The way the 2024 presidential election was framed was a choice between fascism and freedom. At least on that much, the pundits had it sort of right.
They just picked the wrong fascist-leaning candidate to tar-and-feather with the F-word.
Yes, former President Donald Trump is now President-elect Donald Trump. I don’t know who’s noticed, but all the talk of Literally Hitler™, fascism and rounding up enemies has come to a halt — unless, of course, you’re one of the people making those insane TikTok reaction videos where you scream-cry into the camera for a minute straight. (If you’re reading this: Get help.)
However, it’s worth noting that for most of the homestretch of the campaign, fascism was a word tossed around by plenty of liberal pundits. It’s not clear what they meant by it — just calling someone “fascist” seems to do in our modern political discourse, with evidence unnecessary if your opinions are deemed correct enough by our benevolent media overlords — but we were reliably informed one of the candidates was definitely fascist.
In the end, America voted for the one who would save us from soft fascism — at least if one is to go by the dictionary definition of the word.
Now, it’s worth pointing out that “fascist” is an inherently vague term. As Arnold Beichman pointed out in a 2005 article in the Washington Times — back when the left was busying itself calling George W. Bush the F-word — “fascism, as a concept, has no intellectual basis; its founders did not even pretend to have any. Adolf Hitler’s ravings in ‘Mein Kampf,’ Giovanni Gentile’s hortatory article in the Italian Encyclopedia, Benito Mussolini’s boastful balcony speeches, all can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as ‘an amalgam of disparate conceptions.’”
However, the Merriam-Webster definition of the word is about as good as you can do when roping together all that fits under the rubric of “fascism”:
- a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) 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.
- a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.
Of course, for some, the mere fact that Trump could be described as “populist” is enough for them. However, plenty of politicians have been populists, both Democrats and Republicans. On the other side, Trump is promising freedom, lower taxes, less regulation and freedom of speech.
Kamala Harris? Well, let’s look at her positions in her own words — as well as the positions of the Joe Biden administration, which she failed to repudiate.
State control of prices:
There’s nothing quite as autocratic and centralized as a state that decides what you can sell and how much you can sell it for. And that’s what Harris was promising, thanks to her pledge to end “price gouging” by corporations.
She’d do it in housing, according to her campaign website: “Vice President Harris knows rent is too high and will sign legislation to outlaw new forms of price fixing by corporate landlords.”
And she’d do it at the supermarket: “As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers.”
She also promised to “enact the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries.”
🚨PRICE GOUGING?!
Once again, Kamala Harris pledges to “enact the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries,” suggesting that those eevil greedy companies are responsible for higher costs, not her precious government spending.
I’ve fact-checked this claim numerous… pic.twitter.com/ZAL1r1zGI7
— Tyler O’Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) October 30, 2024
Whenever you hear “price gouging,” you should simply hear “price controls” — on food, medicine, housing and more — because that’s all this is, setting prices by law. Centralized government in action, folks.
Gun control:
Want to get a head start on “forcible suppression of opposition?” Take away their guns, of course.
Again, from Harris’ campaign website: “As President, she won’t stop fighting so that Americans have the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities, and places of worship. She’ll ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, require universal background checks, and support red flag laws that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people.” [Emphasis ours.]
All of that jumble is basically the usual gun-grabbing rhetoric, which will do nothing to stop crime or school shootings but which will make it exponentially harder for law-abiding Americans to protect themselves.
The most pernicious part of that, however, is the promise to “support red flag laws” — assumedly at the federal level. Those laws have been tried at the state level and basically allow law enforcement to take away your Second Amendment rights on the flimsiest, most specious grounds possible, then send you through a Kafkaesque nightmare to get them back.
This is what a Harris-Walz administration would have worked toward. But no, it’s the guy who wants to preserve your constitutional rights who was the fascist.
Equity giveaways:
Virtually no issue under the sun couldn’t be spun into a racial one by the Harris-Walz team — and when they got desperate, they issued a spate of proposals that targeted specific races with what could most charitably be described as Affirmative Action bribes.
The only silver lining in this is that these programs were so comically inept that they failed to land with the races they were aimed at. Take the Harris campaign’s “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men,” which proposed that equity could be achieved by … turning black men into legal drug dealers.
“As we enact policies that lift black men up, we must remove the barriers that have so often held them back. [Harris] will … Break down unjust legal barriers that hold black men and other Americans back by legalizing marijuana nationally, working with Congress to ensure that the safe cultivation, distribution, and possession of recreational marijuana is the law of the land,” the position paper read.
“She will also fight to ensure that as the national cannabis industry takes shape, black men — who have, for years, been overpoliced for marijuana use — are able to access wealth and jobs in this new market.”
This was just one of the five points that were part of this “opportunity agenda,” mind you; others included race-based loans to start businesses and help black men start investing in cryptocurrencies, among other things.
Whether or not this was constitutional was very much beside the point. The Democrats have long believed that “demographics is destiny,” which is to say that they care about increasing the number of minority voters because those voters have tended to vote Democrat in past cycles. Thankfully, that trend seems to be reversing itself — but that doesn’t make the party’s obsession with race any more dissimilar with the same obsession fascist governments tend to show on the matter.
Censorship:
While Kamala Harris didn’t exactly tout the Biden administration’s record on social media censorship — that wasn’t exactly one of the campaign’s strong points, to put it mildly — the fact remains she didn’t repudiate it, either.
The “Twitter Files” and “Facebook Files” proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the federal government worked with social media companies to censor topics and users they felt to be problematic, both in terms of the COVID-19 response and other matters.
And then there was Hunter Biden’s laptop — something that the intelligence community and Democrats knew was real when it got dropped just before the 2020 election, but which was censored at the behest of powerful figures in the IC. Not only that, but team Biden-Harris suborned numerous intelligence officials to sign onto a letter calling the damning contents of the future first son’s MacBook Russian disinformation. Shocker: It wasn’t.
Also, lest we forget, this was the administration behind the Disinformation Governance Board, which was to be led by this fine lady:
This one absolutely has to go into the 2022 Time Capsule. #MinistryOfTruth pic.twitter.com/gww1JncUZW
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) April 29, 2022
Alas, the outcry over the Orwellian-sounding department caused it to be scuttled before it even began. That didn’t stop the government from trying to silence parents’ groups concerned with wokeness and critical race theory seeping into their local school districts, though.
Lawfare against its political enemies:
Finally, the hallmark of a fascist regime is using the regime’s legal apparatus to systematically go after its political opponents. I don’t think I need to spell it out aside from mentioning a few names: Alvin Bragg, Judge Juan Merchan, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis. All of those well-connected Democratic functionaries played a pivotal role in trying to scuttle Donald Trump’s run for president through a constant drumbeat of dubious court cases brought at preternaturally opportunistic times.
What a pity that not a single one more will see the inside of a courtroom, at least for four years — and probably not ever.
These are the hallmarks of a fascist government. Now, are the Democrats fascists? Soft Bolsheviks, maybe. Busybody Big Brother types is probably a more accurate way to describe them.
However, if they want to use the F-word on Donald Trump, they need only to look at the dictionary to show that the definition of the word they so promiscuously toss around applies to them far more accurately than it applies to any Republican, living or dead.
Donald Trump’s election means that, for the moment, we’ve been saved from going further down the path to a government 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.”
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