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Perhaps the three clearest warning signs to watch out for as a society heads down the road to fascism are censorship, suppression, and propaganda. They’re an age-old trio which have empowered liberal fascists the world over and now they’re being applied to the Internet. Meanwhile, many of the people who are supporting the relevant actions and policies being carried out by the left appear to have no idea of the dangers that they are courting.
Thus, many are expressing outright approval rather than dismay as the first key symptom takes hold and paves the way down a dark highway: the redefinition of key social and political concepts and rules.
For example, when liberal satirist George Carlin famously griped about “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” in 1972 and when the matter headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, there weren’t any lifetime bans against individuals as we see on Twitter today and the FCC’s standards for policing the public airwaves were largely objective and few if any were complaining they were being wielded for political purposes. So, unlike today, whole ideas weren’t off-limits, and while this relatively objective system was far from perfect and indeed perhaps even misguided and futile, it wasn’t largely politicized.
But now the old standards for censoring profanity and obscenity on the airwaves have been largely superseded by increasingly punitive and subjective double standards on the Internet which seek to dictate and then punish what is now being labeled as offensive using methods which the left would likely have considered draconian only a few decades ago. Moreover, it’s not much of a surprise that these subjective guidelines are being used against conservatives in increasingly selective, undemocratic, political, and hypocritical ways since the people wielding them are predominantly liberals in deep-blue tech hubs like Silicon Valley.
What would George Carlin say about today’s Internet censorship in the name of political correctness? (George Carlin - 7 Words You Can't Say On TV/YouTube screengrab)
Additionally, conservative content that isn’t labeled as offensive is now often suppressed from appearing in peoples' social media feeds on the supposed grounds that it lacks relevance, or that others reacted negatively or stoically to it, or that it’s been deemed as fake even though sites like Facebook and Twitter are well aware, or at least ought to be well aware, that many probably wouldn’t agree with those assessments and would probably like to see it. Meanwhile, many feel that far more dubious content disseminated by those on the left bears no such high burden of exacting scrutiny.
Indeed, nowadays it appears that the left is even trying to redefine the word fascism itself and make it seem like an exclusively conservative phenomenon when in reality of course the most brutal fascist dictators and regimes of the past hundred years or so have nearly all been on the far-left, such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the Khmer Rouge just to name a few. To see this revisionist history in action, check out the only two definitions for the word fascism in the Paperback Oxford English Dictionary Seventh Edition, emphasis added:
Fascism /fash-i-z’m/ n. 1 a right-wing system of government characterized by extreme nationalistic beliefs and strict obedience to a leader or the state. 2 extreme right-wing or intolerant views or behaviour.
And it seems that the misinformation being disseminated by the printing arm of the British university where Bill Clinton spent years as a Rhodes Scholar doesn’t end there. The same dictionary, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2012, also contains this oxymoronic gem as its sole definition of the word Nazi, again emphasis added:
A member of the far-right national Socialist German Workers’ Party.
Yeah, because a socialist workers’ party sounds so “far-right,” doesn’t it?
It is this oft-lamented revisionist history which has led to violent far-left groups of self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” going around doing what they don’t seem to realize are blatantly fascist things in the supposed name of fighting fascism while the irony of their obvious hypocrisy seems totally lost on them.
“Anti-fascists”? If this group of so-called “protesters” doesn’t like what you have to say, then they just might hurt you in the supposed name of free speech. (cantfightthetendies/ Flickr)
However, there are two main reasons not to blame the self-proclaimed “anti-fascists” - or three if you count the potential violence. First, those who do blame them risk running afoul of the aforementioned subjective double standards of what’s considered offensive nowadays. Afterall, it seems perfectly okay to be a far-left fascist hypocrite on Facebook or Twitter. Indeed, many if not most of them seem quite proud of it. But on the other hand, taking to the Internet to point out someone’s unenlightened anti-intellectual state of self-contradiction or worse yet to mock them for it might just get you thrown into “Facebook jail.”
The second reason not to blame the so-called “anti-fascists” for their distinctly fascist tendencies is that they appear to be the ones who were spoon-fed propaganda starting at a very young age then sacrificed on the altar of the American education system. Of course that system is largely run by the far-left teachers’ unions, whose members in the liberal utopia of Boston never seem quite satisfied earning an average of $90.5k/year to indoctrinate the youth as early as possible and take the summers off - a true lefty dream job if there ever was one, complete with benefits which members of other unions could only fantasize about, like a near-total lack of accountability. Indeed, in the corrupted education system which these teachers vote in droves to protect, no matter how bad they mess up, it’s always other peoples' kids who pay the price - and pay they have now, for generations.
So perhaps it’s no small wonder how many members of the so-called “anti-fascist” groups on the left couldn’t spell the word fascist correctly if somebody quizzed them. Maybe it’s no accident that the name “antifa” ends after the second “a” as that could help CNN avoid embarrassing mistakes in B-roll money shots of people holding placards. And maybe we should ask the teachers’ unions if we should hand out partial credit for those who answer “f-a-s-h-i-s-m” since that’s at least close to the word fashion and thanks to the now-decades-long cultural shift away from intellectual pursuits and towards unabashed consumerism fueled by entitlements and narrated by networks like MTV and CNN, many of these “protesters” appear to be far more adept at wearing designer clothes than they are at political science, civics, or history.
Anti-fascist or fashion statement? (Old White Truck/Flickr)
Thus, ironically it is indeed the very so-called “anti-fascist” protesters themselves who perhaps best reveal just how well the stage has been set for the rise of fascism in America and who stand poised through their own ignorance to be its unwitting instruments. All of the elements which have been historically necessary for the rise of fascism are here: large masses of miseducated people who are oblivious to their own counterproductive hypocrisy and to the puppet strings which they’ve affixed to themselves while awash in a semi-coordinated tsunami of sociopolitical propaganda being carried out from the top down for somebody else's benefit but which nonetheless has them both convinced that they occupy the moral high ground and willing to use violence against those who voice dissent; all the while their misguided minds were long ago closed off to the truth, which is now very effectively censored and suppressed to the sound of great applause from the left.
Sound familiar?
(Bundesarchiv, Bild 137-004055 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
The author, Marty Gottesfeld is an Obama-era political prisoner. To learn more about his case or donate to support him, please go to FreeMartyG.com.
