectual confidence in their ideology. They have no interest in arguing with opposing viewpoints, and little or no interest in rationally defending their policy aims. They ridicule and cancel; they do not argue. Perhaps, having imbibed their woke ideology uncritically, as a result of prolonged exposure to emotionally engaging, imagery-rich propaganda, judging others by themselves, they know that if opposing views are widely permitted and promulgated, they will automatically attract adherents who will thwart the fascist program. The Federal government/Democratic party's collusion with social media to silence the expression of opposing views on a wide variety of subjects is a prime example of the oligarchic capitalism that defines the fascist state.

As in the old adage, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes: differences between today's neo-fascists and fascism in the middle of the 20th century do not obviate the essential similarities. Nor does the use of socialist rhetoric, as in the deployment of the neo-Marxist idea that every human being is either an oppressor or a victim, and that this has nothing to do with what an individual does, but is a matter of birth, as in the racist indoctrination known as "Critical Race Theory." This is the root of the "identity politics" by means of which America's fascists hope to ensure their power. To paraphrase Bernard Henri-Levy: wokism is the bastard child of fascism and Gramscian neo-Marxism.

A particularly loathsome mutation that distinguishes what's happening in the United States from fascist Italy and today's China lies in the determination to slow, stop, or reverse economic growth that would otherwise benefit the middle and working classes. The erosion of the economic well-being of these groups, the majority of the population, was temporarily reversed under the Trump administration, but is now, under the Biden regime, continuing apace. A component of the ideological superstructure of the ruling elites, not only the political class but those who run monopolistic "woke" corporations, is that the lower ranks of society have too much freedom, consume too much, eat too much meat and burn too much fossil fuel. Their unenlightened, "extremist" beliefs in political liberty, patriotism. and free markets, and God are a threat to a planet allegedly threatened by global warming caused by human economic activity. And of course they are racists and omniphobes, clinging to their guns, Bibles, and Constitution, who deserve to be punished. All opponents of the regime are denounced as extremists, white supremacists, or domestic terrorists, as the nation redirects its resources away from genuine foreign threats to imagined domestic ones. It abets a cancel culture in which individuals are encouraged to inform on one another and their victims grovel in struggle sessions, reminiscent of the Maoist cultural revolution that preceded China's transition from totalitarian socialism to the fascist oligarchy it is today. At the same time, insofar as the rulers still need to win elections, or at least garner enough votes plausibly to pretend to win them, they aim to ensure that the urban underclass of Blacks remains locked into poverty and dependence on the welfare planation where they will see themselves as victims the corporate state alone can protect. The designed impoverishment of the nation as a whole poses no threat to the accumulation of vast wealth by the oligarchs of the ruling elite. Better, in their view. a larger share of the wealth of a poorer nation than a smaller share of the wealth of a richer nation. Increasingly, American corporations have no loyalty to the nation and the economic system that made their success possible. They see themselves as accountable not to their customers, shareholders, or employees, but to "stakeholders," whose approval they crave, i.e., social justice warriors, and regulators and legislators of the Federal government that have the power to reward them by snuffing out competition from below by means of excessive taxes and regulation they, but not small business, can survive.

Among the seeming anomalies of the new fascism are the sectors of society that traditionally prided themselves as critics of the powerful, such as the academy, journalism, and even comedians, but now not only slavishly follow the party line of woke fascism, but strive to advance it. Part of an explanation must be economic. Colleges and universities are highly dependent on funding from the Federal government, in the form of grants and loans to students who cannot otherwise afford their extravagant charges, and in the form of support of research. Some scientific disciplines, such as demographics, population biology, climatology, and most of the social sciences are almost totally corrupted by dependence on funding from the permanent government in Washington. Research that might undermine the woke narrative about race or climate simply will not be funded. American science begins to resemble German science under Nazism, when anthropologists supported the master race ideology and astronomers supported the view that the stars are made of ice, or agronomy and biology under Stalin, when the inheritance of acquired characteristics was official party doctrine. The Department of Education pressures academic institutions with the threat of loss of Federal funding if they fail to enact its woke decrees, such as the removal of any semblance of due process in the evaluation of charges of sexual assault. Academic institutions are under ever-increasing pressure to prove they are “diverse” and “inclusive,” where these are narrowly conceived as pertaining solely to official victim groups. (Meanwhile, obvious discrimination against Asians and low-income whites remains perfectly acceptable, as we see in the rush to abandon standardized testing in omissions.) Reasonable academic standards are discarded as racist by racists who believe, for example. that Black students cannot be expected to learn Greek and Latin in order to receive a degree in classics from Princeton. Diversity officers in many ways have more power than other administrators and certainly more than faculty. In the name of diversity, the university becomes an intellectual monoculture, thanks, in part, to the flood of government money.

