National Socialism is Not Right-Wing

How the deceptive mislabeling of fascism and Nazism distorts modern politics

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.  –-George Orwell

Summary

As the Industrial Revolution progressed in 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted in The Communist Manifesto that the workers of the world, aka the “proletariat," would someday unite in a socialist revolution against the capitalist "bourgeois" class and take control of the "means of production." By the early 20th century, that scenario did not appear to be developing, however, and the lack of progress was considered a major crisis for the international socialist movement that Marx and Engels had started.

Shortly before and during World War I, socialist thinkers and leaders began to realize that the working class had a much stronger allegiance to their own culture, society, and nation than they had to the abstract notion of the international proletarian brotherhood of workers. They also realized that large corporations were essential to a productive economy and a strong military, and that dismantling them was counterproductive.

In 1919, Benito Mussolini and socialist philosopher Giovanni Gentile proposed combining socialism with nationalism and allowing limited capitalism. They called it "fascism," and Mussolini ruled Italy as a fascist from 1922 until his death in 1943. According to Mussolini, fascism can be summed up as "Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Because private ownership of large corporations was left in place, albeit under the dictatorial control of the state, fascism was economically to the "right" of pure communism, which allows no private property.

Adolf Hitler admired Mussolini's dictatorial ruling style and said so publicly. In 1919 he started the German Workers Party, later renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party, aka the Nazis. The Nazis won a plurality of the popular vote in 1932, and as a result Hitler was appointed as chancellor in 1933. After coming to power through established democratic protocols, however, Nazi "Brownshirts" used violence to undermine democracy and gain absolute power –- as Mussolini's "Blackshirts" had done before them.

Unlike the Italian fascists, the German Nazi fascists were virulent antisemitic racists who believed that their Aryan "master race" would subjugate and rule the world. They hated Jews in particular and deeply resented their success in capitalist enterprises and the free market, which were antithetical to Nazi socialist principles. The term “capitalism” was used by Karl Marx as a pejorative name for the free market. Like Marx, Hitler regarded capitalism as an evil scheme of the Jews and said so repeatedly in his infamous demagogic speeches. 

Before WWII, many prominent Western progressives, including H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and FDR, praised Hitler and Mussolini, and the praise was mutual. Before the words "fascist" and "Nazi" became insults, progressives touted fascism as a desirable "Third Way" between communism and capitalism. However, many of them turned against Hitler when he abrogated the Hitler-Stalin Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Stalin then declared Hitler a "right winger" –- the ultimate insult coming from a communist. When the horrific Nazi death camps and mass graves were made public after the war, socialism had its second major crisis: how could it be expected to grow in popularity and take over the world if it led to those kinds of horrors?

To keep their ideology viable, socialists devised a clever intellectual trick. They ignored the socialist aspect of Nazi national socialism and focused only on the nationalist and racist aspects. Claiming that Hitler and the Nazis were not true socialists, leftist historians and the media placed fascism on the "far right" side of the traditional left-right political spectrum — just as Stalin had done. They claim that Hitler posed as a socialist to gain power but then did not rule according to socialist ideals — but the same is true of all socialist and communist dictators, from Stalin and Mao to Castro and Pol Pot, who together murdered more than 100 million of their own civilian subjects. The left is well aware that correctly identifying the Nazis as left wing would be devastating to their cause, hence they dutifully fall in line to prop up the false flag of "right-wing" over fascism.

This deceptive mislabeling is not just an arcane academic issue. It may have saved socialism from the “ash heap of history,” and it still profoundly affects our politics today by allowing leftists to get away with routinely smearing their political adversaries as “fascists,” deceptively projecting their own fascist tendencies onto them. As a consequence, clueless celebrities and political pundits routinely warn that Donald Trump and his supporters are taking us down the same path that Hitler and the Nazis took Germany, and any European politician who opposes open borders and unrestricted immigration is automatically labeled as “far right,” with its implied Nazi connotation.

