The Authoritarian Left: Down, But Not Out

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One chief reason why leftists love to call themselves “progressives” is because it is an expression of their own hope. They lost big in the 2024 elections, but they’re just down, not out. Everything is still progressing, they think, in their direction. And so it’s important to bear in mind what their goal is: the criminalization of all opposition to their agenda.

On January 16, 2021, eight days after Twitter banned Donald Trump, who was still president of the United States, NBC’s Mehdi Hasan counted down five reasons supporting the claim that “the far-right domestic terror threat is more dangerous than even Al Qaeda after 9/11.” Hasan included this: “Al Qaeda didn’t have the president of the United States or his daughter inciting them or praising them during the attacks as ‘special people’ and ‘American Patriots.’” He added: “Al Qaeda wasn’t umbilically connected to the U.S. conservative moment and the GOP; didn’t have sympathizers in the House GOP caucus who spoke at its rallies and offered cover for them.”

Such comparisons weren’t limited to the media. Former CIA officer Kevin Carroll wrote on February 1, 2021: “We defeated al Qaeda and can do the same to the fascist thugs who attacked our democracy last month. But only if we take similar hard measures against the enemy within.” Who was that enemy within? Another former CIA official, Robert Grenier, said on February 2, 2021, that “even at the seeming height of the crisis immediately after 9/11, there really weren’t that many members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan.” He was making the point that the actual January 6 “insurrectionists” shouldn’t be the sole target of law enforcement authorities; rather, Grenier said what had to be done was “to remove the supportive environment in which they were able to live and to flourish.”

The implication was unmistakable: The “supportive environment” in which the alleged insurrectionists could “flourish” was the company of law-abiding Americans who supported Trump and disliked Biden and his colleagues.

January 6 gave the Left’s efforts to stigmatize and ultimately criminalize conservatives a new impetus, but it didn’t start there. On August 4, 2019, leftist media personality and former CNN host Reza Aslan declared: “The President is a white nationalist terror leader. His supporters—ALL OF THEM—are by definition white nationalist terror supporters. The MAGA hat is a KKK hood. And this evil, racist scourge must be eradicated from society.”

Then on November 5, 2020, Wajahat Ali, an op-ed writer for the New York Times, offered the Biden camp some advice: “Biden/Harris needs to establish a war room just for media and messaging. You have treat [sic] the Republican Party and right wing media as the increasingly extremist group that they are. Biden has to heal the nation, court the voters, but the right wing movement is hostile.”

The following day, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, who was once promoted as a conservative, said: “Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to [sic] follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.”

These were the Left’s voices of reason. Then there was novelist D. C. Petterson, who tweeted on November 8, 2020: “Oh, the crimes of the Trump Reich must be punished. We need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or a series of Nuremberg Trials, or an extradition treaty with The Hague. That’s a necessary first step.”

Many other respected leftist spokespeople expressed enthusiastic support not only for deplatforming Trump but for silencing people who agreed with him. On February 22, 2021, Biden’s then attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland, who took office on March 11, stated that domestic terrorism was “more dangerous” than it had been even at the time of the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing. Garland promised to investigate not only the January 6 Capitol “rioters” but the “aiders and abettors who were not present on January 6.” These terms were elastic enough to encompass virtually anyone who supported Trump.

The plan didn’t work. Videos of the police opening the doors of the Capitol for the “insurrectionists,” and the improbability of a group of unarmed people being able to overthrow the most powerful government on earth, ultimately led to the collapse of the whole scenario. Trump’s directions to the protesters in hisJanuary 6, 2021 speech, when he told them to proceed“peacefully and patriotically,” also gave the lie to the claim that he was inciting them to storm the Capitol.

And now he has won the White House again. The left, however, has not given up. Leftists will find more opportunities to further their insidious agenda.