Sep
28
2025

Calling Everything Fascism … is Kinda Fascist, Isn't It?

At Instapundit, Ed Driscoll has a long, amusing/appalling array of people looking for, and invariably finding, signs of the "dark night of fascism" descending upon us. Ed links to, and quotes, Aubrey Harris in the American Spectator: Now Even Stay-At-Home Moms are Fascist. About this Guardian article:

And that's just one example among many. (Going to the gym, epic poetry,…) But Aubrey, quoted by Ed:

Calling Just About Everything Fascist Obfuscates Its Definition

That was a trigger for me to leave a comment, pointing out:

Sure. Nothing new, though. For example:

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.

Kids, that's from George Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language ". Worth reading.

Kind of snarky, but 8 Instapundit comment-readers seemed to like it.

Also of note:

  • The process is the punishment. Andrew C. McCarthy says, convincingly: The Indictment Against Comey Should Be Dismissed. (NR gifted link)

    Jim Comey has a dilemma.

    The vindictive indictment the Trump Justice Department barely managed to get a grand jury to approve on Thursday is so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, he should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss. Legally, he’ll be entitled to that, and it would short-circuit the very expensive and punitive litigation process.

    Yet, the case has been randomly assigned to a Biden-appointee in the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Michael Nachmanoff. If Judge Nachmanoff throws the case out pretrial, President Trump and his supporters will rail that the fix was in. So as pointless as a trial would be, Comey and the court may want the vindication of a swift jury acquittal.

    It’s a hard call. But it’s not a hard case. It’s a mess.

    Use the gifted link above, my last one of the month, if necessary, to read just how messy.

  • And way too smug, but that's not a crime. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has an additional observation in the WSJ: Worse Than a Criminal, Comey Is a Blunderer (WSJ gifted link).

    James Comey’s real crime was bad judgment. Find anyone who thinks his 2016 interventions were wise, justified or proper. You can’t. Not his FBI colleagues. Not the Obama-appointed inspector general of the Justice Department. Not Loretta Lynch, the Obama attorney general whose reputation he was supposedly saving with his gallantry.

    The great unmentionable is that the only beneficiary was Donald Trump, who likely wouldn’t have won in 2016 without Mr. Comey’s serial interventions, culminating in his chaotic reopening of the Hillary Clinton email investigation before Election Day.

    Mr. Comey’s criminal indictment this week, hustled past a grand jury by a Trump factotum as the statute of limitations was about to expire, accuses the former FBI supremo of misleading statements to Congress in 2020. Yawn.

    It goes without saying Mr. Comey engaged in spinning, word-parsing and leaks about decisions he now realized were a disaster. In fact, the truest thing Mr. Comey has said about his actions is that he expected Mrs. Clinton to win and therefore his actions would never be closely examined.

    Holman's bottom line:

    Unfortunately, the law offers no obvious remedy for intelligence officials who misuse their powers as he did. An honest airing in the public square might at least discourage the use of criminal prosecutions as an alternative to political redress. But for that, we’d need an honest and forthright press and we don’t have one.

  • Counterpoint. Yesterday I linked to, and quoted, Kevin D. Williamson's Dispatch article that disparaged (putting it mildly) Trump's new Ukraine attitude. Also posting at the Dispatch, however, is Michael Warren, considerably more charitable, explaining Why Trump’s Latest Surprise Could Benefit Ukraine For Once.

    One of the most remarkable developments in the decade-plus of Russian military aggression against Ukraine happened this week in one of the unlikeliest places: Donald Trump’s proprietary social media service, Truth Social. On his account there, Trump went further than any sitting American president since Russia occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014 to express the simple idea that Ukraine can and should win the war.

    “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump posted Tuesday afternoon. “With time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO, the original Borders from where this War started, is very much an option. Why not?” 

    Trump’s statement went on to denigrate Russia as a “paper tiger,” called its military efforts “aimless,” and even suggested a victorious Ukraine might expand its territory, a goal the Ukrainians have never sought. (But points for enthusiasm!)

    In case you haven't seen me say this dozens of times: I don't know nothin' 'bout no foreign policy. Although way too much here seems to depend on the deeply irrational and chaotic mental processes of Putin and Trump.

  • Magic 8-Ball says… In response to Jeff Maurer's question, What Would Political Realignment Look Like?, I think it's "Ask again later".

    But Jeff (while filling his usual quota of dirty words) is pretty thoughtful:

    I watched Trump’s Tylenol press conference and thought “I remember when dumbass anti-empiricist paranoia was a left-wing thing.” At EPA, I would frequently field calls from “independent filmmakers” (that is: trust fund kids who got a camcorder for Christmas) pursuing some crackpot theory built on a combination of anecdote, suspicion, and one lonely paper in the Journal of Publishing Any Ol’ Shit For $200. It’s no accident that RFK Jr. started out as an environmental lawyer; he’s a buoy bobbing in a sea of conspiratorial nonsense, and as those currents shifted to the right, he went with them.

    Of course, medicine is far from the only area where Trump agrees with lefty know-nothings. Trump has gotten the government so involved in the economy that Adam Smith is probably spinning in his grave while Karl Marx is totally erect in his. Trump’s post-Charlie Kirk attacks on speech mirror what parts of the left did after George Floyd, and Trump parrots the radical leftist view that any talk of principles in foreign policy is a smokescreen for self-interest. The cross-pollination of bad, extremist ideas goes the other way, too: The far left is dabbling in anti-semitism and extolling the virtues of political violence, and left-wing race essentialists use language that would be at home in a 19th century book about the cranial capacity of the various races.

    We’ve developed new words to describe the re-shaping of the political spectrum. “MAGA” and “woke” basically mean “cult members”. “Conservative” has faded from the lexicon as The Dispatch types continue to be a Republican Party In Exile that will probably never re-conquer the GOP and hoist the banner of the House of Reagan. “Liberal” used to mean basically any Democrat, but now “progressive” replaces “liberal” once the amount of BlueSky/MSNBC poisoning in the subject’s bloodstream surpasses a certain level. And then there are “leftists” and the “alt-right”, i.e. weirdos who would have channeled their antisocialism into Ren Fests and Civil War reenactments in years past, but who now cosplay in the political sphere instead of in the woods.

    It's a really good essay.

  • No foolin'. The College Fix notes verification of what you've suspected: Large-scale syllabi study finds professors only teach left-wing side of controversial issues.

    Contentious topics are often taught in college classrooms from a uniformly one-sided perspective, according to newly published research that used the Open Syllabus Project, which hosts over 27 million syllabi, to develop its findings.

    The research focused on three topics — “racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion” — to determine how controversial issues are presented.

    The research primarily looked at assigned reading materials to conclude that “professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies.”

    I recently read a book which advocated… see below.

Recently on the book blog: