RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/who-are-you-calling-fascist-mr-president-david-harsanyi/

The other day, President Joe Biden accused voters of the opposition party of turning to “semi-fascism.” This is probably the first time in American history a president has openly attacked the opposing party’s constituents in this way.

Then again, Biden, who once alleged that the chaste Mitt Romney was harboring a desire to bring back chattel slavery, is prone to stupid hyperbole. And it’s true that most people who throw around the word “fascist” fail to do so with much precision. These days, the word “democracy,” like “fascism,” has lost all meaning. According to Democrats, asking someone to show ID before voting is an attack on “democracy,” but so is the Supreme Court’s handing back power to voters on the abortion issue. When you have no limiting principles of governance, anything that inhibits your exertion of power is seen as anti-“democracy.” If students have loans to be paid, “forgive” them. If you can’t pass a bill, the executive branch should do it by fiat. If the court stops it, pack it. Power is only to be limited when the opposition holds it.

A microcosm of this confused thinking can be found in the recent spate of hysterical media pieces about alleged Republican “book banning.” The use of “ban” by the media is more than a category error; it’s an effort to paint parents who use the very same exact democratic powers the left has relied on for decades as book burners. Public school curricula and book selection are political questions decided by school and library boards. Neither have a duty to carry every single volume on racial identitarianism or sexually explicit material simply demanded by some busybody at the American Library Association.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/why-are-we-surprised-bidens-speech-bruce-thornton/

Last week’s speech by Joe Biden was the epitome of the Democrat Party’s totalitarian instincts. Even the banana-republic staging–– two Marines flanking the president, the lurid blood-red lighting, and a photo of Biden orating with raised fists––evoked the theatrics beloved by dictators. The burden of the speech was the dangerous “semi-fascism” of Donald Trump and his millions of MAGA supporters, which similarly recalled the “enemies of the state” like Jews, “deviationists,” and kulaks that typify autocratic regimes, as do the numerous “big lies” lacing Biden’s rant.

All this has been noted and deservedly criticized by commentators, some of them even on CNN. But the implications that the Dems and Biden have violated some venerable norms of “our democracy” were puzzling. For nearly 60 years the Democrats have been relentlessly moving farther to the Left and adopting its vicious “any means necessary” tactics for acquiring and keeping power. All it needed to reach a wider audience were decades of an educational system corrupted by leftist ideology.

But even before the chaos and degradation of politics in the Sixties got this malignant ball rolling, starting in the late 19th century Marxism had gained a foothold in our culture and politics. Progressivism was the political philosophy that was the vehicle of Marxist assumptions that both ideologies share.

Like Marxism, progressivism favors centralized power, technocratic control, the perfectibility of people, and the pretensions of “science” as the means for undermining the Constitution’s limited, balanced, and divided powers. This constitutional structure is necessitated by a human nature driven by zero-sum “passions and interests” that need power in order to be realized. And both ideologies scorned the Founders’ principles of federalism, unalienable human rights, individual freedom, traditional wisdom, common sense, and civil society.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/09/04/it-took-less-than-a-day-for-joe-biden-to-retract-his-attacks-on-maga-republicans-n2612635

Joe Biden, who everyone thought would play the role of Mr. Unity, set off a bomb Thursday and later went on vacation. That incendiary device was the fascistic speech he delivered on the grounds of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Biden decided to waste precious time not talking about inflation, drug cartels, border security, the rising fentanyl crisis, rising crime, or inflation—but MAGA Republicans and their supposed threat to the country.

The irony is as thick as concrete. The speech was supposed to be a smackdown of the alleged “semi-fascist” elements in America but made Biden look like Franco. The Democrats are obsessed with Nazi references when attacking politicians and viewpoints they don’t like. This speech is the closest anyone has ever come to embodying those heinous principles, Joe Biden, of all people, was the one to send it when it came to channeling their inner Hitler.

The remarks were a trainwreck. He smeared tens of millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump as enemies of the republic and then called for unity. Questioning election results, protected by the First Amendment, is now a domestic terrorist activity. Does Joe know his press secretary is an election denier? 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/03/whos-really-threatening-american-democracy/

There were many striking things about that weird Joe Biden speech the other night. First and foremost, it was a spectacular failure of optics, something the political class from which Biden hails is supposedly so brilliant at. For some reason, Biden and his team decided he should address the American people in front of an Independence Hall in Philadelphia – birthplace of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – illuminated in blood-red lighting: a peculiarly Nuremberg-esque aesthetic given his subject – as we’ll come on to – was the supposedly proto-fascistic threat posed by Trumpist right-wingers. But the speech was also a spectacular display of brassneck – a tirade against authoritarianism that only underlined the ‘respectable’ authoritarianism that Biden himself has helped usher in.

Building on his recent shameful comments about the supposed ‘semi-fascism’ of former president Trump and his supporters, Biden cast the modern Republican Party in his speech as a threat to America itself. ‘Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic’, he thundered. ‘Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans’, he kindly conceded. ‘But there is no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country.’ Given 74million people voted for Trump in 2020 – the second-highest number of Americans to ever vote for a presidential candidate, just behind Biden in that same election – one wonders who does or does not count as a MAGA Republican. Still, the effect was to make Hillary Clinton’s infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comment look cute by comparison. Biden essentially cast vast swathes of the American public as domestic terrorists.

He reeled off a laundry list of the usual scare stories about Trumpism, ditching what might be legitimate criticisms of Trump and his more crazed supporters in favour of painting an image of a lurid fascistic hellscape. ‘[H]istory tells us that blind loyalty to a single leader and a willingness to engage in political violence is fatal to democracy’, Biden said, in a not-so-subtle nod to the 1930s. ‘January 6’, the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021, came up a lot. But while the Capitol riot was an unhinged and anti-democratic display, fed by Trump’s conspiratorial nonsense about the election being ‘stolen’ from him, it was not an ‘insurrection’, as Biden put it in his speech on Thursday night. It was a strangely carnivalesque riot that got seriously out of hand. Most of the Trumpists just wandered around the Capitol aimlessly, posing for self-incriminating selfies.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped ‘January 6’ being turned into a new 9/11 – a comparison vice-president Kamala Harris has explicitly made – and the justification for a new wave of authoritarianism. Which is where the cheek of Biden’s speech comes in. Since he came to power he has made tackling ‘domestic terrorism’ a priority. In June 2021, his administration published the first-ever national strategy for tackling domestic terrorism, pledging new resources to fight this ill-defined threat. When you hear officials and FBI agents speak about domestic terrorism, it seems to encompass both racist mass murderers and a much broader, vaguer category of ‘those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies’. Nevertheless, it seems to be the latter – with ‘January 6’ in mind – that particularly preoccupies the administration. Indeed, it is striking that this Democratic-led clampdown on extremism was sparked not by, say, the racist Charleston church shooting at the tailend of the Obama years, but by a big, dumb riot at which the only person shot was a Trump supporter.