Until this lie is fully debunked, the right will be on defense, and a resurgence of actual leftist fascism and totalitarianism will remain a threat. But progressives defend this lie and false flag as if their leftist ideology depends on it, because they know it does.

The Left-Right Political Spectrum

The traditional left-right political spectrum originated in the French National Assembly during the French Revolution in 1789, where revolutionaries sat on the left, and supporters of the traditional monarchy sat on the right. In modern times, it has come to represent various notional aspects of political ideology on a theoretical continuum. In economics, the left end of the spectrum is usually associated with pure communism (no private property allowed), and the right end with the notion of unrestricted “capitalism” or free enterprise (with no limits on private wealth).

Simplified Nolan Chart

In 1969, libertarian activist David Nolan proposed a two-dimensional chart with economic freedom on one axis and personal freedom on the other. The original Nolan Chart was later simplified as shown above so the horizontal axis goes from less to more economic freedom from left to right, as is commonly understood, and the vertical axis goes from less to more personal freedom from bottom to top. These axes could be considered two separate linear continuums, but they are usually correlated: most people who favor more economic freedom also tend to favor more personal freedom.

In 1932, Mussolini and Gentile wrote an essay called The Doctrine of Fascism, featuring section titles such as “The Absolute Primacy of the State” and “The Fascist Totalitarian Vision of the Future.” They coined the term “totalitarian” and touted it as a desirable feature! In that essay, they explain that, "For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State." That allows for little or no personal or economic freedom, placing fascism at or near the lower left corner of the Nolan Chart. It is the antithesis of the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution, which together guarantee “unalienable rights” and explicitly limit the powers of the government over individuals and groups. Fascist totalitarianism is the exact opposite of traditional American conservatism, which is based on the principle of minimal government with minimal centralization of power at the national or even state level.

But something strange happened with the historical evaluation of where fascism belongs on the political spectrum. Whereas communism is normally and correctly placed on the far left, fascism was placed on the far right. That puts totalitarianism at both ends of the of the political spectrum, with freedom in the middle —- which is completely inconsistent with the Nolan Chart. Some would argue that extremism can go in either “direction,” but that notion is itself based on the placement of fascism on the far right. What other common scale or metric goes from low in the middle to high at both ends, or vice versa? It is confusing, perhaps because it was designed to deceive the public.

Some argue that the Nazis and the Italian fascists were “right-wing capitalists” because they allowed private ownership of large industries to continue, but that is misleading. They allowed nominal private ownership of industry to prevent their economies and their wartime military industries from collapsing, but the “owners” of those industries were completely subservient to the state. In other words, they commandeered private industry, and the nominal “owners” became de facto managers in the government hierarchy, answering ultimately to a dictator. It was a far cry from laissez-faire free enterprise, so while the fascists were slightly to the right of the communists, they were clearly not on the right side of the overall economic political spectrum.

In response to the severe economic hardship caused by the Russian communist revolution 0f 1917, Lenin introduced the “New Economic Policy” to the Soviet Union in 1921, which he said would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control." That did not make Lenin or the Soviet Union “right wing.” Similarly, after the economic debacle of the Cultural Revolution in China from 1966 to 1976, modern China allows and even encourages capitalism on a large scale to build their economic and military power. It is under strict government control, however, and no one calls them “right wing.”

As if that were not enough, historian Lawrence K. Samuels has uncovered direct quotes from both Goebbels and Mussolini making it clear that they considered their fascist governments to be on the Left. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1931 that, “According to the idea of the NSDAP [Nazi party], we are the German left. Nothing is more hateful to us than the right-wing national ownership block.” (quoted in Wolfgang Venohr’s book, Documents of German existence: 500 years of German national history 1445-1945, 1980, p. 291, and vetted on the Goebbels Wikiquote Page.) Mussolini also made it clear that Fascism was on the Left in his pamphlet The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, where on page 20 he looked forward to “…a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism”. If Goebbels and Mussolini could come back today, they would be astonished to learn that fascism is now widely regarded as a “right-wing” ideology.

