Mamdani Claims It’s ‘Important’ He Still Views Trump As ‘Fascist,’ ‘Threat To Democracy’ After White House Meeting
'Everything I said in the past I continue to believe'
‘Star Wars’ actor smears Disney and MAGA as fascist
When Disney-owned ABC briefly pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air over comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, "Star Wars" actor Oscar Isaac took it personally.
In an interview with GQ magazine, Isaac was asked what his stance was on returning to “Star Wars” — and while he recently claimed to be on board with starring in the franchise again, things changed after Kimmel’s removal from the air.
“Yeah. I mean ... I’d be open to it, although right now I’m not so open to working with Disney. But if they can figure it out and not succumb to fascism, that would be great,” Isaac said.
“If that happens, then yeah, I’d be open to having a conversation about a galaxy far away,” he added.
“What universe am I living in that now Hollywood is saying that Disney are fascists because, of course, the ABC thing and suspending Jimmy Kimmel? And so now, Oscar Isaac, who, you know, just made, what, $2 million off of ‘Star Wars,’ $6 million off of ‘Moon Knight,’ I’m told,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says.
“Now he has morals and standards,” she adds.
“The funny thing,” BlazeTV contributor Matthew Marsden says, “is that’s an absolute bait and switch right there, what he was doing, because he knows that the series that he was in was terrible and that ‘Star Wars’ was ruined and nobody likes it.”
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Antifa burns, the media spin, and truth takes the hits
On Monday night, violence erupted at UC Berkeley. Again.
That sentence alone might not shock anyone. Berkeley and riots go together like gender studies and Marxist slogans — a tradition older than most of its students. But this time, the target was different.
Christians and conservatives should keep showing up. Every TPUSA Faith event, every lecture, every debate — attend them. The more witnesses, the less room for lies.
The mob didn’t come for a politician or a protest. It came for families.
The crowd surrounded a Turning Point USA Faith event hosted by an officially recognized student club, featuring Christian apologist Frank Turek and atheist Peter Boghossian, along with comedian Rob Schneider and British commentator and satirist Andrew Doyle. In one evening, TPUSA offered more intellectual diversity than the entire Berkeley humanities department has managed all year.
The riot that proved the stereotype
Picture families walking into a campus hall to hear a Christian and an atheist debate civilly. Now picture an angry crowd blocking the doors, throwing bottles, lighting fires, and chanting, “Punch a fascist in the face!”
Their only problem: No fascists were present. Unless, of course, you classify Turek, Boghossian, and a few Christian undergrads as Mussolini’s heirs. But that’s Berkeley logic — where “diversity” means everyone thinks the same and disagreement is treated like violence.
The radical left has no greater enemies than Christianity and free speech. Combine the two, and leftists melt down faster than a Berkeley sophomore trying to define the word “woman.”
How did we get here?
Berkeley has been the stage for riots since the 1960s. If campus unrest were Broadway, Berkeley would be “The Phantom of the Opera” — always running, always loud, always masked. But tradition doesn’t excuse terror.
The deeper problem is the culture feeding it. In today’s universities, students are marinated in ideology, not inquiry. The humanities have traded Socrates for slogans and replaced debate with denunciation.
This worldview breeds fragility and fanaticism: emotional dependence on outrage, intellectual intolerance, and the conviction that disagreement equals danger. It’s no wonder students' activism now mimics the very authoritarianism they claim to resist.
Antifa’s unofficial motto might as well be: “Accuse your opponents of what you plan to do.”
The media’s complicity
Right on cue, the Guardian rushed to describe the riot as “mostly peaceful.” That phrase should be Berkeley’s new marketing slogan: Mostly Peaceful Since 1964.
The truth is simpler. The TPUSA attendees were peaceful. The rioters were not. They screamed in people’s faces, hurled debris, blocked exits, and called it “defending democracy.” Apparently, democracy now means assaulting Christians.
The radical playbook
If you want to decode the left’s method, just reverse the leftists' accusations. They say, “Don’t demonize others,” while labeling everyone to the right of Lenin a fascist. They say, “All voices deserve to be heard,” while drowning opponents in primal screams.