Journalism in this country has long been associated with the Left, the default politics of those who work with words rather than material reality. However, this generally was accompanied by skepticism of entrenched economic and political power. This is now far from the case. When, as in the Trump administration, the fascist hold on the Federal government was threatened, the legacy media abandoned all claim to journalistic integrity. Moving from being merely biased in favor of the Left, it became a de facto propaganda organ of the permanent government and its political party. A conjectural explanation is that the legacy media sees its impending doom as it is displaced by new, internet based, media, and looks to government for its salvation. The line between legacy media and the current regime in Washington is porous, as a group of closely connected individuals cycle between jobs in government and media. Rather than being committed to free speech, the media now works to ignore, silence, and ridicule opinion the ruling elites disapprove of. The theoretical rationale is already in place: “Speech opposing the regime is hate speech. Hate speech is violent. Therefore, it should be legally prohibited. ” Competitors like Fox News and Newsmax, as well as a plethora of conservative outlets on the web, are regularly denounced as “extremist, right-wing media that peddle dangerous conspiracy theories” that ought to be silenced. It’s hard to imagine anyone at, say, PBS, NBC, CBS, the NY Times, or the Washington Post speaking out for freedom of the press, rather than cheering on government action that “cancels” their competitors. We are well aware of the degree of censorship that the “Big Tech” oligarchs, in close alliance with fascist government, imposes. Even if we were to ignore the multiple illegalities used to procure the 2020 election victory for the woke fascists, social media’s egregious efforts on behalf of the Democrats were obvious, as in, e.g., the censorship of the NY Post’s coverage of the discovery of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptops and the clear evidence they contain that candidate Joe Biden was on the payroll of this country’s foreign adversaries.

However, economic explanations only go so far. Consider comedy, the paradigmatic tormentor of sacred cows. Comedians are not recipients of direct or indirect government support. Saying outrageous things, violating social norms, has long been the staple of comedy, but now a regime of self-censorship rules. Presumably, this is a matter of what their audiences, or at least those who control venues, are willing to tolerate. The cancellation of “politically incorrect” comedy, and in effect the cancellation of comedy as such--“Fuck Trump!” as a punchline wears thin rather quickly--is principally a cultural phenomenon. Any deviation from approved attitudes and opinions must be avoided at all costs. We see this in many areas, e.g., the MIT scientist who confessed that she, like many others, ignored or denied the empirical evidence that the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab leak solely because not to do so was to be seen as agreeing with Donald Trump, or the case of the individual who, in the waning days of the pandemic, announced that he intended to continue wearing a mask, lest anyone mistake him for a conservative. Merely being associated with the nation’s majority non-woke culture must be avoided, even to one's economic detriment.

The pathology that threatens to engulf the United States and other Western countries must not be understood as solely the nefarious activity of a corrupt, incompetent, and arrogant government and its affiliated political class. It has the vigorous support of a relatively small, but vocal and belligerent, part of the population. Grounded in class hatred of the middle, and lower middle/working classes, it is what Niall Ferguson describes as "spontaneous totalitarianism from below." The deranged hatred of Donald Trump is, I believe, due to the fact that, despite his wealth, he championed the lower classes' challenge to social and political power. I conjecture that a root cause lies, ironically, in the upward social mobility that American freedom made possible. There is rampant contempt for those one regards as class inferiors who inhabit "fly-over country" and must be controlled and kept in their place. I believe this arises from insecurity about status. Approval of the destruction of the manufacturing sector of the economy, indifference to high levels of suicide and drug addiction in the nation's heartland, and seeking the replacement of native-born workers with cheap and docile immigrants, are expressions of this mentality. So long as those the woke see as beneath them are free and prosperous, they are at risk of being supplanted from below. Status anxiety motors identification with the ruling "elite" among those who are patently in no way elite and generates hatred and fear of supposed inferiors on the part of school teachers, academics, middle managers, "journalists," and petty bureaucrats. A fatuous "anti-racism," conjoined with absurd narratives of "systemic racism" and the various "-phobias," affords them a conviction of a moral superiority that in their view entitles them to rule without legal or moral constraint.

