Tag: fascism

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First Amendment rights free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Politically Exposed Persecution

fascism, freedom, business, censorship

National socialism, as operated by the actual Nazis, did not seize all the major industries and run them as collectives or state-​owned businesses. The Nazis applied party control directly to big business, as a political-​regulatory matter. 

How different is what woke Democrats have been doing to business today, here in America, using multiple agencies of the United States federal government’s regulatory apparatus?

Marc Andreessen, investor, innovator, business genius, and early Internet pioneer, explained how in a discussion on the Joe Rogan Experience, last month.

Start with debanking, which the regulators can tell banks to do to “politically exposed persons.” Mr. Andreessen told Joe about a friend who was debanked, apparently because his job title was involved in the business use of crypto-currency. 

And debanking is exactly what you think it is: de-​platformed from the financial system.

Don’t worry, statist: you are not “politically exposed.” This only applies to critics of our quasi-​fascist system.

This commercial censorship is run pretty much like censorship on the social media companies after 2016, by soft pressure … the “raw power” of a “privatized sanctions regime.” Government functionaries notify a bank that a person or business is “politically exposed,” and the bank — fearing getting on the bad side of regulators — kicks the customer off the rolls. 

Politicians can haughtily state that it was the bank that did it. Banks, after all, are not obliged to serve everyone! They can pick and choose their customers.

Besides, there is no First Amendment right to have a bank account.

This is how woke bureaucrats can rule like Nazis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Communists Within the Form

“They’re not communists,” comedian Dave Smith recently told Tucker Carlson, referring to leading Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris. “They work for big business!”

Sure, but beside the point: they spew out commie talking points not as an excuse to overthrow the state and set up a communist one, but to overthrow the last vestiges of the Constitution — free-​speech rights, private property rights, the whole shebang — and consolidate power in the corporatist, neo-​mercantilist fascism that yearns to squelch all dissent.

National candidates talking “far left” allows gullible left-​leaners to back powerful insiders against the real outsiders, the churchgoers, the small business owners and entrepreneurs, free-​lance professionals and the like. 

The real revolution is what Garet Garrett, expanding upon Aristotle, called “revolution within the form.”

So, are Kamala Harris and Tim Walz just “useful idiots” preparing the way for the plutocrats’ totalitarian end game?

Would-​be Cackler-​in-​Chief aside, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman posits that Walz may be an out-​and-​out communist:

  • “As a high school teacher in the 1990s, Democratic vice-​presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz appeared to extol life under Chinese communism, telling his students that it is a system in which ‘everyone shares’ and gets free food and housing.”
  • “Walz’s rosy description of communism in China is similar to his recent controversial remark that ‘one person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.’ It also reflects his longstanding ties to the country.”
  • “After returning to the United States in the early 1990s, Walz started leading trips to China for American high school students, with support from the Chinese government. The trips were ‘arranged by a friend of Walz in China’s foreign affairs department,’ the Star-​Herald reported at the time. The Chinese government also provided some of the funding for the program.”

True-​believing communists in the old style? Or just woke, post-​Marxist totalitarians? 

It hardly matters when the point of what they say is not the dogma, but the performance, allowing them to revolt against us, and the constitutional order we rely upon.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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The New Non-Normal

Joe Biden MAGA speech

“Too much of what’s happening in our country today,” President Joe Biden offered last night, “is not normal.”

You can say that again!

“A crowd of about 300 invited guests — a mix of elected officials and dignitaries, along with Democratic supporters,” reported CNN, “watched Biden speak” at Independence Hall in Philadelphia “from behind panes of bulletproof glass.” 

The president said some other things with which I agree.

“There is no place for political violence in America. Period. None. Ever,” Mr. Biden intoned. Well, “ever” goes just a tad too far. After all, the American Revolution was violence. But generally, yes, Joe is right that “we can’t allow violence to be normalized.”

Which is why he should call out the political violence that occurred throughout the summer of 2020 as well as that of January 6th. 

