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On Monday, journalist Glenn Greenwald asked on X, “Is there a single person in DC or media acting as if Literal Adolf Hitler is about to assume power in 2 weeks in order to end American democracy, install fascism, and create a white supremacist dictatorship? Is it possible those who said this for years never believed it?”
You can answer that for yourself. But the fact is, the Donald Trump transition is turning out to be quite … normal. The president-elect is busy hammering out policy proposals and staffing his administration. Democrats are, of course, criticizing Trump and promising to give some of his nominees a hard time in confirmation hearings. But that is the sort of thing one always sees in transitions from one party to the other. What is absent is the kind of ugly, fevered, frenzied, over-the-top rhetoric about Trump that characterized the campaign.
Remember? Vice President Kamala Harris called Trump a fascist. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Trump a fascist. Media talkers such as Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski called Trump a fascist. Journalists and academics called Trump a fascist. (Sample headlines from The New Yorker: “What Does It Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist?” and The Atlantic: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”) For a while, it seemed like everyone on the left with a podcast, TV show or X account called Trump a fascist.
Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden became the focus of nearly nonstop discussion about fascism and Nazism. In the runup to the event, it was entirely commonplace for media commentators to compare the rally to the infamous Nazi rally held at the Garden in 1939. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate Trump defeated in 2016, told CNN that Trump would be “actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”
The fascist talk got so crazy that ABC News conducted a poll asking voters whether the 2024 candidates were fascists. The result was that 44% of registered voters said Trump was a fascist, 18% said Harris was a fascist and 5% said both were fascists. Only 32% of those surveyed gave the obviously correct answer, which was that neither was a fascist.
In retrospect, perhaps that was the moment — the poll was released on Oct. 25 — when the fascist talk jumped the shark. If a large majority of American voters called the major-party candidates fascists — and a combined 67% said Trump, Harris or both were fascists — then the concept of fascism had lost any meaning. It was just talk.
Maybe that is why the talk seemed to disappear so quickly after the election. When Trump won not only the electoral vote but the popular vote as well, many looked back on the fascist moment of just a week earlier and asked, “What was that all about?”
It was about defeating Trump, of course, and when it didn’t work, it became an embarrassment, certainly for the most fervent fascism talkers. After the election — and just weeks after calling the Madison Square Garden rally “Nazi-like,” Scarborough and Brzezinski traveled to Mar-a-Lago for an audience with Trump. Afterward, they said they wanted to “restart communications” with the incoming president, as if he were a normal political leader and not the fascist they said he was.
Such turnabouts were why Greenwald could look around and note that nobody in official Washington is acting as if all those dire predictions have come true. Instead, it’s mostly business as usual. Politicians and media figures are debating whether there should be one big bill or two. Whether tariffs should apply to this or that product. What border security measure would be most effective. No one is acting as if “Literal Adolf Hitler is about to assume power in 2 weeks in order to end American democracy, install fascism, and create a white supremacist dictatorship.”
The damage the fascist moment did to our political discourse is hard to measure at this point. Maybe it will become clearer later. But we know that many in media, government and academic circles hurt their own reputations by losing their heads over Trump.
They also demonstrated the limits of their own influence. On Monday, radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump about the effect the election has had on the most dedicated anti-Trump voices in the media. “I think they’re disrespected,” Trump answered. “I think they’re not taken so seriously. … They were totally opposed to me. … They were opposed to me at levels never seen before … and I won.”
For all those knownothings calling Trump a Fascsts comes this we used in our Younger days TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR,WHAT YOU SAY,IS WHAT YOUR ARE,WHAT YOU ARE IS WAHT YOU SAY,TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR the Democrat/Globalists are the Enemies along with the UN as well
Anyone that supports immigration is a Fascist…
Supporting immigration is about spreading satanic worshiping muslims around the world…
…
But here is the new theme… “CLIMATE REFUGEES”
What better way to dupe the masses… so satanic worshiping muslims can be brought into Western Nations… under the guise of “Climate Refugees”….
The Raw Egg Nationalist Reports:
“What makes the climate migration scenario so dangerous is that we’re being told we must encourage the migration to take place as soon as possible. We must take an active role in it to minimise the suffering caused.”
Now there’s an excuse for illegal immigration and the spreading of satanic worshiping muslims around the world…
Islam = Islamofascism
I guess those type of “migrants” will be avoiding Southern California.
The only one who brings up fascism is AOC
Where Did All The Fascism Talk Go?
It’s being stowed away for the next 4 years. Does it matter if the Left doesn’t believe it? It’s all they really have. They will dust it off for JD Vance. They always need a fascist.
The lies about conservatives being “fascists” will continue until the underlying lie about fascism being on the political right is exposed. Dinesh D’Souza wrote a great book about this in 2017 called “The Big Lie,” which I urge everyone to read.
The truth is that fascism and Nazism, although arguably slightly to the right of outright communism, were actually hard-core leftist movements that simply added a nationalistic element to give socialism more political traction compared to the more abstract international version of socialism.
I realize that is not news to readers here, but we need to realize that it *is* news to most of the general public. Do a search for “Were the Nazis left or right” and see what you find. The vast majority of what you will see are claims that the Nazis were indeed right wing, and conservatives are trying to gaslight people into believing they were left wing.
Here is my answer to those claims:
National Socialism is Not Right-Wing
How the deceptive mislabeling of fascism and Nazism distorts modern politics
https://russp.substack.com/p/the-false-flag-of-right-wing-fascism
The fascism talk died down (temporarily) because the shrills don’t see the point of flapping their pie holes, now that Trump has been elected.
My guess is the talk will be resurrected again every single time Trump makes a decision that doesn’t fit in with their narrative (or that would prove them wrong).
Are you sure the correct answer was “neither is fascist”? Remember Mussolini’s own definition of Fascism: the union of corporate and state power. Using that as the definition, there’s a reasonable case to be made that the correct answer was “both are fascist.” At very least, a case can be made that America has two fascist parties, one of which has a very noisy and influential cultural Marxist faction, and the other of which has an, alas insufficiently influential, classical liberal faction.
One can only hope the “cultural Marxists” crawl back in the whole from whence they came. Their “end game”, political Marxism, has repeatedly failed unless practiced at the end of a gun barrel or prison cell. Politically or culturally, it is the ideology of tyrants and psychopaths who coerce the stupid into thinking the human condition, as we now know it, is mankind’s fatal flaw. Their tactics seem to be most effective among those we would expect more from: college students.