A key difference between left and right is based on the concept of "negative" versus "positive" rights. So-called "negative" rights are essentially the right to be "left alone," whereas "positive" rights include the supposed "right" to the necessities of life, including food, shelter, and health care. The terms “negative” and “positive” as used here do not imply a value judgment in the usual sense. They are simply used to distinguish the requirements of each kind of “right.” A “positive” right requires others to provide a product or service for you, but a “negative” right only requires others to refrain from harming or threatening you as long as you are not harming or threatening anyone else.

So-called “negative” rights include the “unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as well as freedom of speech and religion, the right to bear arms, the right to own private property, and equal opportunity in education, employment, and housing. As for the "positive" rights to basic material needs, those on the right see them as illegitimate because they require products and services that must be provided by others, and no one has the right to force others to work for them. That is the function of voluntary charity, but the left wants it to be mandatory. James Madison, the “father” of the US Constitution, wrote, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

That is not to abandon the idea of a social "safety net," but those on the right believe that providing able-bodied individuals with the necessities of life for extended periods is not wise because it fosters dependence and helplessness, whereas socialists on the left believe in the Marxist slogan: "from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs." The problem with that Marxist principle is deciding who determines, and how, what each person’s “abilities” and “needs” are.

Were the Nazis True Socialists?

According to Wikipedia, fascism is “a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology,” and Nazism was "the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany." This assertion that fascism in general and Nazism in particular are "far-right" ideologies may be based on a widely held “consensus,” but is it true –- or is it a lie that has been repeated so many times that it is now commonly accepted as "truth"?  Wikipedia can certainly be useful, but it is hopelessly biased for anything controversial or political, and this topic is certainly both.

The word "Nazi" is a contraction of "national socialist" in German (Nationalsozialistische), and the universally recognized classification of socialism as a leftist ideology would seem to put the Nazis on the left side of the political spectrum. However, those who label them as “far right” claim that their party name is misleading — like “Democratic People's Republic of Korea” for the communist dictatorship of North Korea. Some claim that Hitler did not really believe in socialism and did not govern as a socialist, while others claim that the Nazis started out as socialists but ultimately abandoned their leftist ideology and shifted their governing style to the far right.

A typical article on this subject makes the following claim: “However, the assumption that because the word ‘socialist’ appeared in the party's name and socialist words and ideas popped up in the writings and speeches of top Nazis then the Nazis must have been actual socialists is naive and ahistorical. What the evidence shows, on the contrary, is that Nazi Party leaders paid mere lip service to socialist ideals on the way to achieving their one true goal: raw, totalitarian power.”

But that is exactly what socialist despots have always done, from Stalin and Mao to Castro and Pol Pot. According to this specious argument, none of those communist tyrants were socialists either! So were they all on the far right too, or were their tyrannical atrocities consistent with socialist principles? Which is it? The fact that the quoted claim above is even taken seriously demonstrates a disturbing ignorance of the basic history of communism.

Hitler was unequivocal about identifying himself and his Nazi party as socialist. In his 1925 autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), partly written while in prison for a failed coup attempt, he wrote that, "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea …" In a 1927 speech he stated plainly that, "We are socialists. We are the enemies of today's capitalist system of exploitation ... and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions." If he was a right-winger pretending to be socialist, he did a very good job of it!

Early Nazi recruiting literature a few years later was clear as well. In a widely distributed Nazi pamphlet that first appeared in 1929, Goebbels wrote that, “We are socialists because we see in socialism, that is the union of all citizens, the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance and to regain our political freedom and renew our German state. Socialism is the doctrine of liberation for the working class. … Socialism gains its true form only through a total fighting brotherhood with the forward-striving energies of a newly awakened nationalism. Without nationalism it is nothing, a phantom, a mere theory, a castle in the sky, a book. With it is everything, the future, freedom, the fatherland!”

