In Part 1, I talked about actions you could take if someone on the Left calls you a Fascist. A vile term meant to stop any further conversation because you are evil beyond compare and unworthy of consideration or debate. But when challenged to define Fascism, Stephen Sheehy, who called Trump a Fascist, ghosted further back and forth.
That epithet is generally directed at you/us simply because we disagree with them on Rights, modes of governance, Free Speech, Capitalism, and the like. You know, what the US was founded on. And for the most part, they have NO idea of what a Fascist is or what is the definition of Fascism – and how it differs from our Founders’ vision of what our Republic should be.
So, after I called him out, I returned to give him (and the rest of the unknowing Eco-Socialists) a couple of definitions – and torqued Lloyd Alter in the process (and yes, all emphasis is mine):
Here’s a couple notes of Fascism. First is from the Cambridge Union debate:
“Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump. Il Duce, der Führer, The Donald. The Roman salute, the Sieg Heil, the YMCA dance. The comparison is so absurd it practically debunks itself.
Anyone who genuinely thinks that Trump’s America – whatever else you might think of the man or his policies – can be mentioned in the same breath as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany needs to get a grip.
Because let’s be clear about what we are talking about here. Fascism, and especially its Nazi incarnation, was an evil the like of which the world had never seen before. Or, thankfully, since.
Totalitarian control. Messianic dictatorship. A cult of racial superiority. Paramilitaries crushing the left at home. A Darwinian military struggle for supremacy abroad. The worship of war and violence. The mechanised attempt to murder all of Europe’s Jews.
If this sounds anything like America in 2025 to you, then I suggest you leave here right now and go and have a nice, long lie down.
Trump is many things. He’s a right-wing populist. He’s a trenchant opponent of illegal and mass migration. He’s a culture warrior. He can also be a thin-skinned, occasionally conspiratorial, blowhard.
But try as I might, I am struggling to find the extermination camps or the goose-stepping gunmen killing with impunity. Perhaps my colleagues on the other side can enlighten me.”
Yes, he can be a blowhard – but it always seems that he has a purpose when he turns that attribute on.
And Ruth Marcus (rather far along on the left side of the political spectrum) wrote at the Washington Post: “Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.”
NO Fascist would ever do such things. Not EVAH! Their goal is to coalesce such Powers to as high a level of possible and making Government the only entity that has meaning or worth. We just end up as cogs (mostly very small ones) in its machine. What you do or say is controlled by Govt. Full stop.
Here and back at TH, I was often called a fascist by those that didn’t even bother to read history and do their homework to properly understand what its definition really is – but think they are smart in hurling such an epithet at someone they no little about. Here’s Nick Nolte’s rather simplistic description of what a fascist is (using Marcus’s subtitle):
“Hey, guess what the opposite of fascism is? Well, a pretty good definition is “curtailing government’s power and reach”.
Did Hitler decrease or increase the power and reach of government? Did Stalin decrease or increase the power and reach of government? What about other infamous fascists like Castro, Mussolini, Hugo Chavez, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden? They all expanded the power and size of government because that’s what a fascist does.
Trump’s doing the opposite. In “Constitutional speak”, he has started the process of paring down the Federal govt back to what is allowed by the Constitution. The crowding out of States Rights and powers that have been going on since the late 1890s has started. The Fed was never imagined to do so many things at such a high cost, not just in $$, but in Freedoms and Liberties at the individual level.
True Fascists hate that. They are of the Hobbesian mindset that Government controls those. Which, to put it another way, individuals have no Rights or Freedoms except at the whim of Government. Which is to say, individuals have nothing at all.
And that “curtailing government’s power and reach” is simply Trump working to re-implement the Pillar of Federalism (which Progressives, with the help of a lot of rather Republicans, have all but totally wrecked). We’re also freakin’ $36.5 Trillion in DEBT!!! Of COURSE the Federal Government has to be curtailed – we can’t afford this continual level of spending.
And with that, I guess I made thin-skinned Lloyd (who also refuses that just because he’s a subject domain expert in one area doesn’t mean that works in others like politics); I also found out that once he starts to get mad, his reading ability and comprehension sags rather quickly:
I don’t know what to do here, now you are calling Biden and Obama fascist. I don’t care about names but this is getting beyond the pale. Meanwhile he is destroying my country’s economy with his threats, that’s what bothers me. Please stop the fascist namecalling or I will shut this down, we have bigger problems.
Winning! So instead of an actual debate, he turned the Streisand Effect onto himself (as far as I was concerned) and I took advantage of it:
First, he has destroyed NOTHING in your economy as of this instant. And I already left a comment on your steel tariff post and I’m betting that will end up the same as this first set – his target is not the object that everyone else, like you is concentrating on right now (although I have an idea of what the actual target is).
Second, I dryly note that Stephen Sheehy first used “fascist” so you really should take this up with him and anyone else who is “throwing the first verbal/written punch. And he did so that fit no definition that could be applied to Trump.
I simply called him out on it – and having no real answer, he ghosted this post.
Then, given its mal-usage against seemingly anyone on the Right that disagrees with the Left, I decided to supply some very simplistic definitions of a fascist/Fascism (it could be books long) and ONE of them is the growth of Government (and that, btw, was in the quote from Nick Nolte). Even Marcus, a long, LONG term columnist for WaPo, agreed that he’s no fascist as NO fascist would EVER take steps to make Government smaller and less intrusive.
However, a second one is the control of news and speech for/by a populace is also the mark of totalitarians of any kind; repercussions if the Governmental line is not followed and we saw that in both of our countries during the Pandemic (Social media throttling demanded by the Biden Administration and the Truckers Strike punishments by the Trudeau (like seizing bank accounts) as two examples).
Given the current revelations coming out of the financials of USAID by the DOGE Bros, as well as previous information from the Twitter Files and Zuckerberg himself (think Facebook) backing them up, there were proscribed “Government speech” issuances and censorship of other lines of thought by non-Governmental folks over a long time periods.
Heck, FB throttled me, pre-Elon Twitter as well, so I know it existed. Thus such censorship happened under Biden – that is incontrovertible.
All that said, am I calling Biden a fascist? Nope – again, not my words.
However, the actions of his Administration (much of it staffed at the higher levels by Obama retreads) now fits two of the criteria. So, am I blaming Biden?
Nope, as I don’t believe, because of his finally-acknowledged-dementia didn’t have the horsepower to pull it off (Hur agreed). Heck, when I interviewed him back in 2008 during the Presidential Primary, he couldn’t have pulled it off then either.
So I’m not calling anyone a fascist as I know the definitions. However, having been called one here and at TH, should I not have the ability to correct it when thrown my way?
So far, I have no been blocked or deleted, so there’s that. But after that, Lloyd ghosted doing another reply.
But WAIT! There’s MORE! Part 3 does another round where I explain (again, simplisticly) what a tariff can do, Lloyd goes ballistic again, and I follow it up two ways to Sunday.
GOSH! I love blogging in making “those that refuse to learn” look silly.
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(H/T: Carbon Upfront!)
