Meet the New Fascists, Same as the Old Fascists
"Fascist" or "Semi-fascist" is the new perjorative being tossed at "MAGA Republicans," but it looks more like a classic case of projection. And there are other targets.
Economist Steven Moore (emphasis added):
In just the last few weeks, Liz Truss, Britain's new prime minister, has been denounced by critics as a "fascist." So has Giorgia Meloni, Italy's newly elected prime minister. Along with all Republicans in Congress, Texas and Florida GOP Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis and, of course, former President Donald Trump. Every one of the tens of thousands of "MAGA Republicans" who attend Trump rallies, too.
Dangerous fascists, for that matter, all of whom critics say need to be shut up.
Truss is a fascist because she wants to cut taxes. Meloni is a fascist, and getting banned from several social media platforms, because she gave a rousing speech endorsing God, family and country. What a dangerous tyrant. Republicans in Congress are fascists because they support work for welfare and are trying to block the Green New Deal.
Hillary Clinton said after a recent Trump rally in Ohio, "I remember as a young student ... I'd watch newsreels and I'd see this guy standing up there ranting and raving, and people shouting and raising their arms." Trump's defeated 2016 Democratic presidential rival was referring to Hitler.
"You saw the rally in Ohio the other night," added Clinton, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state. "Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour, and you have these rows of young men with their arms raised." She didn't quite say it, but the implied message was clear: These crazy Trump supporters wanted to say, "Heil Hitler."
At least President Joe Biden doesn't call his political adversaries fascists. They are only "semifascists." What a relief.
Aren't these the same people who have urged raising the level of civil discourse? Wasn't Biden supposed to "unify" the country with Trump out of the picture?
What is so infuriating about these slurs is that the Left doesn't even understand what a fascist is. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, fascism is "a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government." The Britannica Dictionary defines fascism as "a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government."
Let all that sink in for a minute. Who are the fascists here? A government that "controls the lives of the people." Let's see — we have a group of politicians who shut down schools, businesses, restaurants and churches during COVID-19. A government that is now telling us what kind of light bulbs we can put in our homes, what temperature we can set our thermostat in our living rooms, what kind of car we can buy and what kind of drugs we need to be inserted into our arms.
Who is the leader who is vastly supersizing our centralized government? Biden and congressional Democrats have already spent $4 trillion expanding nearly all the power structures of government in Washington. If this isn't fascistic, what is?
But here's the rub. The definition of "fascism" has gradually been evolving over time. Nowadays, according to the Collins Dictionary, fascism "is a set of right-wing political beliefs that includes strong controls of society and the economy by the state" (emphasis added).
By this definition, leftists can't be accused of being fascists because they want to use government for virtuous ends, while the Right wants to use government to further enrich the rich, spread racism and deny science.
What we have here is a clinical case of "projecting." Democrats and other leftist parties around the world accuse the Right of wanting to expand government powers when that is precisely the overriding objective of the modern-day American Left.
It is prototypically fascistic. Elevate race and skin color into the public debate. Trample civil liberties. Squash those who disagree with the reigning government. Partner up Big Government with Big Business and micromanage the economy through dictates from the central planners. Put your political enemies in handcuffs and jail without a trial. Trample over the traditional guardrails that were installed to protect liberty — by changing voting rules, ending the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate and discrediting and trying to pack the Supreme Court. Declare everything, including COVID-19 and climate change, an existential threat to justify more power to the politicians.
So what is a fascist really? The Left says it is anyone who opposes what they want to do to expand government.
But the real definition of a fascist is a leader who wants to exploit governmental power to suppress the basic liberties of individuals. It is the partnership of government and private industry for political power and monetary gain. To find it in modern-day America, the folks at the White House may want to look in the mirror.
Speaking of neofascists. . .
The new loyalty oath imposed on Jews
Melissa Langsam Braunstein, for the Washington Examiner magazine:
On college campuses, in progressive organizing spaces, in some professional contexts, and even among friends, Americans are increasingly being told their Zionism is disqualifying. For many Jews, that means an aspect of their own identity makes them persona non grata in spaces where left-wing views are paramount. For non-Jews, maintaining until-recently mainstream, pro-Israel opinions means risking social stigmatization and professional harm. Although this problem has begun to gain some visibility, it’s time Americans understood the extent of the social pressure to self-censor or else face the mob.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jews keeping their Zionism hush-hush weren’t eager to be interviewed. However, 32 Jewish and non-Jewish students and young alumni, academics, communal and advocacy group figures, governmental leaders, activists, and creatives contributed to this article. Taken together, what follows is a portrait of profound societal changes.
These changes, it must be noted, affect all Jews in these spaces because they are greeted with suspicions and assumptions about their support for Israel that they must either dispel or confirm. And this manifests in various ways.
In 2015, University of California, Los Angeles, student Rachel Beyda was expecting to be confirmed without incident to the student council’s judicial board but was met with a bizarre question from a member of the council: “Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” Beyda was asked, “how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?” After a lengthy discussion of Beyda’s Jewish identity, from which Beyda was excluded, her nomination was voted down. (This was only reversed when a faculty adviser to the council stepped in.)