They say, “Fight oppression,” while physically intimidating families trying to attend a faith event.
At Arizona State University, a colleague of mine once wrote, “I’m all for free speech — but not for bigots,” to justify banning Charlie Kirk from campus. Translation: I love freedom — as long as no one I dislike exercises it.
This is the moral logic of the modern left: Disagreement equals harm, and harm justifies censorship — or violence.
The 'radical' minority that isn’t
We keep calling these leftists radicals, but that implies rarity. Surveys say otherwise. The ideological monoculture dominates academia. The “moderate left” isn’t moderating anything; it’s supplying the radicals with silence, funding, and applause.
The tenured class that claims to value “diversity of thought” has created an institution where dissenters are treated like heretics.
RELATED: The Antifa mob at Berkeley showed us what evil looks like
What must be done
First, Christians and conservatives should keep showing up. Every TPUSA Faith event, every lecture, every debate — attend them. The more witnesses, the less room for lies.
Second, tell your state legislators you don’t want tax dollars funding violent intolerance disguised as higher learning.
Third, warn every parent and student what really happens on college campuses. Prepare your kids to challenge the ideological orthodoxy behind DEI, critical theory, and the alphabet soup of new moral dogmas.
Finally, support alternatives. Seek out institutions that teach truth instead of propaganda — and organizations like TPUSA Faith that defend free inquiry.
That’s why I started my Substack: to expose the rot inside American universities before your children discover it the hard way.
The cure for intellectual darkness is light. The cure for ideological riots is courage. And the cure for the Berkeley disease begins with showing up, speaking truth, and refusing to bow.
'F**k your dead homie': Hateful leftists clash with TPUSA supporters as Charlie Kirk's planned tour ends in violence
Violence erupted outside a Turning Point USA event on the UC Berkeley campus as protesters gathered to challenge TPUSA's presence at the school on the final stop of TPUSA's tour after Charlie Kirk's assassination in September.
KTVU reported that protesters clashed on Monday with attendees outside Zellerbach Hall, where the event was scheduled to take place. Comedian Rob Schneider and Christian apologist Frank Turek headlined the event.
Other signs read: 'Kirk said death penalties should be public, quick, and televised ... Congrats Bud!' and 'TP belongs in the toilet.'
KTVU's Crystal Bailey described a "rowdy" crowd outside the venue, noting that there was heightened security as well.
The event sold out the 1,900-seat venue, a UC Berkeley TPUSA chapter representative told KTVU.
Bailey reported that the protests turned violent as protesters and attendees clashed, saying that there was "blood splattered on the ground" as the result of an "altercation."
In a now-viral video posted Monday night, leftist protesters and students could be heard chanting, "F**k your dead homie," referring to late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was publicly assassinated exactly two months ago Monday.
The crowd can be seen holding signs that read, "This machine fights fascism," "No safe space for fascists," "Karma's a b***h," and "The lion doesn't concern himself with the opinions of trash."
Other signs read: "Kirk said death penalties should be public, quick, and televised ... Congrats Bud!" and "TP belongs in the toilet."
A large red sign with two hammer and sickle symbols could be seen with the words "Drown Fascism in a Sea of Resistance." Underneath the slogan was an apparent reference to a group called the Revolutionary Student Organization. With a portrait of Mao Zedong on the "about" page of its website, the RSU participates in several forms of "direct action."
In other videos from the event shared by reporter Andy Ngo, activists can be seen shouting incoherently at California Highway Patrol officers and igniting smoke bombs.
TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet still claimed the event was a success. "Despite Antifa thugs blocking our campus tour stop with tear gas, fireworks, and glass bottles, we had a PACKED HOUSE in the heart of deep-blue UC Berkeley," he said, according to the New York Post.
KTVU reported that at least four students were arrested in connection with vandalism associated with the event.
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No Kings, no boundaries, no America
Fourteen years after Occupy Wall Street and five years after the George Floyd riots, the Democratic Party has embraced the tactics of the mob. Anyone who hoped the party would retreat from extremism was wrong.
The movement calling itself No Kings has returned, proving the point. What began as a slogan of defiance now serves as the organizing banner for a political faction that thrives on confrontation, violence, and plausible deniability.
