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Fascism Shmascism

My friend Steve, whom I’ve known since the second grade, emailed me the other day to report that he had just attended a high school reunion. He and I didn’t go to the same high school, but he did run into former classmate Jerry at the reunion, whom I’ve also known since the 2^nd grade. Steve caught him up on what I’ve been doing in recent years, namely writing for the Freedom Center, and Jerry responded that he thought David Horowitz was a “fascist.” Jerry then proudly proclaimed himself a political moderate who avoids such extremes.

Sigh. “Fascist” is such a brainless, kneejerk accusation from the Left. As other pundits have noted, self-righteous progressives throw that word around either without understanding what it means, or knowing what it means and intentionally smearing their opponents with the label. Either way, to them a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the progressive agenda, which they believe is moderate. Progressives don’t refer to themselves as “far-Left” or “radical”; instead, everyone to the right of Chairman Mao is a far-Right extremist.

Benito Mussolini, the father of modern fascism, defined the word as “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state.” How in the world could anybody reconcile that with the small-government principle of conservativism? Jerry was quick to demonize our late founder Horowitz, but he clearly never read anything Horowitz wrote and never perused FrontPage Mag, or he would know that the whole mission of the Freedom Center is pro-freedom (the word is right there in our name), and anti-totalitarianism.

As for Jerry’s claim to being a centrist and rejecting extremism: he seems to think this is somehow noble and virtuous, but that all depends on where you believe the center is and what you consider extreme. These days, the political polarization in America is so intense that I don’t believe there even is, or can be, a center anymore. “Moderation” implies that there is a political spectrum, a sliding scale; but there isn’t a single issue today on which progressives and conservatives have common ground – hence, there is no spectrum, just two Americas: the people who want to make America great again, and the mob who wants to burn it down. As the Highlander tagline goes: there can be only one. Neutrality is not an option; you have to choose a side.

Trump’s “Fascist Playbook”

Speaking of kneejerk, hyperbolic accusations of fascism: Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (man, they really need to get a new name) announced at a press conference on Monday that President Trump will not be invited to address the civil rights organization’s national convention next month in Charlotte, North Carolina. This would be the first time in its 116-year history that the NAACP has excluded a sitting president from addressing its convention.

“This has nothing to do with political party,” Johnson said in a statement. Translation: This has everything to do with political party. “Our mission is to advance civil rights, and the current president has made clear that his mission is to eliminate civil rights.”

Blah blah blah. By “eliminating civil rights,” what the Left means is that the Trump administration rejects the progressive agenda of prioritizing illegals over citizens, criminals over the law-abiding, and “people of color” over whites.

Johnson continued:

Right now, it’s clear — Donald Trump is attacking our democracy and our civil rights. He believes more in the fascist playbook than in the U.S. Constitution. This playbook is radical and un-American.

The president has signed unconstitutional executive orders to oppress voters and undo federal civil rights protections; he has illegally turned the military on our communities, and he continually undermines every pillar of our democracy to make himself more powerful and to personally benefit from the U.S. government.

All of this is false – it’s always a hoot when the Left pretends to care about the Constitution – and I can’t help but think that Johnson’s tirade stems not from outrage over the purported “elimination” of civil rights but from bitterness over Trump’s alarming (to the Left) success with black voters. Trump garnered some 16 percent of black votes in the last election – the highest black support for a Republican presidential candidate in decades. He essentially doubled his electoral share of young (under the age of 45) black men, about three in 10 of whom went for Trump, roughly double the number he got in 2020.

Democrat elites are panicked that they are hemorrhaging major blocs of voters – blacks, Hispanics, men – to their arch-enemy, and they don’t know how to staunch the bleeding except by screeching impotently that Trump is Literally Mussolini™.

Sean Penn, Fascist

Unlike a lot of conservatives, I’m not a fan of HBO talk show host Bill Maher just because he comes down on the right side of an issue occasionally. He has a long way to go, as far as I’m concerned, to redeem himself for his contributions to the Left-wing Narrative. But credit where credit is due: he put radical fascist-lover Sean Penn in the hot seat on Sunday’s broadcast of Maher’s Club Random podcast, scolding him for meeting with dictators but refusing to meet with Trump.

Maher, who recently sat down to dinner with Trump and reported on his changed impressions, asked Penn if he still refuses to take a meeting with the President. Penn admitted as much and even said he wished Maher had said less about his own visit. Penn suggested that Trump was “successful” in manipulating Maher.

“It would have been successful if he had somehow seduced me into supporting him,” Maher pointed out. He went on to say, “Really, you’ll meet with fucking Castro and Chavez but not the president of the United States?”

Penn went much further than to simply take meetings with human rights abusers. In addition to friendly visits with the late Fidel Castro (“I had the privilege to introduce my children to comandante Fidel Castro”) as well as Fidel’s successor brother Raul, and Haiti’s Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Penn became literal BFFs with Venezuelan socialist strongman Hugo Chávez. He declared that anyone who referred to Chavez as a dictator should be incarcerated. When Chavez died in 2013, Penn wept and said, “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion. I lost a friend I was blessed to have.”

Penn defended to Maher his meetings with multiple dictators, saying, “I saw good results come out of some of those things in terms of that.”

“So, you really wouldn’t go?” Maher pressed him about sitting down with Trump.

The lifelong anti-American Penn blathered inarticulately in an attempt to justify himself but Maher slammed him for his “bad attitude.” He concluded, “You don’t know anything.”

And on that, Bill Maher and I agree.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior