BY DAVID HARSANYI
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/columns/davidhasanyi/2022/09/02/who-are-you-calling-a-fascist-mr-president-n1626239;
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
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.
Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center notes that fascists “believed that multiparty democracy weakened the nation and that competitive capitalism was wasteful and exploitative. Their alternative was a one-party state that guided the economy through regulation and sector-based accords between labor and business.”
Well, is it not the left that champions government intervention in the economy, with never-ending regulations, subsidies, and mandates that effectively allow for controlling the means of production? Leftists — some incrementally, some less so — are the proponents of nationalizing the health care system, the energy sector, and education. Again, if progressives have any limiting principles when it comes to intervention in our economic lives, I’d love to hear about them.
Related: The Left Should Be Happy With Biden
Are the most vociferous defenders of “democracy” not the ones who sound suspiciously like they want a one-party state? Modern Democrats have stopped debating policy or accepting the legitimacy of anyone who stands in their way. They will pass massive, generational reforms using parliamentary tricks, without any input from the minority. And they don’t merely champion their work as beneficial; they claim these bills are needed for the survival of “democracy” and “civilization” — nay, the survival of the planet. Anyone who opposes saving Mother Earth is surely an authoritarian. There is nothing to debate. The villainization of political opponents isn’t new, but we are breaking new ground.
Some may find it a bit fascist-y that the FBI feels free to instruct giant rent-seeking corporations to censor news to help elect their preferred candidate, as it did with Facebook. Or that the White House is in the business of “flagging” “problematic posts” and threatening corporations to “root out” “misleading” speech or be held accountable. One wouldn’t be off base seeing a “Disinformation Governance Board” that sifts through speech the administration dislikes or a Justice Department that treats those protesting authoritarian school boards as “domestic terrorists” as “semi-fascist.”
It is curious, as well, that the same people who control basically all major institutions in American life — academia, media, unions, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, trade associations, public schools, publishing, the entire D.C. bureaucracy, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, not to mention the presidency and Congress — claim to be victims of budding authoritarianism. The only major institution free of progressives’ grip right now is the Supreme Court. And the left is engaged in a systematic effort to delegitimize the Court for doing its job and limiting the state’s power.
None of this is to say that the right is innocent. I often find myself debating the populist right on issues ranging from the free markets and the role of the state. Abuses of the Constitution should be called out no matter who engages in them. However, progressivism’s crusade to destroy the separation of powers, its attacks on religious freedom and free speech, its undermining of civil society, its binding of the economy to the state, and its fostering of perpetual dependency and victimhood are far bigger long-term threats to the republic than Trumpism — and far closer to the definition of “semi-fascism” than the Republican agenda.
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BY MATT MARGOLIS
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/02/heres-what-bidens-speech-tells-us-about-his-sinister-plans-for-next-year-n1626405;
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BY MATT MARGOLIS
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/02/bidens-hitler-esque-speech-was-even-too-much-for-cnn-n1626394;
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
I must admit that I’m still trying to wrap my head around Biden’s primetime speech on Thursday evening. Who thought this was a good idea?
Biden’s message was bad enough—his political opponents are fascists, and if you don’t support him and the Democrats, you’re a fascist, too—but the staging felt like something from 1933 Germany, and the ominous red lighting in the background didn’t help.
The optics were so bad that even some at CNN were alarmed by the spectacle.
The use of the Marines behind Biden for such a blatantly political speech was criticized by the network’s chief national affairs correspondent, Jeff Zeleny.
“There’s nothing unusual or wrong with a President delivering a political speech — it’s inherent in the job description,” Zeleny tweeted. “But doing it against a backdrop of two Marines standing at attention and the Marine Band is a break with White House traditions.”
CNN’s Brianna Keilar agreed, saying it “flies in the face” of the notion that the American military is “supposed to be apolitical.”
“Whatever you think of this speech the military is supposed to be apolitical,” Keilar tweeted. “Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that. It’s wrong when Democrats do it. It’s wrong when Republicans do it.”
The overtly partisan nature of the speech also didn’t sit well with CNN contributor Scott Jennings. “This was a very, very partisan speech. His core message to me was if you don’t vote Democrat, we don’t have a democracy anymore, so that’s not going to land very well at all with any Republican voter, no matter what kind of Republican they consider [themselves to be].”