The republic cannot survive a ruling class that excuses its own mobs.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk could have been a moment of national reflection — a chance for Democrats to reconsider their indulgence in rhetoric that blurs the line between protest and terrorism. Instead, the party apparatus has chosen escalation.
When you tell unstable people that Trump is a “fascist,” that dissent is violence, and that opposition equals Nazism, don’t be shocked when someone acts on it.
The logic of the left
To understand how this happened, you must understand how the modern left thinks. Progressives treat speech as violence and dissent as an existential threat. Anyone who refuses to affirm their ideology becomes, by definition, an oppressor.
From that premise, violence becomes “self-defense.” If Trump is Hitler, then violence against him — or anyone aligned with his cause — is not just justified but virtuous.
The left’s revolutionaries no longer storm palaces. They dominate the streets. On October 18, No Kings protests will erupt again across the country. What was once the fringe tactic of radicals has become the preferred strategy of the Democratic Party: organized street action modeled on unstable regimes abroad.
This backslide into mob politics raises tensions at a time when the nation needs prudence. Instead, Democrats seem eager to test how far their own movement will go.
What lies beneath the No Kings network
After the June 14 protests, our team at the Oversight Project traced the movement’s primary organizing partner, 50501. What we found confirmed the worst suspicions: demonstrable ties to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Democratic Socialists of America, Antifa, and Students for Justice in Palestine.
These groups have openly supported violent action or defended authoritarian regimes, including China’s Communist Party. Mapping their social media connections revealed links to foreign influence networks tied to Chinese propaganda operations.
Antifa affiliates have also joined the effort, circulating merchandise celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death — shirts reading “Nazi Lives Don’t Matter” and “Normalize Political Violence” printed with a guillotine.
This is the energy behind No Kings. Its rhetoric echoes the Chinese Communist Party’s talking points on Tiananmen Square and defends regimes that crush dissent. Some of its alumni have even celebrated the murder of Israeli diplomats. Others maintain direct connections to Neville Singham and Chinese consulate officials.
For years, Democrats obsessed over alleged Russian meddling in U.S. politics. Yet now they embrace networks steeped in foreign influence to advance their own protest movements. As the Trump administration maps these organizations, many roads will lead overseas. Beijing has long used this method — stoking domestic unrest to weaken rivals from within.
The question isn’t whether the Democrats know this. It’s whether they care.
How the extremists captured the party
So how did a movement this toxic gain institutional cover from the Democratic establishment? Why do party leaders like Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) offer it full-throated support? And why do former Republicans like George Conway, Bill Kristol, and Joe Walsh lend their credibility to the cause?
Because the Democrats have surrendered to their radical base. They’ve stopped trying to lead it and started following it. Rather than condemn political extremism, they seek to normalize and rebrand it.
When Antifa militants show up at Democrat-aligned protests, party leaders feign surprise. When violence erupts, they retreat to the safety of “plausible deniability.” It’s a tired act — and the public no longer buys it.
RELATED: Trump names Antifa. The establishment still pretends it doesn’t exist.
Why the crackdown terrifies them
This explains why Democrats fight so ferociously against classifying Antifa as a domestic or foreign terrorist organization. Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 directs a whole-of-government response to domestic extremism. Through the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, federal agencies already possess the tools to investigate, expose, and dismantle these networks.
The real question is whether they will use them.
A serious enforcement effort would strip away the Democrats’ mask of deniability and expose the institutional support behind the violence. It would show that what poses as activism is, in fact, the operational arm of a radicalized political movement.
The choice ahead
Across the world, major parties have flirted with revolutionary tactics when democracy failed to deliver their goals. It’s the oldest temptation in politics. But America is now watching a mainstream party openly indulge in it.
Street action, foreign influence, and mob intimidation are not signs of progress — they are symptoms of decay. If Democrats continue down this path, they will drag the country with them.
The republic cannot survive a ruling class that excuses its own mobs.
Trump names Antifa. The establishment still pretends it doesn’t exist.
On September 25, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7. The sweeping directive lays out a “whole-of-government strategy” for combating domestic terrorism.