The fascist corporate state does all it can to break down mediating social structures and institutions such as the church, the family, local government, and even biological sex roles. It aims to destroy the nation’s traditional culture, seeking to erase the memory of honored forebears and to despise values, such as freedom of speech, due process, equal justice under the law until recently universally held. In this regard the mentality of the fascist revolutionaries closely resembles that of the Chinese cultural revolution of the 1960s. Promoting relativism, it weakens the convictions of those who might otherwise oppose it, while at the same time dogmatically advancing its own beliefs and values, and denouncing all opposing views as mere manifestations of the will to power or moral corruption. It sees social evils not as evils, but as catalysts of chaos, preparing society to accept their rule to restore order. Today, streets in our large cities are lined with lawless homeless people, most of them mentally ill or substance abusers. This would never be permitted in the still sane parts of the country, but in the cities ruled by woke Democrats, this is accepted as an inevitable fact of urban life. Rates of violent crime reach record levels. When the woke fascists achieve complete power, none of this will not be allowed, no more than rioters will be allowed to burn down police stations and attack Federal government buildings. For these people, chaos is a means to seize power by creating a population desperate for order (Recall Cloward-Piven). They purport to want to "defund," or even abolish, police, while all but the most addled actually aim to replace local policing with with a national police force, which like the DOJ, the FBI, and the CIA it has corrupted, will enforce their dictates at the local level unencumbered by the rule of law. They are devoted to disarming the population, focusing not on types of guns often used in crime, but on so-called "assault" weapons of the sort useful for resisting a tyrannical regime. It seeks to purge the military of those who will not reliably due its bidding. It strives to weaken the working class politically, economically, and socially by opening the southern border and flooding the country with unskilled, non-English speaking immigrants. These people, it hopes, will be difficult to integrate into the general population and thus be isolated and compliant, loyal to the state rather than the nation. Sensing that, despite its long-term efforts to maintain their dependency, it is losing its grip on African-Americans, it endeavors to create a new underclass of Hispanics dependent on, and thus supportive of, the regime, ignoring the fact that these people are often escapees from fascist regimes and loyal to family and faith. Whatever social devastation government "aid" inevitably inflicts on these groups, it will be attributed to the racism of its political opponents. It incites individuals lacking earned self-esteem to see doing the state’s bidding by ferreting out its opponents as a mark of moral and intellectual superiority.

Neo-fascism exploits society’s exiguous rationality, fomenting irrational action based on image and emotion. It eschews discussion of actual national policy issues and makes politics a matter of fashion and personalities and the real or imagined oppression of marginal minorities, such as the transgendered. It encourages individuals to identify themselves as members of groups, not as individuals who think for themselves and pursue their own interests.

It expresses great enthusiasm for equality, and more recently for equity, i.e., equality of outcomes. Yet its goal is neither; it is to ensure better outcomes for some and worse outcomes for others, depending on their support of the regime and its current ideology.

It operates a formal, baroque, and corrupt, two-tier legal system that empowers the regime’s friends and punishes its enemies. It harps on about the need for “unity,” but this turns out to be enforced uniformity of thought and expression. In its initial stages, it brings the ‘soft tyranny’ Rod Dreher and others warn us of. However, resistance will elicit the regime’s inherent brutality. Increasingly, political opposition to the regime, however mild, e.g., saying "Let's go Brandon!" is characterized as insurrection. Parents angrily objecting to school boards that indoctrinate their children are told they have no say over what their children are taught and the Department of Justice characterizes them as potential terrorists.

