Free speech in particular has been under attack from the left. By labeling traditionally mainstream Christian beliefs as racist, homophobic, or bigoted, they seek to marginalize people of faith. Left-leaning progressive nonprofits like the Southern Poverty Law Center clamor to dox organizations that engage in speech they don’t like. Progressives at the IRS targeted nonprofit groups based on their political leanings. Progressive students at college campuses clamor to exclude or disrupt conservative speakers, abridging the freedom of others on campus who wish to hear them. When was the last time we saw conservatives shut down a progressive speaker on a college campus?
One particularly ironic example is happening in my own state, where progressive groups have demanded that a conference scheduled at Utah’s Brigham Young University in 2023 be moved because of the university’s morality standards. The Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS), an academic organization for scholars of ancient Greece and Rome, initially stood firm against the heavy pressure from progressives. But the group eventually caved, ironically invoking the group’s policies on inclusivity and diversity to justify excluding a university with a divergent view. These are the tactics of authoritarians.
The first bill introduced by Democrats in the 116th Congress also contains a raft of provisions limiting free speech. As my friend and colleague Senator Mike Lee often explains, Democrats believe anyone is free to publish opinions about political campaigns, but only if they don’t actually own the printing press.
Some in the media have taken to attacking what they call “bothsidesism”—which New York Times columnist Paul Krugman describes as the “almost pathological determination to portray politicians and their programs as being equally good or equally bad, no matter how ludicrous that pretense becomes.” Krugman believes some opinions (apparently, even mainstream conservative ones) are so beyond the pale that good journalists have a duty to shun them. Yes, fascist threads run deep in the fabric of the American left.
One need look no further than the confirmation hearings of Justice Kavanaugh to find fascism gone mainstream in America. They built upon some of the very same tactics I saw deployed at my last town hall. They were not interested in truth. They were interested in narrative. It didn’t matter what was real, only what could be projected. We saw key players dispense with the battle of ideas, again relying on debate-killing epithets to destroy the opposition at any cost. Truth became collateral damage.
We saw the divide-and-conquer tactics of identity politics in which men were pitted against women and stereotypes were taken as gospel truth. We witnessed the deployment of nonprofit networks to help stage the show. But most disturbing was the willingness to sacrifice long-standing institutional norms—the presumption of innocence, due process, and the very confirmation process itself—to protect political power. None of that is compatible with freedom. It’s far more compatible with fascism.
Again, I’m hesitant to call it fascism, because I think we have been far too careless in our use of that term. We should be reticent to use the word casually. Shame on the Democrats and their media allies for devaluing a term that should be reserved for extreme totalitarian regimes. When such radical terms are employed in the service of petty political battles, we are left with no language sufficiently strong to describe legitimate threats to our republic.
Nonetheless, if President Trump can be called a fascist for prioritizing border security or objecting too strongly to biased news coverage, then those same standards easily convict Trump’s opposition. Are there threads of fascism in American politics?
The government has indeed targeted, framed, and in some cases prosecuted political enemies—but they were not the enemies of Donald Trump. Thus far they have been the enemies of the left, ranging from conservative nonprofits to Trump appointees to the president himself.
The Democratic House under Speaker Pelosi looks to double down on this tactic going into 2020 with an avalanche of new congressional investigations designed to serve as opposition research rather than actual oversight.
Furthermore, we are seeing proposals to curtail freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights—but again, those proposals are coming from Democrats in Congress, not from the Trump administration. An in-depth look at the priority bills filed by Democrats in the 116th Congress shows an alarming attempt to fundamentally transform American institutions and forever alter our constitutional checks on centralized power.
In the political realm, we are seeing Democrats attempt to achieve through legislation what cannot be done at the ballot box, with proposals for vast new federal authority over state and local elections and campaign finance rules carefully crafted to do exactly the opposite of what they purport to do.
We are seeing a weaponization of national consensus on issues like fascism and racism. But perhaps most alarming is what we are not seeing. The weaponization of traditionally apolitical entities, particularly in the nonprofit sector, is invisible to most Americans. But the nefarious practice of using nonprofit charities as fronts for political organizations represents a chilling new battleground in the quest for political power.
What happens to people who express unpopular opinions in a fascist state? They get suppressed. Leftists once again turn to their time-honored tactic of suppressing debate with anger-inducing labels. Hate speech is the one they use to justify retaliation against ideas they wish to suppress. Where are we seeing suppression of political views in America today? The threat to free speech actually comes from the likes of left-leaning cultural, educational, and media sectors. Technology giants like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and even PayPal have gotten into the censorship game—where errors or overreach almost inevitably fall to the benefit of leftist speech.
Tucker Carlson called out PayPal in a February 2019 broadcast, pointing out that the online payment platform, upon which many rely for income, has taken to banning users whose speech the left-leaning company dislikes. He explained:
Last year, PayPal banned Alex Jones from using the platform for saying things they didn’t like. They have also banned anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer, the publication VDARE, and a number of other people and organizations whose speech they believe should be silenced.
[PayPal CEO Dan] Schulman admitted that his company takes guidance on who to ban from the Southern Poverty Law Center—that’s an entirely fraudulent organization that works as an arm of the Democratic National Committee. According to Schulman, “The line between free speech and hate, nobody teaches it to you in college. Nobody defined it in the law.” Well, that is ridiculous. It is very much defined in the law and has been for 50 years. In 1969, the Supreme Court conclusively decided that hate speech does not exist. But it doesn’t matter to Schulman or any of his allies on the left. To them, the First Amendment is merely a legal obstacle. It’s something to subvert rather than celebrate.
Granted, fascist elements can be found in the extreme movements of both right and left. The likes of Alex Jones and open white supremacists like VDARE are certainly beyond the pale. We are fortunate to live in a society in which we are free to reject such rhetoric. But when the left, using the SPLC as a metric, gets to decide what constitutes extreme speech, even the most mainstream conservative outlets can become a target.
There are plenty of fascist policies coming from outside the Trump administration. Trump may occasionally talk the authoritarian talk, but it’s the left that walks the authoritarian walk.