Hitler passionately preached national socialism in his writings and speeches, and he never repudiated it, but how can we know for sure if he or any socialist leader was a true believer? Most if not all of them used socialism to gain power by exploiting envy and economic insecurity. Were Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro altruistic, humanitarian believers in "from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs"? Not likely. Does that mean they were not true socialists? Perhaps, but what ultimately matters is that they used the lure of socialism to gain power and impose tyranny. Communist governments in China, Russia, Cuba, North Viet Nam, Cambodia, North Korea, and elsewhere murdered over 100 million of their own subjects during the 20th century –- hardly indicative of the promised socialist paradise!

Hitler certainly used socialism to gain power, but he may have also actually believed in it. Aside from his extreme racism, his ideology and his policies had a lot in common with that of modern leftists and progressives. He preached class warfare, agitating the working class to resist "exploitation" by capitalists –– particularly Jewish capitalists, of course. His Nazi agenda called for the nationalization of education, health care, energy, transportation, and other major industries. The Nazis censored their political adversaries and enforced strict gun control on the civilian population. Does that sound more like modern left-wing progressivism or right-wing conservatism?

According to Dinesh D'Souza in his book The Big Lie (2017), many socialists became fascists between WWI and WWII because, as explained earlier, they did not see international Marxist socialism as having a strong enough popular appeal. In fact, virtually all of the early fascists came from the Marxist community, including Gentile, Mussolini, Hitler, and most of their followers. If fascism is a "far right" ideology, then its early growth constituted a mass conversion from left to right — but it was no such thing. None of the socialists who became fascists repudiated socialism. Some repudiated international Marxist socialism but not the basic tenets of socialism per se. They just adopted a nationalistic approach to enhance the popular appeal of socialism. Hitler himself bragged that his nationalistic brand of socialism had more muscle behind it than the international Marxist version promoted by the intellectuals, saying "I have put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun."

Another common argument for placing the Nazis on the political right is that they persecuted communists on the left and fought a brutal war with the Soviet communists in WWII. But according to that line of reasoning, Shiite Muslims are not really Muslims because they are enemies of the Sunni Muslims and fought a brutal war with them in the Iran-Iraq war. And Catholics were not Christians when they fought with Protestant Christians. According to that simplistic logic, the People’s Republic of China could not have been communist because in 1961 they formally denounced Soviet communism as the work of "revisionist traitors" in the USSR. Did that make the Chinese communists “right wingers”? And of course the Crips must be working for law enforcement when they feud with the Bloods. The Nazis and the Marxists were rival leftist gangs, and leftists have been fighting each other from the start. Stalin had his communist rival Trotsky killed in 1940.

The specious notion that the Nazis were on the right because they fought communists and Marxists serves as useful propaganda for the left, which needs "right-wing" atrocities to divert attention from the horrific communist atrocities of the past century. Hence, communist atrocities have received far less publicity than Nazi war crimes, even though they were greater in magnitude by any objective measure.

In his book Death by Government, R. J. Rummel writes that, "During this [the 20th] century's wars, there were some 38 million battle deaths, but almost four times more people –- at least 170 million –- were killed by governments for ethnic, racial, tribal, religious, or political reasons. I call this phenomenon democide, and it means that authoritarian and totalitarian governments are more deadly than war."

According to Rummel, Soviet communists murdered 62 million of their own civilian citizens, and Chinese communists killed 35 million of their own. The Nazis murdered 21 million civilians, including six million Jews. Additional purges occurred in smaller communist nations such as Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Cuba. But the Nazi crimes have been pinned on the “far right” and have largely eclipsed public awareness of the communist atrocities. Hence communism is still widely regarded as a fundamentally good idea that has just not yet been properly implemented.

Is Racism Right-Wing?