What we now face is a weird specimen: traditional fascists glorify, rather than hate, their country and its traditions. Today’s fascists do not identify with their own nation, but with like-minded elites in a ‘globalized’ world. They aspire to a global 'reset' in which they alone have the intelligence and virtue to rule. Further, while traditional fascists may single out some minority group for persecution, exacerbating old hatreds for their ends, our contemporary fascists make the majority of the country, to which most of the rulers themselves belong, the object of hatred. The woke "vanguard," in the style of Lenin, cleanses itself of its association with the wicked majority by adhering to the current ideology, i.e., by being 'woke.' It seeks personal advancement not as a matter of achievement grounded in effort and character, but by presenting oneself as high in the hierarchy of victimhood. It holds the military virtues in contempt and sees the armed forces as venues for its destructive social engineering. However, it is willing to employ its armed forces at the slightest sign of active opposition. An incursion of unarmed citizens into the capitol building is denounced as a deadly 'insurrection,' while it condones ongoing violence in the streets that it sees as furthering its ends. BLM and Antifa, essentially fascist organizations are praised, while the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, plainly opposed to racism and fascism, are designated as such and declared the nation's enemies. Large numbers of young Black men are gunned down in America's cities, but this is of no significance in comparison to the very small number of unarmed Blacks, typically with criminal records and resisting arrest, killed by cops, for alleged but almost never substantiated racial motives, which is ginned up into a cause that convulses the country. In St. Louis, a rioting neo-fascist mob breaks down a gate and approaches a private home, shouting death threats. The homeowners, standing on their own property, brandish legal, unloaded firearms to hold the mob at bay, with the result that they are arrested while the rioters suffer no penalty, but are admired in the media. A drug-crazed petty criminal, possibly the victim of improper police action--the circumstances are ambiguous--is made a posthumous national hero. The cop is summarily convicted after a blatantly unfair trial. In Ohio, a white police officer shoots and kills a young Black woman who is on the verge of plunging a knife into another young Black woman. The cop's name is immediately publicized and he is nationally castigated. In contrast, a young white and unarmed conservative woman is shot and killed in the capitol building by a government agent who is almost immediately exonerated while his identity remains a state secret months later. The incursion of unarmed citizens into the capitol building is denounced as as deadly "insurrection" requiring a national focus on "extremism," while months of rioting across the country costing innocent lives and millions in property damage is at best tolerated, and at worst praised, by the regime. The capitol, no longer the seat of legitimate government, protects itself from the people by walls, razor wire, and armed troops: the optics of fascism are embraced as necessary to defend "democracy." The fantasy that Americans voted for Trump in 2016 because of their racial animosities, rather than because of the corruption, incompetence, and arrogance of Washington and the political class is now turned to the January 6 protest, now attributed to "white rage" rather than to their resentment of representatives blithely certifying a stolen election. Predictably, evidence gradually emerges that the so-called insurrection was incited by the regime itself, an American version of the Reichstag fire. In Andrew Klavan's words. we face an "empire of lies."

American anti-American fascism seems inherently unstable. The nation is rendered vulnerable to intimidation and even attack from foreign adversaries because it's ruling elite disdains it and, focused on subjugating its own population of "deplorables," is indifferent to foreign threats. Another source of potential instability lies in the fact that those who achieve positions of authority for the sake of wielding power will always seek further power, imposing more and more control over its allies in the wealth-producing sector, moving toward a socialist command economy with the inevitably ruinous results. There are hints of this already happening in China.

On January 6, 2021 a Bronx man, Joseph Bolano, attended President Trump’s speech in Washington, the one in which he asked the crowd to go to the Capitol Building and “peacefully and patriotically” make known their opposition to certifying an apparently fraudulent election. Uninspired by the speech he returned to his hotel. He never entered the building or came close to doing so. Bolano’s neighbors learned that he had attended the rally and was a Trump supporter. They notified the FBI on a tip-line for January 6 informants, with the result that the man answered the door to his apartment to find 10 tactical police officers equipped with a battering ram, a crowbar, and a rifle, which was pointed at his head. The terrorist response team carted off all his electronic devices as well as many boxes of personal property. Four months later these have not been returned to him. He was interrogated and released but warned that charges might be coming. I imagine that the informants, those working in the FBI, and those giving orders to the cops will look in their mirrors and say, “How can I be a fascist, I’m such a good person?” Meanwhile, many of the charges against those arrested or rioting and looting in New York the previous summer were dropped.

In its vision, rulers of obedient subjects replace those who govern by the consent of free citizens. A regime inept in all things other than acquiring power holds the population it purports to serve with contempt. It bullies its subjects while genuflecting to its foreign adversaries. It speaks of "our democracy," denoting a system which is democratic in name only. The "our" points to the fact that what is at stake is the undemocratic political apparatus fashioned over decades that serves itself, not the people. It is a system in which elections, and elected representatives' behavior, have little to do with the actual preferences of the population. The nation is increasingly ruled by "administrative law" made, judged, and executed by anonymous, unelected bureaucrats, who serve not the nation, but the ruling ideology.

