Joe Biden’s Fascist Fetish
The president’s latest attack on one-half of the electorate is his most ridiculous yet.
Unity, he snarled. Unity, you ultra-fascists.
From Jim Eagle to ultra-MAGA to semi-fascism to F-15s, Joe Biden has a way with words. It’s a dimwitted way, an idiotic way, but a way nonetheless — and he thinks it’ll energize his equally dimwitted base between now and the November 8 midterms.
It was a week ago, in fact, when ol’ Scranton Joe, speaking at a Democrat fundraiser in Maryland, said: “What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s semi-fascism.”
We wish he’d make up his mind. Is it the beginning or the end? And by the way, has anyone bothered to tell him that dastardly Donald Trump’s approval rating is four points higher than his own? That’s some death knell. But maybe it’s just a semi-death knell.
And as for you right-wing mouth-breathers, you knuckle-draggers, you troglodytes: Your deeply held desire for limited government, for free and fair markets, and for individual accountability is really just semi-fascism in disguise.
Furthermore, if you don’t believe that the 2020 election was “the most secure election in American history,” and if you don’t believe that men can have babies, well, you’re really a semi-fascist.
We’re used to this, of course. Whether it’s Barack Obama calling us bitter clingers or Hillary Clinton calling us deplorables, we’re used to Democrats demonizing our half of the American electorate. And make no mistake, warns our Mark Alexander: “Biden’s comments are invigorating midterm election voters, just as intended. We in conservative media can lament his lies, but the lies are working among his dullard electorate.”
But, still, we’re curious: Just what is a fascist, or a semi-fascist for that matter, and who among us are the real fascists?
First, let’s list the key attributes of fascism: authoritarianism, dictatorship, centralized autocracy, a corporatist economic system, forcible suppression of the opposition, and subordination of individualism for the perceived good of the nation.
Given these attributes, we don’t need to get bogged down in a philosophical discussion about whether fascism is a product of the Left or the Right. It’s the former, and it’s not debatable, even though Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats will try to convince you otherwise. But don’t take our word for it; take the word of the great Thomas Sowell:
Back in the 1920s … when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.
It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.
As Sowell writes: “What socialism, fascism, and other ideologies of the left have in common is an assumption that some very wise people — like themselves — need to take decisions out of the hands of lesser people, like the rest of us, and impose those decisions by government fiat.”
So let’s not accept Biden’s ridiculous claim that the fascists are on the Right. One of the hallmarks of leftist rhetoric is to accuse one’s enemies of the very things one’s own finger-pointing self is guilty of. As Ben Shapiro notes:
That [semi-fascism] smear is particularly galling coming from Biden the same week in which he announced, without any constitutional authority whatsoever, that he was erasing some $500 billion in student loan debts — the single largest executive action in American history. Biden justified that action on the basis of a nonexistent COVID-19 emergency. He has justified similar usurpations on similar grounds: He illegally tasked his Occupational Safety and Health Administration with forcing vaccines on some 80 million people on the basis of a “public health emergency”; he used his Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to try to propagate an eviction moratorium on the same basis; he bragged in July that he will reshape the American economy on his own if Congress doesn’t act in order to forestall a supposed “climate change emergency.”
All these are the acts of a fascist. And rising up to denounce these acts is not an act of semi-fascism. Instead, it’s the act of an even older -ism: patriotism.