Most headlines focused on Antifa’s new designation. But NSPM-7 is the real story. It’s the game changer, and the left is only beginning to grasp its scope. Expect it to define political battles for years to come.
Naming the enemy
For the first time in years, a presidential directive names threats with specificity instead of hiding behind euphemisms. NSPM-7 defines what it calls “the anti-fascist lie” — the framing of foundational American principles like border security and support for law enforcement as “fascist” to justify violent revolution.
NSPM-7 marks a historic break with the old rules. It calls the threats by name, orders the government to follow the money, and strips the Justice Department of its wiggle room.
That lie, the document states, has become the “organizing rallying cry” for domestic terrorists. And it spells out the ideological fuel behind the violence: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and open hostility toward traditional American views on family and morality.
Political correctness has long forbidden that kind of bluntness. NSPM-7 throws it out.
In doing so, Trump’s memorandum recalls his 2016 insistence on naming “radical Islamic terror” despite Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s refusal to do so. As Trump said during his second debate with Clinton: “To solve a problem, you have to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name.”
NSPM-7 says the names.
Following the money
The directive goes further than definitions. It instructs agencies to act.
Perhaps most striking: The Treasury Department is ordered to identify and disrupt the financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence. That includes tracing illicit funding streams and coordinating with other agencies to choke them off.
The IRS is directed to ensure no tax-exempt entities are financing political violence — directly or indirectly. And when they are, the IRS must refer those organizations, their leaders, and their employees to the Justice Department for prosecution.
For years, Americans suspected billion-dollar left-wing institutions were underwriting street violence while hiding behind plausible deniability. NSPM-7 sets the stage to prove it. It establishes the long-demanded “follow the money” strategy — something only government agencies can do. Had it been in place before the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the “Summer of Love” might have cost millions in damages, not billions, as resources dried up.
Zero tolerance
The president’s directive also mobilizes Joint Terrorism Task Forces and makes domestic terrorism a national priority area. But its most consequential piece comes at the Justice Department’s expense.
The attorney general is instructed to prosecute all federal crimes tied to domestic terrorism “to the maximum extent permissible by law.” Every word matters. “All” means no discretion. If it can be charged, it must be charged. “Maximum extent” means no plea deals designed to make cases go away.
RELATED: Hollywood goes full antifa with 'One Battle After Another'
That language is a direct rebuke to the Justice Department’s pattern of selective prosecution. Think back to the Eastern District of Virginia’s refusal to pursue James Comey until a new U.S. attorney had to take it on. Trump’s team drafted NSPM-7 to make sure that kind of deep state resistance doesn’t happen again.
The test ahead
The proof will come quickly. Attorney General Pam Bondi now must prosecute at scale. No more leniency for “unpermitted protests” that turn into riots or for assaults on ICE officers. The Justice Department’s past record has been sparse, at best. NSPM-7 removes its excuses.
NSPM-7 marks a historic break with the old rules, and I’m here for it. It calls the threats by name. It orders the government to follow the money. It strips the Justice Department of its wiggle room.
The left sees the danger in this because it exposes its networks of funding and protection. Conservatives should see the opportunity.
Trump has delivered a strategy that treats domestic terrorism not as a nuisance, but as a war to be fought and won. Now, it must be enforced.
The left needs fascists like vampires need blood
The post-Enlightenment West prides itself on having left religious myths behind. Sophisticated people scoff at demons, devils, and other silly superstitions. But ideas that once wore robes and halos simply change costumes. The idea of absolute evil re-emerges in secular form, and fascism plays the part of the devil in our political imagination.
Once a movement or person becomes the secular Satan, debate ends and violence begins to look like the only remedy. That is why leftists now call ordinary conservative positions “fascist” — they build the moral case for political violence.
Publicly branding an opponent ‘fascist’ with the expectation that it justifies violence should be as unacceptable as calling for a race-based lynching.
Consider the common thought experiment: “Would you travel back in time to kill baby Hitler?” Many answer yes. The image of a helpless infant collides with the scale of evil Adolf Hitler later embodied. For some, the calculus seems to justify murder when it prevents mass atrocity. Hitler stops being a human in that mental model; he becomes pure malignancy, and ordinary moral rules fall away.
