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Quote of the Day: American Fascism
When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jack-boots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley. – George Carlin
George Carlin died 15 years ago, in 2008. He first made this statement in one of his 1990s nightclub acts. Yet if anything best describes the soft fascism that has emerged since 2020, this statement does. Right down to Nike endorsement of modern fascism as typified by the behavior of Colin Kaepernick.
In many ways Carlin’s statement echoes the theme of Tucker Carlson’s episode 2, which dropped on Thursday:
Ep. 2 Cling to your taboos! pic.twitter.com/45AeVdtwOu
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 8, 2023
(Incidentally, if you want an example of smiley-smiley fascism, try searching for this on YouTube. Good luck.)
Yes, the jackboots are now coming out as are the black shirts of black bloc protestors, but those are trailing edge phenomena. Fascism gained purchase through safe spaces and trigger warnings. It was normalized during Covid using soft fascism. It has grown harder once the soft fascism became accepted. The next few years will be interesting. In the same sense that Randall Garrett’s pseudo-Chinese curse (May you live in interesting times) means interesting.
Good luck, everybody.
Published in Group Writing
Things are warming up here in the frog-cooker, aren’t they?
Not directly on-topic, but does Tucker still have access to the January 6 videos, or did he have to leave them with Fox?
Oh, and great quote too.
Actually, it showed up in yoga pants waving a rainbow flag, but he was close.
Yeah, it definitely seems like the American matriarchy is far more fascist than the so-called patriarchy ever was.
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The Woke ain’t fascist. They’re awful, but fascism is something quite different.
It is continually troubling to me that people who think of themselves as being on the political Right are as careless in their definitions as those on the Left.
Many things are troubling for you. Like people thinking slavery is a bad thing. Or supporting Israel. Or believing in liberty.
Well, let’s see:
Anything Mussolini could do the Woke can do better.
I understand why you don’t consider them fascists, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.
What is fascism?
A combination of government and big business to crush all dissent? I’d say they are scoring a solid 90%. What would you suppose they are missing?
Nominally true, as Fascism would properly be defined as Italian national socialism as espoused by Mussolini.
However, as short hand we understand it to broadly mean authoritarian socialist totalitarianism.
Wokeism is not fascism, but the majority of the woke are clearly on the fascist – socialist – communist continuum. And at their most basic levels, wokeism, in step with the socialist continuum, requires the rejection of there being a power, a source of of morals, external to man. That is, they reject the very basis for all the Abrahamic religions. In other words, realize it or not, they’re atheists.
I know, many “main line” “Christian churches” have embraced wokeism. In that case, see paragraph above.