The incidents that make national headlines give the public a rare window into the discrimination regularly wielded in left-of-center institutions. For example, there was an explosive controversy about whether one can be both a feminist and a Zionist, which the Women’s March's then-leader Linda Sarsour answered firmly in the negative. Jewish lesbians were ejected from Chicago’s Dyke March for carrying a Pride flag emblazoned with a Jewish star because some attendees were uncomfortable with the symbol’s association with the Israeli flag. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) was “demonized by extremists as a white supremacist, as a supporter of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, [and] genocide” for condemning Hamas’s terrorism. The Washington, D.C., chapter of the environmental group Sunrise Movement refused “to participate in a voting rights rally” alongside three Jewish groups. An undergraduate at the State University of New York, New Paltz, was expelled from a “sexual assault awareness group” she co-founded over an Instagram post describing Jews as indigenous to Israel. And the list goes on.
Each time a particularly egregious case broke through, though, it quickly faded from the news, as true inclusion was quietly eroded yet again.
Support for Israel, of course, is mainstream among American Jews. In 2019, Gallup found that “95% of [American] Jews have favorable views of Israel,” and in 2021, the Pew Research Center reported that 82% of American Jews consider Israel “‘essential’ or ‘important’” to their Jewish identity, one of the highest markers of commonality among famously fractious co-religionists.
Yet younger Jews are feeling compelled to camouflage that piece of themselves. A 2021 Brandeis Center poll found that “50% of Jewish [college] students hide their Jewish identity and more than half avoid expressing their views on Israel.” A 2022 survey by the American Jewish Committee reported that “28% of American Jewish millennials say that [the] anti-Israel climate on campuses or elsewhere has damaged their relationships with friends” and “23% reported that the anti-Israel climate on campus or elsewhere has forced them to hide their Jewish identity.” These are nontrivial numbers.
This shift toward stigmatizing Zionists has been snowballing for decades, according to Brandeis University professor emerita Joyce Antler. “Progressives were always divided about Israel, but that sense of Israel as an aggressive, imperialist state grew from the late 1960s through the early 1980s,” she told the Washington Examiner magazine. “Many of the feminists I interviewed for [the book Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement] about their experiences in the 1970s and 1980s mentioned their hesitancies to identify publicly as Jews or to support Israel.”
The timing is conspicuous. “The USSR invested massive resources into inculcating [conspiracist anti-Zionism] among its supporters among [the] Western Left” during the 1970s-1980s, said Izabella Tabarovsky, a senior program associate at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute. “Today’s hard Left reproduces verbatim the slogans, motifs, and explanatory logic of conspiracist Soviet anti-Zionism.”
“We’re well beyond demonization and delegitimization of Israel. We’re now into [attacks on] Zionists, on Israel supporters here, and moving into targeted attacks on Judaism,” said Miriam Elman, executive director of the Academic Engagement Network. “What’s changed in the last decade or so is how anti-Zionist Jews have been pushed to the forefront to minimize [charges of] antisemitism and hostility toward Zionists.”
Implicit and explicit pressures are forcing American Jews to adapt. One common adjustment involves first impressions.
Kayla Hutt, a freshman at New York University, recalled showing her “Why NYU” application essay to her high school headmaster: “There was a big chunk of it that was about the Chabad and the Hillel, and the overall Jewish community at NYU. ... He told me I shouldn’t have that in there — that it’s enough they’ll see I go to a private yeshiva high school and I shouldn’t rub it in their faces that I was in the Israel Awareness Club and that I’m a proud Zionist.”
The headmaster’s strategy was successful but left Hutt feeling that “it’s very complex. We spend our entire lives in private Jewish school, are taught Jewish values and taught to lead Jewish lives, but at the same time, we’re living in America, immersed in this secular world as well.”
Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, an educator with StandWithUs and project director at the Endowment for Middle East Truth, recalled learning a former colleague’s LinkedIn page made no mention of his previous employer: “I reached out to the guy, and he said he’s proud of his work there, but there’s a complication of working with a Zionist group and now working in the financial sector. ... A lot of young Jews told me they do this or know people who do this. If they’re applying to college, they do not mention it. Several told me they have two resumes. One’s sterilized with no mention of Jewish or Zionist activism, and one mentions those in case the organization they’re applying to is friendly.”
Interviewees shared two explanations for why Zionist affiliations are scrubbed from resumes or LinkedIn. Either the reference is considered professionally irrelevant or erasing it sidesteps controversy.
The latter particularly motivates junior faculty, who can lose job opportunities for minor reasons. Ayal Feinberg, who chairs the junior faculty section at the Academic Engagement Network, said younger academics who study Israeli Jews may “submit two different CVs, one that mentions Israel and one that doesn’t.” In other words, even researching Israeli Jews could work against junior faculty.