That same process unfolded on American streets and campus quads over the past eight years. In 2017 Richard Spencer, a white nationalist, received a shove and a punch while speaking publicly. Spencer committed no violence that day. He threatened no one. He merely exercised his right to speak.
Still, many on the left cheered the assault. The assault collapsed an important boundary: If someone looks or sounds like a “Nazi,” is it now permissible to punch him? The Supreme Court long ago protected ugly speech, even the American Nazi Party’s right to march through a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors.
Anti-fascism as civic religion
But popular sentiment has shifted: Physical force against those denounced as fascists won moral approval from many progressives.
From insults to legal penalties to physical attacks, the escalation followed a familiar arc. Speech codes function as secular blasphemy laws. Labels like “bigot,” “racist,” or “transphobe” once carried distinct meanings; applied relentlessly, they blurred into a single category: heretic.
When those tags lost bite, the left raised the stakes. “White supremacist” replaced “racist” for positions like ending illegal immigration or opposing radical medical interventions for children. When that failed to stanch conservative influence, progressives reached for the final word: fascist.
That choice carries theological force. In secular modernity, defeating Hitler and the Nazis became a foundational myth. Anti-fascism assumed the status of a civic religion: a liturgical memory, a ritual cast of villains, and a duty of perpetual vigilance.
Paul Gottfried and other thinkers note how anti-fascism functions as a moral system after World War II. Comparing any enemy leader to Hitler became morally decisive. Nationalism, family veneration, and cultural continuity assumed guilt by association. The strong gods, once banished, left a moral vacuum that anti-fascism now fills.
RELATED: Calling MAGA ‘fascist’ is the smear of the century
We’re all ‘fascists’ now?
Yet, fascism as a coherent political doctrine remains a historical phenomenon tied to early 20th-century Italy and, in some respects, to German national socialism. Stretching the term until it fits every conservative position strips it of analytical meaning. Calling something “fascist” should require attention to ideology, not impulse. Treating the word as a universal moral obliterator turns politics into theology. You cannot bargain with demons; you must exterminate them.
The very online left sells a modern variant: “ontological evil.” Call someone ontologically evil and you deny that person’s capacity for change. Evil becomes an essential property, not a series of choices. A man deemed ontologically evil stops being a political adversary and becomes a predator to be neutralized. That rhetoric creates a moral climate in which killing a political opponent appears not merely excusable but necessary.
We hear that rhetoric applied to mainstream conservatives practically every day. News figures, pundits, and Democratic politicians label President Trump and his supporters “fascists” or, at the very least, “semi-fascist.” After Charlie Kirk’s murder, some commentators continued to call him a fascist. Those who declared him so while he lay dead turned vile accusation into a license for dehumanization. The slogans scrawled by the shooter evoked the same anti-fascist catechism.
When likely presidential candidates like California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) brand ordinary conservative beliefs — national sovereignty, for example — as “fascist,” they signal to zealots that violence is not just allowed but morally mandated.
RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s ‘fascist’ slur echoes in the streets
That dynamic plays out in organization and funding as well. Networks of activists and groups that tolerate or endorse violent tactics receive resources and cover. Antifa and similar formations act as paramilitary foot soldiers who can intimidate, disrupt, and, when they choose, kill. They do so with the encouragement of influencers who frame opponents as existential threats. Label someone a fascist, and the path to extra-legal action opens.
Argument, not extermination
Americans must treat such rhetoric with the same moral opprobrium once reserved for lynch mobs. Publicly branding an opponent “fascist” with the expectation that it justifies violence should be as unacceptable as calling for a race-based lynching. When progressives use “fascist” to mark a target for death, they weaponize language to strip victims of human rights.
We must also restore analytic discipline. Accurate political language matters. Fascism, nazism, and other totalizing ideologies warrant denunciation and opposition, but we dilute our ability to resist genuine threats when we scream “fascist” at any conservative who supports border security or traditional marriage. If every disagreement becomes a call to arms, the political space collapses into a permanent state of evisceration disguised as moral clarity.
Finally, recognize what this rhetoric teaches would-be killers. If violence succeeds in silencing a critic, networks that cheer the act learn an obvious lesson: violence pays. The civic cost is enormous. The social fabric frays. The state loses its monopoly on legitimate force when vigilantes and ideologues decide they hold moral authority to execute enemies.