Racism per se is inherently neither right-wing or left-wing, but it is widely regarded as a predominantly right-wing phenomenon as a consequence of the Nazis being labeled as right-wing. This common view is based on a circular argument that goes as follows: (1) modern leftists oppose racism, so the Nazis must be on the right, and (2) racism is predominantly “right wing” because the ultimate racists, the Nazis, were on the far right end of the political spectrum. Besides being circular, the premise of this argument is based on misleading historical revisionism. The pre-WWII historical record is clear that the progressive left was at least as racist as the right if not more so.

Leftist racism dates back to Marx himself, who made it clear that the "workers' revolution" would not include all races. Engels referred to some races as “racial trash,” and Marx wrote in 1953 that “The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way.” A paper in the Journal of Political Ideologies examined the writings of Marx and Engels and concluded that, “For present-day standards, the racism displayed by Marx and Engels was outrageous and even extreme. For nineteenth-century standards, though, it was not.” Marx and Engels were not genocidal racists like Hitler, but neither were they paragons of racial harmony. They did, however, fan the flames of anti-semitism that motivated Hitler nearly a century later. Despite being a Jew himself, Marx wrote an essay in 1943 called “On the Jewish Question,” in which he said, “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”

In his book The Big Lie, Dinesh D'Souza documents the cordial relationship between the pre-war Nazis and the Democratic Party in the US. Southern Democrats fought the Civil War to maintain slavery, of course, and even after losing the war they continued to oppress blacks in the south for another century with so-called “Jim Crow” laws. Southern Democrats also founded the Ku Klux Klan to terrorize blacks and the Republicans in the south who tried to support them. The Nazis liked their methods and modeled their own "Brownshirts" after the KKK to terrorize and intimidate their political opponents. All the while, prominent Democrats and leftist intellectuals, including FDR, openly admired both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists in the years preceding WWII. And then there was FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

The now-discredited eugenics movement was also popular with the left before the war. According to Cambridge professor George Watson, author of The Lost Literature of Socialism, "In the European century that began in the 1840s from Engels' article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found. … Ethnic cleansing was orthodox socialism for a century or more." According to Watson, “It is notable that no German socialist in the 1930s or earlier ever sought to deny Hitler’s right to call himself a socialist on grounds of racial policy. In an age when the socialist tradition of genocide was familiar, that would have sounded merely absurd.” But leftist historical revisionism has done everything it can do to hide this history, so now racism is widely and erroneously considered a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.

Today, leftist progressives constantly accuse the right of racism, but is it true or is it a lie they just keep repeating? Racists can be found in any large group of people, no doubt, but a compelling argument can be made that the modern left is actually more racist than the right. They just changed their strategy in the 1960s because blatant racism was no longer politically viable. Their modern strategy is to patronize blacks and get them as dependent as possible on government, while keeping them trapped in dysfunctional large cities and government schools where they are indoctrinated rather than educated. LBJ was infamously quoted as saying, "I’ll have those ni**ers voting Democratic for 200 years.” That is why virtually all large cities in the US with high rates of crime and poverty are run by Democrats and have been for decades –- over six decades in some cases. Leftist policies have done great harm to racial minorities and continue to do so, whether intentionally or not.

At the same time, leftists cavalierly smear Trump and his supporters as racists and Nazis for merely demanding that longstanding immigration laws be properly enforced and preferring legal immigrants that assimilate and support themselves. By comparing the enforcement of immigration laws to the Holocaust, leftists trivialize the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi death camps, demonstrating a complete lack of comprehension of the nature and magnitude of the Holocaust. Hitler did more than enforce immigration laws and verbally insult illegal aliens who commit rape and murder –- he had innocent Jews rounded up and sent in cattle cars to be murdered wholesale in gas chambers.

Many modern leftists also support “reverse racism” against whites, Asians, and Jews. Their campaign against “white privilege,” for example, lumps all whites together as “oppressors” based on skin color, which is exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. warned against. Racism divides us by race, regardless of which races are demonized. The recent widespread anti-Israel protests on college campuses also show that most modern anti-semitism is on the left –- certainly no one would claim that those campuses or the anti-Israel protesters are “right wing.” They have been known to chant the old Palestinian slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” siding with the Hamas terrorists and echoing the Palestinian call for the state of Israel to be eliminated.