It's been apparent for some time that projection is a staple of the woke fascist psyche, and that most anything they accuse those who resist them of they themselves are really guilty of, e.g., hatred, extremism, racism, intolerance, bigotry, voter suppression, spreading conspiracy theories, lying. It should be no surprise that they so regularly deride those on the right as fascists, and that their fascist organization that riots, loots and burns in the cities they control labels itself as anti-fascist. The party of slavery, "Jim Crow," opposition to immigration, eugenics, and the KKK--early in the last century the Klan was the military arm of the Democratic party, as BLM and Antifa are today--invents "systemic racism" to mobilize minorities and those ignorant of history to attack its enemies, ludicrously labels anything it disagrees with as racist. As in other matters, Orwell's 1984 is their manual: labels are repurposed to refer to their opposites, so, e.g., legislation designed to facilitate further election fraud is designated the "For the People Act," a bill designed to force individuals to pay more for their medical care is labelled the "Affordable Care Act", and what they call anti-racism training is overtly racist. They have honed the device of the 'meta-lie,' promulgating lies about their opponents lying, assuming that detecting lies about lying places an overly demanding cognitive load on their ill-educated constituents. In the school curriculum, what was once called "critical thinking" was the study of informal logic. They have co-opted the term, employing it to refer to uncritical indoctrination in "critical theory," neo-Marxian doctrines devised in response to the failure of Marxism's economic theories and predictions.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the woke fascists lied promiscuously, constructing the tale that the Russians had somehow stolen the election for Donald Trump, a conspiracy theory contrived out of whole cloth. This appears to have begun as an effort to distract from the Clintons own illegal collusion with the Russians leading up to the election. Once Trump was in office, the media abandoned whatever shreds of integrity it still had to prosecute a fraudulent case against a president who had the effrontery to side with the nation against the ruling elites. In characteristic fashion, the neo-fascists charged their opponents with the crimes of which they themselves were guilty. Four years later, in the face of mounting credible evidence that they had stolen the presidency for the corrupt, stupid, and now demented Joe Biden, they and their media minions dismiss accusations of election fraud, label it a groundless conspiracy theory promoted by extremists, and fight savagely to prevent forensic audits of the ballots and voting machines.

These people have already done serious damage to the United States, and they aspire to do more. Beyond the coastal enclaves of the ruling elites, a few large interior cities, and various university towns, Americans no longer regard the nation's institutions, now in the hands of the power hungry, anti-American woke, as legitimate, worthy of respect, deference, or obedience, even as our rulers plan all manner of controls over us. It is hard to imagine that this will end well.

It may be that the only options before us are to accept fascist tyranny or to resort to violent resistance with unknowable consequences. We are experiencing a conflict of claims to rights that are constitutive of the identities of the claimants. One side claims the right to rule in virtue of superior virtue and intelligence. The other claims a variety of rights grounded prior to government, including the right not to be ruled, and the right to be governed only with their consent. On one side a small minority possesses a great deal of institutional and cultural power; the other side is the majority of the population. There is no apparent room for compromise. The potential for a breakup of the republic or a bloodbath is obvious. The best hope I see is for nullification: for individual states, or better, confederations of states, to defy the radical departures from our constitutional, republican form of government. Over two centuries, the Federal government has grabbed innumerable powers it is explicitly denied by the Constitution. Reviving Federalism, states should make explicit their refusal to comply with laws its own high courts declare unconstitutional, e.g., the federalizing of elections, the confiscation of firearms, anti-American and racist indoctrination in public schools, legal constraints on free speech. Success and the survival of liberty will, in this scenario, depend on the federal government lacking the will or the power to enforce its designs on the states that nullify its dictates.

Update 2022: the a priori hostility to the military evaporated suddenly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Whatever the wisdom of stopping Putin’s ambitions there, the woke-fascists were delighted for the United States involvement in what approximates a proxy war with Russia and characteristically, immediately demonized anyone who even questioned our involvement, let alone opposed it, as a tool of Putin. Parallel with this development, the regime continued to undermine U.S. military readiness for the sake of ferreting out ‘”extremists,” terminating those unwilling to accept the experimental COVID vaccine, and indoctrinating the troops in woke ideology. Unsurprisingly, recruitment collapsed. This is another signature of totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi Germany and the Red Army.