Treat accusations of “fascism” with the contempt they deserve. And make clear that no label grants anyone the right to take a life. If we let secular Satan labels justify bloodshed, we will learn in short order how quickly a republic can abandon its own laws and become hostage to its worst angels.
Don Lemon SLAMS white men, Joy Reid redefines fascism
Don Lemon and Joy Reid appear to be in a competition for who can sound the least intelligent in front of an audience, and BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock isn’t sure who is winning.
“Men who look like you, men who vote like you, and men who sound like you. White men, something is broken. Something is cracked deep inside when so many of you believe the answer to fear, to loss, to change is violence,” Lemon said on “The Don Lemon Show.”
“Are you listening to me? I hope I’m saying it loud enough for the people in the back,” he added.
“Don Lemon has always been difficult for me to understand. This feels almost intentionally stupid so that he can be mocked and ridiculed by people that disagree with him. So that he can spark a conversation,” Whitlock says on “Jason Whitlock Harmony.”
“Have you looked at the statistics on the violence among black men? Did you look at the violence that happened as a result of George Floyd and Jacob Blake and Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and so on and so forth? Are you kidding? Are you kidding me?” he adds.
But Lemon, of course, isn’t alone in his ridiculous statement, as former MSNBC host Joy Reid had to throw some nonsense out into the universe as well.
“If you go back before the 20th century, there were no income taxes. There were no regulations on business. You could earn as much money as you want, leave 100% of it to your children with no taxes. That’s the world they want back. And to get it back, they need society to change. They need people to be less modern. They need people to want fewer things,” Reid said on BET while attempting to equate the Trump administration to fascism.
“When I heard that I was like, ‘Is she talking about heaven?' No taxes. I get to earn as much as I want. I get to leave it to my family. Man, that sounds awesome. When we say ‘Make America Great Again,’ if that’s what they’re talking about, man, sign me up," Whitlock says.
When deciding who made the “dumber statement,” Whitlock’s panel is having a hard time — but Wilfred Reilly believes it was Reid.
“It’s a tough competition, but I’d probably have to say Joy Reid. You know, Don Lemon, I mean, I think everyone on the panel knows this, but you know, crime is high across the board in the USA, but if you look at murder, black murder rate — seven times the white murder rate,” Reilly says.
“That’s an absurd, racist thing to say,” he says. “But Joy Reid … she doesn’t know what fascism is. I mean, fascism is, you know, it’s the system, business, and government working together.”
“She went through, ‘You’re not going to pay taxes, the government’s not going to be involved in every aspect of life. You can leave 100% of your money to your son or your little girl,'” he continues.
“I would be very comfortable … going back to that world,” he adds.
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Calling MAGA ‘fascist’ is the smear of the century
No political insult gets thrown around more recklessly these days than “fascist.” The word has been gutted of meaning, reduced to a club progressives swing at President Trump and people like Stephen Miller and the late Charlie Kirk. Democrats and their media allies casually smear conservatives as extremists who follow the “fascist playbook.”
Joe Biden himself dragged the rhetoric to a new low. In September 2022, standing in front of Liberty Hall in Philadelphia, he declared that “MAGA Republicans” are extremists and enemies of democracy.
“They embrace anger,” Biden thundered. “They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies.” Weeks earlier, at a fundraiser in Maryland, he even called the MAGA movement “semi-fascist.”
The smear reveals less about conservatives and more about the authoritarian streak buried in the left’s own philosophy.
Say what you want about Trump’s sharp elbows in politics, but he never demonized American voters as enemies of the republic. Biden did — and Democrats have repeated the smear ever since. The question is: What happens to a country when its leaders brand millions of citizens “fascists”?
The goals of the MAGA movement are plain: Protect natural rights, foster prosperity, expand energy access, secure the border, reduce crime, preserve domestic peace, and pursue a foreign policy rooted in prudence. These aims hardly resemble fascism. Yet defenders of liberty now find themselves caricatured as authoritarians.
To see how absurd this charge is, it helps to remember what fascism actually means.