Biden spoke against “the politics of grievance” and those who “obsess about the past.” But golly gee whiz, does Biden really want to alienate his Critical Race Theorist fan base?

“You can’t love your country only when you win” an election, he argued. Hasn’t that been an equal opportunity foible for both Rs and Ds — considering the 2016 as well as 2020 presidential results!

Losing the battle for the economy of the nation, Mr. Biden is looking for Campaign 2022 to be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” But making sweeping attacks about all who favor Trump being “semi-​fascists” has led even Democrats like U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan to criticize Biden.

“They refuse to accept the will of the people,” the president said of so-​called MAGA Republicans. “They embrace political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

Sadly, that applies to both parties as well.

“Get engaged,” Biden implored the audience. “Vote, vote, vote!”

Well … maybe just vote once.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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folly general freedom nannyism national politics & policies

Faucists on the March

Fauci, fascist, authoritarian, Covid

While many experts, including Southwest Airline’s CEO, think that the air filtration systems on jetliners are so good that wearing protective face coverings (“masks”) is pointless, our Doctor Anthony Fauci will have none of it.

When the National Institutes of Health head honcho and Big Pharma Pusher No. 1 was asked about whether we can ditch masks on airplanes, he responded predictably: no. “I think when you’re dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step.…” He says that even with first-​rate filtration systems, “masks are a prudent thing to do, and we should be doing it.”

This was on ABC News’s This Week on Sunday. 

“As Christmas approaches, COVID-​19 again threatens to upend American life, driving the spread, Omicron,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl narrated. “At least 43 states now have confirmed cases of the latest and by far most contagious variant yet. On Saturday alone, New York state reported nearly 22,000 new COVID cases, breaking a single-​day record set just the day before.” And then Karl mentioned total COVID deaths in the United States — but not the number of Omicron deaths. 

See how the propaganda is pitched? The breathless relaying of statistics, but nothing like a sense of the science.

Contra Fauci, these once-​discouraged and now-​forever-​exalted masks are not nearly as effective as made out. And they have severe “unintended” effects.

I put marks around “unintended” because for some people in power, the psychological effects of mandatory masks in a situation of perpetual or seasonal alarm might be the whole point: the inducement of a mass delusional psychosis. How very fascist.

We can appreciate the name “Fauci” both by rhyme and reason: Faucism is medical fascism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom media and media people social media too much government

Ceding “Science” to Totalitarians?

Covid, fascism, vaccination

A recent Reason article on New York’s new vaccination passport informs that “there’s a case to be made …” yet neglects to mention that the opposite case can also be made. 

What case is it?

Well, the Mayor Bill de Blasio-​sanctified case is that “these [totalitarian] measures are important for getting as much of the population vaccinated as possible in order to reduce virus mutation and prevent more harmful variants from taking root.” 

Yet the inverse is perhaps more persuasive. Several important figures in the medical and scientific community have been crying Cassandra* for some time, arguing that an ineffective vaccine, like the mRNA treatments sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna, may, according to epidemiological principles long understood, pressure the spreading viruses into the thing we don’t want: more deadly variants.

The normal course for a new contagion is for it to mutate into easier-​to-​spread but less deadly variants. Killing a host isn’t good for the virus, so it changes over time. Oddly, I rarely hear this mentioned.

Herd immunity, which is the prevalence in a community of enough people who can fend off the virus preventing transmission to weaker people, can only be helped by vaccination when the vaccines increase hosts’ immunity to obtaining it and spreading it — neither of which clearly applies to the current vaccines.

“From their very first conceptualization,” claims Geert Vanden Bossche, one of the biggest names in the industry to object to the vaccination campaign, “it should have been very clear that these ‘S‑based’ Covid-​19 vaccines are completely inadequate for generating herd immunity in a population, regardless of … the rate of vaccine coverage.”

Sans herd immunity but with universal vaccination, he says, deadlier variants could arise.

Is he right? I don’t know. 