Of course, not everyone on the network had the same response.
CNN correspondent Eva McKend, for example, dubbed the speech “very, very patriotic.”
“And something else that really stuck out to me is that he almost seemed to be reclaiming patriotism. Often you hear Republicans argue that they are the pro-America party. The Democrats are not patriotic enough. But what was more pro-USA than this speech?” she asked. “And I think this is exactly what Democratic voters wanted to hear. We honor the will of the people, right? A nod to our democracy but also a nod to preserving reproductive rights. He is the president of all America. We are still at our core a democracy. I mean all of these things, it was a very, very patriotic speech, and I think that that is a lot of what Democratic voters across the country—they want to be patriotic, too. They want to be part of the American story, too. I think he spoke to that.”
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BY STEPHEN GREEN
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/09/02/i-am-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-the-biden-regime-and-so-are-you-n1626390;
Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.
“Clear and present danger” aren’t words any president should use lightly because that’s when the big guns used to come out against the First Amendment — and might again.
Set aside for a few minutes the vaguely Nurembergesque optics of Thursday night’s historically divisive speech by Presidentish Joe Biden so we can concentrate on the content.
“MAGA Republicans have made their choice. They embrace anger,” Biden angrily declared. “They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth but in the shadow lies together.”
“That’s why respected conservatives, like Federal Circuit Court Judge Michael Luttig, has called Trump and the extreme MAGA Republicans, quote, a ‘clear and present danger to our democracy.”
Ben Shapiro called it “the most demagogic, outrageous, and divisive speech” he’s ever seen from an American president because Biden “essentially declared all those who oppose him and his agenda enemies of the republic.”
Biden’s speech came just two days after he not-so-implicitly threatened [VIP link] millions of law-abiding Americans with military action. “For those brave right-wing Americans,” he sneered, “if you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something little more than a gun.”
Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel said that Biden’s word choice was as “deliberate as it was divisive,” reminding readers that the C&PD doctrine was “created by the Woodrow Wilson-era Supreme Court to curtail the free speech of Americans.”
Biden, warned Gabriel, “floated a legal pretext to silence Republicans heading into the midterm elections.”
Already, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have been revealed as willing stooges for government end-runs around the First Amendment, as our own Stacey Lennox noted just today:
On the heels of shocking comments by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the FBI’s role in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, initial e-mails related to a lawsuit filed by Schmitt and Landry show even more evidence that the Biden administration is using Big Tech to do what it is not, allowed to do according to the Constitution.
Lennox wrote that “Further disclosures could demonstrate that Big Tech and the government are conspiring to censor information related to any number of issues.”
But back to Thursday night’s demagoguery.
MSNBC’s Eugene Robinson approvingly described Biden’s speech as an “urgent, wartime address.”
Recommended: Finger-Pointing Federal Reserve Admits They Can’t Tame Inflation, Blames Congress
Well, with whom is Biden at war?
Biden has met the enemy, and he is us.
Many on the Right, including my friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser, believe that Biden’s speech was a display of weakness, “the panic and flop sweat of every Washington power player inside the Beltway.” I don’t necessarily disagree, but let's at least consider that it might have been something else: A display of dangerously hubristic overconfidence in the administration’s own power.
Their power not to govern but to rule.
What else is there to call it when the Biden regime goes from surreptitiously silencing critics via social media back channels to openly floating a Wilson-era pretext for jailing us?
If this scheming mediocrity believes he can use his signature to transfer up to a trillion dollars from blue-collar Americans into the wallets of lawyers, doctors, and Trans Deconstructive Lit Theory majors and call it “debt relief,” why wouldn’t he think he can use the coercive power of the state to silence his critics?
I’ve been writing for PJ Media for over 15 years, but this is the first time I ever felt like the company, all of these voices, might not be here tomorrow.
I don’t know if the Swamp cabal running the White House will get away with it, but I’m sure as hell not going to be quiet about it — and neither will anyone else on any of the Townhall websites.
If you’d like to help keep us speaking up and speaking out on behalf of you and 72 million other clear and present dangers to this regime, I’d sure appreciate your VIP membership.
You can become a member right here, and don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code for a 25% discount here on PJ and all six Townhall sites.
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Forget “democracy” — our republic might depend upon it.