Why it Matters

The issue here goes way beyond some arcane academic debate over where the Nazis really belong on the political spectrum. This obfuscation of the political spectrum is being used as a very effective long-term strategy to confuse the public and distort our entire political system by projecting the past atrocities of fascists and Nazis onto freedom-loving, patriotic Americans to demonize and discredit them.

The protest group known as Antifa (short for anti-fascist) is one of many paid professional left-wing fascist groups that claim to be anti-fascist while implicitly projecting their own fascism onto others to justify violence and destruction. While political violence is normally considered unacceptable, many consider it “understandable,” “forgivable,” or even “justified” when directed against (supposed) fascists. This strategy of demonization by projection was promoted by Saul Alinsky, the radical Marxist revered by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals, a how-to guide on dirty tricks in politics. Alinsky and his followers have taken dirty politics to a new level.

American Jews traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Since 1992, between 68 and 80 percent of them have voted for the Democrat Presidential candidate in each election, and the percentages are even higher for secular Jews. Part of the reason for that preference may well be the belief that Republicans, being politically to the right of Democrats, are therefore "closer" to the kind of fascism that led to the Holocaust. In other words, the lie has been repeated so many times that most Jews apparently believe it. The same is also true of blacks to a lesser extent, although they have voted even more overwhelmingly for Democrats since Roosevelt's “New Deal” of the 1930s.

Republican presidents going back to Reagan have been routinely smeared by the left as fascists. In his first inaugural address, Reagan famously said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Yet he was somehow a fascist who believed in what Mussolini called "the absolute primacy of the state." With Trump, the barrage of lies is only getting worse, as he is routinely compared to Hitler by historically illiterate celebrities such as Joy Behar, Robert DiNiro, and many others, not to mention pundits and scholars who should know better.

Leftists routinely conflate all nationalism and equate it to fascism, either implicitly or explicitly. For them, American patriotism is fundamentally no different than Nazi patriotism, and Trump is the next Hitler because he is a nationalist just like Hitler. A president looking out for the interests of his own nation and its citizens is somehow considered immoral. According to this distorted thinking, all patriotic nationalism is simple-minded jingoism, and enforcing longstanding immigration laws is morally comparable to gassing Jews to death in concentration camps. It demonstrates a complete lack of appreciation for the constitutional limits on our government and the constitutional guarantee of our unalienable rights in the US.

The mainstream media routinely takes Trump's words out of context and twists their meaning to smear him as a fascist and a racist. When neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed with Antifa in Charlottesville in 2017 over the potential removal of a statue of Civil War General Robert E Lee, Trump held a press conference in which he said that there are "very fine people on both sides of the debate." The mainstream media showed that statement out of context and made it appear that he was referring to the neo-Nazis as "very fine people," but he was doing no such thing. He was referring to people on "both sides" of the debate over removing Confederate statues. To make that clear, Trump went on to say, "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists. They should be condemned totally." But the mainstream media deceived their viewers by deliberately omitting that clarification. Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats have repeated that lie many times now, hence close to half the nation still believe that Trump sympathizes with neo-Nazis.

Similarly, when Trump referred to violent MS-13 gang members as "animals," the media took it out of context to deceive their viewers into thinking he was referring to illegal immigrants in general. And they never correct these errors or apologize for deceiving their viewers. Again, close to half the nation still believes that he referred to all illegal immigrants as "animals," so of course they also believe that he must be a racist. The mainstream media also implicitly assumes that racism is the only possible reason that Trump and most Republicans want to enforce longstanding immigration law and secure the southern US border. Not until Democrat-controlled big cities were overrun with illegal aliens did it occur to them that there could be reasons other than racism to oppose an open border.