But the case against vaccine passports might reference epidemiology and virology from sources outside establishment-​approved “scientific” opinion.

Totalitarians rarely have “the science” on their side.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 * Ineffective because suppressed on major social media, in part. You can find their discussion on Rumble, Brighteon, Bitchute and other upstart sites.

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free trade & free markets general freedom international affairs too much government

From Socialism to Fascism

Venezuela, socialism, fascism

Democratic socialism might seem all fun and games … right up until one is forced to choose between democracy and socialism. Those countries that choose the latter, like Venezuela, lose both prosperity and democracy, and then things get really bad.

But what happens when such a society’s dictator wises up?

“Bankrupted by Socialism, Venezuela Cedes Control of Companies,” Fabiola Zerba reports for Bloomberg. “Saddled with hundreds of failed state companies in an economy barreling over a cliff, the Venezuelan government is abandoning socialist doctrine by offloading key enterprises to private investors, offering profit in exchange for a share of revenue or products.” 

If that last sounds like less than full privatization, and unnecessarily cumbersome, it is. “Dozens of chemical plants, coffee processors, grain silos and hotels confiscated over the past two decades have been transferred — but not sold — to private operators in so-​called strategic alliances.…”

“Strategic alliances” sounds ominously … fascistic.

This is not gratuitous, for, as Peter Drucker explained, “Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.” And it is definitely not directly towards “free markets” that Venezuela now moves. Dictators and ruling juntas don’t like free markets. It makes them less integral to the wealth extraction process. 

And wealth, in their view, needs to be extracted!

It gives meaning to their lives.

Jon Miltimore, in an article at FEE, also uses the f‑word, and quotes my friend Sheldon Richman’s definition: fascism, noun : “socialism with a capitalist veneer.”

Really moving beyond 20th century mistakes would entail reviving actual free markets. Not “so-​called strategic alliances.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling international affairs

Subsidizing Chinese Attacks on American Ideals

Should the federal government fund organizations working at the behest of China and the Chinese Communist Party?

Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee have blocked an amendment sponsored by Representative Elise Stefanik (R‑NY) that, in her words, would have banned funding of academic institutions “if they have a partnership with any entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the government of the People’s Republic of China or organized under the laws of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The entities being referred to are so-​called Confucius Institutes, which, in addition to promoting innocuous educational goals, help spread the propaganda of the misnamed CCP. (The Chinese Communist Party should really now be called the Chinazi Party. Post-​Mao, the Chinese have stopped trying to communize everything and now permit markets to function to a significant extent — but, as in the fascist Nazi version of totalitarianism, always subject to sweeping interference and oppression.)

The current number of active Confucius Institutes in the U.S. is uncertain, but the National Association of Scholars counts at least 55, including 48 at colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, as part of a freeze on regulations issued toward the end of the Trump administration, President Biden has withdrawn a proposed rule that would have required schools to reveal any ties to Confucius Institutes.

Is it a bad idea to find out which schools are facilitating Chinazi propaganda? 

Is it a good idea to directly or indirectly fund Chinazi propaganda? 

No and no.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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general freedom ideological culture moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

An Evil Ism

socialism, Antifa, means, ends, refutation, fascism, intentions

With “democratic socialism” again on the rise, a refresher course in history seems apt: socialism has demonstrated the strong tendency to end up in totalitarian tyranny, poverty, and genocide.

As I mentioned on Monday, Reason’s Nick Gillespie suspects that this response is not very convincing to people tempted by socialism. But really, why not? What about a history of horror could be appealing?

Which is why the question “Do Socialists Mean Well?” as answered by Grant Babcock, might help. Babcock answers in the negative.* “Socialism is not ultimately an end but a means. And as a means, socialism is evil.”

With an evil means, one’s chosen end is irrelevant, because of other results. “If I told you I wanted to end homelessness, you might say I had good intentions,” Babcock explains. But if he confessed to seek that end “by conscripting the homeless into the army … [n]ot only should you say I have bad intentions, you shouldn’t give me any moral credit for saying I want to end homelessness.”

