OPINION:
If you’re a member of a lunatic fringe group, how do you get disproportionate publicity for your loathsome ideas? Do something that gives liberals a chance to smear conservatives as fascists.
Last week, a group of neo-Nazis demonstrated outside Disney World. Some held pictures of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“DeSantis is coddling antisemitism” because he sees antisemites as part of his base, raved former Gov. Charlie Crist, who may still be smarting from the drubbing Mr. DeSantis gave him in the 2022 election.
Mr. DeSantis called the Orlando protesters “jackasses.” When he was in Israel in May, he signed an expansion of Florida’s hate crimes law dealing with antisemitism. Do politicians with a Nazi base usually spend time in Israel?
The left loves to compare conservatives to Nazis. President Biden has denounced former President Donald Trump’s “semi-fascism,” compared his predecessor to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and called MAGA Republicans “a threat to our very democracy.”
But if we’re playing pin the swastika on the storm trooper, where does it really belong?
The Nazis despised constitutional government and civil liberties.
Last week, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham decided she could temporarily suspend the Second Amendment by declaring a health emergency — a move since stayed by a federal judge. What will she do next, suspend the First Amendment in response to anti-vaccine appeals?
After the Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a stand-down order so the military could “root out white supremacy and right-wing radicalism” in the ranks. Given his commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, conservatives were likely the real targets.
Mr. Austin’s order was reminiscent of Hitler’s response to the 1933 Reichstag fire when he persuaded German President Paul von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree giving him the power to deal summarily with his enemies.
The American left is obsessed with race, just as Nazis are.
Both hold that virtue is race-based. For Hitler, Germans were good and Jews evil. For the left, racial minorities are the perpetual victims of Whites, who are inherently evil — unless they’re willing to atone for historical wrongs by supporting reparations and preferential treatment of minorities.
Antisemitism is thriving in America, not among fringe groups, but in the Democratic Party and bastions of progressivism.
When Mr. Crist’s party controlled the House of Representatives, it couldn’t pass a resolution unequivocally condemning the antisemitism of some progressives in the chamber, who hold that Israel is a racist state that doesn’t have a right to exist.
In a Sept. 12 column, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder wrote that in a fall course, Princeton University will use a textbook that “unapologetically promotes vicious libels against Jews,” including accusing the Israeli military of “harvesting Palestinians’ organs.”
An Ipsos poll found 60% of Jewish undergraduates witnessed or experienced an antisemitic incident. Perhaps the American Association of Colleges and Universities should issue a stand-down order giving it time to root out hatred of Jews on campus.
Under Nazism, schools imbued students with the master race theory. German universities were dominated by Nazi student groups long before the dawn of the Third Reich.
In America, academia is so tightly controlled by the left that a conservative risks his life speaking on campus. It’s the model of a totalitarian state that lacks only secret police and torture chambers.
The current battle over public education pits progressive teachers unions against parents. The left insists on its right to radicalize our children with transgenderism and critical race theory.
In a debate during the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The National School Boards Association asked the Justice Department to investigate parents who complained too loudly at school committee meetings as “domestic terrorists.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin is under attack for pardoning a man who was convicted of disorderly conduct for protesting the rape of his daughter in a girl’s bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. Nothing will be allowed to interfere with progressive indoctrination in public education.
Nazism was about more than stiff-arm salutes and insignia. Its essence was subordinating the individual to the collective.
Mussolini said: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” — ergo, totalitarianism. Progressives want to control every aspect of our lives, from the cars we drive to the food we eat to what we’re allowed to post online.
Who are the fascists — those who want limited government, or the ideologues who would make it open-ended?
• Don Feder is a columnist at The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.