RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/04/how-old-bad-ideas-become-wonderful/

There is no end of history. Instead, civilization is a constant fight to embrace what has worked for the common good through the ages—and to reject what in the past has failed abysmally. 

Bad and bankrupt ideas, protocols, and ideologies—like McCarthyism, communism, various cults, or fascism—resurface not because of their intrinsic or lasting value or record of success, but because civilizations become less vigilant and allow human vanities, ignorance, arrogance, and evil to reassert themselves. 

Joe McCarthy Is Back

Our Tail Gunner Joe (of semi-truck driving expertise and brilliant legal training fame) in a single week smeared roughly half the country as un-American “semi-fascists.” Then in one of the creepiest speeches and background sets in American political history, Joe Biden railed that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.” Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan in careful, sober, and exacting presidential tones; Joe Biden all but declared war against half his own people like a raving lunatic.

All that was missing from the rant was Biden waving to the crowd a purported list of names of prominent MAGA threats to our collective soul and screaming, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 members of the MAGA Party!”

Yet Biden never quite told us what was subversive about the “MAGA Scare” or wanting to “Make America Great Again.” It was merely a sort of conservative version of George McGovern’s call to “Come home, America.” Both slogans, like Obama’s “hope and change” banality, suggest things were either better before the present or will be better afterwards. 

Unable to acknowledge this, a more-than-usual angry, snarling, and nearly incoherent Biden screamed his McCarthyesque attack amid an eerie red-and-black lit background, punctuated by two U.S. Marines on guard in the shadows of the red glow. (Gen. Mark Milley was uncharacteristically silent about the use of military props for executive political agendas). The resulting lurid visual effect was a cross between an outtake from “Triumph of the Will” and a bad version of “Phantom of the Opera.” 

Biden barked out all sorts of fantasy enemies of the state, as he lumped 75 million people together as a collective existential threat to the soul of America. Left unsaid but understood is what Biden and the “good” other half are supposed to do with such an existential danger posed by millions of their fellow Americans. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-speech-had-it-all-backward-fascist-democratic-party-trump-ideology-america-jan-6-democracy-11662161065?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPT:

The Democrats have the “fascist” business wrong.

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.

Mr. Trump and his followers, believe it or not, are essentially antifascists: They want the state to stand aside, to impose the least possible interference and allow market forces and entrepreneurial energies to work. Freedom isn’t fascism. Mr. Biden and his vast tribe are essentially enemies of freedom, although most of them haven’t thought the matter through. Freedom, the essential American value, isn’t on their minds. They desire maximum—that is, total—state or party control of all aspects of American life, including what people say and think. Seventy-four years after George Orwell wrote “1984,” such control (by way of surveillance cameras, social-media companies and the Internal Revenue Service, now to be shockingly augmented by 87,000 new employees) is entirely feasible. The left yearns for power and authoritarian order. It is Faust’s bargain; freedom is forfeit.

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.