A (very) short history of fascism
The intellectual father of fascism was Giovanni Gentile, an Italian philosopher born in 1875. Following Hegel, he saw the rational state as the end point of history. He defined “true democracy” not as liberty but as the individual’s willing subordination to the state.
For Gentile, public and private interests were one and the same. To serve society was to serve the state. His student, Benito Mussolini, turned this philosophy into doctrine: “All is in the state, and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.”
Contrary to today’s rhetoric, fascism did not begin on the right. Mussolini himself was a Marxist. He and Antonio Gramsci broke with Leninist revolution but retained socialism’s collectivist core. Fascism emphasized nationalism, racial particularity, and the total authority of the state — summed up in the term “blood and soil.” Its very name came from the Latin word fasces, the Roman bundle of rods bound to an axe — symbolizing unity and power.
Fascism arose in the economic chaos of the 1920s and ’30s. Italy and Germany launched massive public-works programs, funded by confiscatory taxes, borrowing, and printing money. As with communism, fascism treated every citizen as an employee and tenant of the party-run state. Force and coercion were essential. Mussolini was blunt: The individual’s “anti-social right” to resist the state did not exist.
In his 1928 autobiography, he wrote:
The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity. The Fascist State with its corporative conception puts men and their possibilities into productive work and interprets for them the duties they have to fulfill.
Fascism and the New Deal
The American version of the 1930s response to the Great Depression, of course, was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today it’s remembered as democracy’s answer to authoritarianism. But at the time, many noted striking similarities between Roosevelt’s programs and those of Mussolini and Hitler.
John T. Flynn, a leading conservative writer, warned in “As We Go Marching” (1944) that the New Deal looked like a “good fascism” — regulation and planning at home, military adventures abroad, and growing state power. Others saw the same trend: massive public-works projects, charismatic leadership, centralized propaganda, and the creation of a “voluntary compulsion” that blurred the line between civic duty and government coercion.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s remarkable 2006 book, “Three New Deals,” compares the era’s regimes. He did not equate Roosevelt with Mussolini or Hitler, but he highlighted the parallels: grand projects like the TVA, monumental architecture, direct appeals from the “leader” to the people, and the constant use of war imagery. Roosevelt even warned that those who resisted his programs were “enemies” of recovery.
The difference, of course, was that America retained constitutional checks that Europe discarded. Yet the centralizing impulse — and the temptation to vest extraordinary authority in a leader — was real.
Progressive roots
The resemblance should not surprise us. European fascism and the New Deal both grew from the same philosophical soil. The American founding drew on John Locke and natural law. “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one,” Locke wrote. “And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind.” The Declaration of Independence, in turn, proclaimed that rights are endowed by the Creator and cannot be erased by government.
European thought took another path, from Machiavelli to Hegel, exalting the state as the source of order and authority. By the late 19th century, American Progressives imported this vision. Woodrow Wilson and other intellectuals trained in German universities rejected the founders’ natural-rights philosophy and embraced statism.
RELATED: The next generation of Marxists is marching through the institutions
Progressives, like their European cousins, placed the state at the center of political life. They taught that rights flow not from God but from government — positive, material entitlements dispensed by bureaucrats. Over the past century, Democrats from Wilson and FDR to Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama have built a regime that subordinates every aspect of American life to the federal leviathan.
The real irony
Given this history, 21st-century progressives should think twice before flinging “fascism” as a slur. Their own intellectual lineage shares far more with Mussolini and Gentile than anything found in the MAGA movement.
Trump supporters want liberty secured, prosperity restored, and sovereignty defended. Progressives want the state elevated above all. The smear reveals less about conservatives and more about the authoritarian streak buried in the left’s own philosophy.
Gavin Newsom Escalates Rhetoric That Makes Political Violence Inevitable
Charlie Kirk was murdered less than three weeks ago by a deranged leftist who inscribed anti-fascist slogans on bullet casings. Kirk’s murder should have been a wake-up call that inflammatory rhetoric smearing conservatives as “fascists” or “Nazis” or “Hitler” has deadly consequences. Instead, it’s only emboldened the left to increase such rhetoric. Nowhere is that […]Today's top stories
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