True. But Babcock has to engage in his extended argument about means because, for purposes of his essay, anyway, he began with the premise that while fascists are evil because they seek directly to harm some people, socialists do not.

Uh, really? Most socialists make much of taking from “the rich,” however they define the rich — as “the one percent” or “the privileged,” etc.

Call it expropriation; call it theft: that’s a lot of anger and ill will directed to one group of people.

In that way, the appeal of socialism is too much like the appeal of fascism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Babcock, by the way, denies the label “socialist” to social democrats who call themselves “democratic socialists” — by definition. On this matter, see “Bernie’s Slippery Definition of Democratic Socialism” and “Is Denmark Socialist?” on this site.

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education and schooling First Amendment rights folly ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

The Critique of Pure Intolerance

Christina Hoff Sommers, Lewis & Clark Law School, Federalist Society, fascism, free speech, censorship, no platform

If you are older than 50, you probably remember when “liberal” meant free speech advocacy to the point of absolutism. “I may disagree with what you say,” stalwart liberals pledged back in the Sixties, “but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Nowadays, if you are under 30 and have gone to college, you may not even have encountered this saw. 

Which has consequences.

Nine student groups protested, last week, the Federalist Society’s invitation of writer Christina Hoff Sommers to speak at Lewis & Clark Law School. The groups called it an “act of aggression and violence” and smeared the philosopher and Democrat as “a known fascist.”

Bari Weiss, writing in The New York Times, calls this “the moral flattening of the earth,” the “main effect is that these endless accusations of ‘fascism’ or ‘misogyny’ or ‘alt-​right’ dull the effects of the words themselves. As they are stripped of meaning, they strip us of our sharpness — of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists and misogynists or members of the alt-right.”

While this “flattening” does prevent the flatteners (bullies) from even seeing any gradations of threat or error, let’s not pretend to be surprised. Their techniques do not merely echo, but replicate exactly, neo-​Marxist postmodernist philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s proposal, in “Repressive Tolerance,”* to censor writing and speech “from the right.” 

Ideas have consequences. Just as Marxian socialism led to Lenin, Stalin and Mao, these tyrants led to Marcuse, whose thinking set much of today’s Academia into full tyranny mode.

It’s time for liberals “on the left” to repudiate explicitly the methods of tyrants … to their left.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* See Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Woolf, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965). My college political theory professor, a proud communist, was a big fan of Marcuse.

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crime and punishment folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies responsibility

Five Fascist Things

Antifa, fascist, fascism, November 4, protest, coup, overthrow, violence,

Mass protests have been planned for this Saturday in many major cities across the country. “On November 4, 2017,” says the Refuse Fascism website:

Take To The Streets And Public Squares in cities and towns across the country continuing day after day and night after night — not stopping — until our DEMAND is met:

This Nightmare Must End:

The Trump/​Pence Regime Must Go!

In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

The group took out a full-​page ad in the New York Times, repeating all that along with the ominous “Nov 4 • It Begins.”

Now, I am against fascism. You may have noticed that … reading between the lines. I’m for limited government, a classical liberal, a modern libertarian. Fascism arose in no small part as a replacement for liberalism, which fascists scorned for not promoting activist government. 

And though I’m not gung-​ho about President Trump, I do not see much fascism coming from the White House. I challenge tomorrow’s protesters to name five fascist things* the new president has done … that the previous president had not also done.

And then, I ask, what practical way could you oppose these putatively fascist things without taking to everybody’s streets until you get your way?

Also, please keep non-​violent, as promised. When protesters become rioters, bad things happen — including conjuring up greater authoritarian sentiment from some.

That reaction may not be fascism. But it wouldn’t be good.**

And, on the right: don’t welcome civil war, as some have already done.

Do you want to see blood running in the streets? I sure don’t.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Or four? Three? Two? One? Remember, we are talking about new fascism.

** Alas, everything bad in this world is not automatically fascism.

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