The absurdity of the anti-Trump mainstream media became obvious for all to see with the recent “bloodbath” hoax. While addressing a group of auto workers, Trump said that if the Democrats succeed in forcing us all into electric cars, China will dominate the market, and the result will be an economic “bloodbath” in the US automotive industry. The mainstream media saw a golden opportunity to deceive its viewers yet again and jumped into action, sternly warning America that Trump was threatening to instigate a “bloodbath” in the streets if he loses the 2024 election! If that was an “honest” mistake, they are pathetically incompetent. If it was a lie, which it almost certainly was, then every media organization that pushed it should permanently lose all credibility for anything and everything involving Trump. These are the same media outlets that shamelessly promoted both Russia hoaxes and never apologized for deceiving their viewers and readers for years on end with completely fabricated stories.

The Democrats and the media are now warning us that Trump is an "authoritarian." But it was Biden, not Trump, who forced COVID vaccine mandates. It is Biden and the Democrats, not Trump, who are pressuring Big Tech and social media to censor views that go against their approved narrative on many issues. It is Biden and the Democrats, not Trump, who are trying to force a major energy transition that will impoverish the middle class if fully implemented. And it is the Democrats who are willing to forcibly take children from their parents if those parents don't go along with irreversible chemical or surgical gender transition at shockingly young ages. But Trump’s desire to restore basic law and order in the current lawless environment apparently makes him an “authoritarian.”

As a general rule, "authoritarians" do not reduce tax rates, but Trump did. Lower taxes allow people to use more of the money they earned as they wish rather than handing it over to the government to support an agenda that the taxpayer may or may not agree with. As a general rule, "authoritarians" don't protect civil rights, including free speech and gun rights, but Trump nominated three Supreme Court Justices who have upheld those rights in nearly all cases. Hitler ended free speech and outlawed private gun ownership -- which is exactly what many of those who equate Trump to Hitler want for the US, of course. They want laws against "hate speech" and "misinformation," where they define the terms themselves –- as essentially anything they disagree with — or know is true but don’t want the public to know.

On issue after issue, leftist progressives project their own authoritarianism onto Trump and his supporters as a smokescreen to confuse and deceive the public. Comparing Trump to Hitler is not just hyperbole; it is a reversal of reality. Now they have the audacity to warn that, if reelected, Trump will harass and prosecute his political adversaries — as if they haven’t been doing exactly that to him and his supporters for years! They even warn that Trump will “end democracy,” projecting onto him their own intention to do exactly that. The underlying foundation of all that projection is the Big Lie and false flag that fascism is “far right” and Trump is the new Hitler. Their ultimate objective is to impose fascist totalitarianism under the guise of anti-fascism, and they are dangerously close to pulling it off.

References

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, Dinesh D’Souza (2017). This book is an absolute must read for anyone who wants to understand the national and international politics of the past century.

Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the 'Free Left' and the 'Statist Left', by L.K. Samuels (2019). This book provides an informative history of the left-right political spectrum and its deceptive maniputation.

The Lost Literature of Socialism, George Watson (2010). This remarkable but little-known book by a professor of literature at Cambridge will turn everything you assumed about pre-WWII socialism upside down.

Hitler and the socialist dream, article by George Watson (1998)

Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian, article by George Reisman, Mises Institute (2021)

Those Damned Nazis, Joseph Goebbels (1932), German Propaganda Archive

The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini (1932)

The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, 1933.

The Nazis Were Leftists, Deal With It, article by Paul H Jossey (2018)

Socialist origins of Neo-Nazism, article by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. (1999)

A Short History of Democrats, Republicans, and Racism

Nazi Party 25 Points (1920), Alpha History

Is Fascism Right or Left?, short video by Dinesh D’Souza on PragerU.com

It’s Time to Talk About Karl Marx’s Racism, article by Jarrett Stepman, The National Interest (2021)

Marx and Engels’s theory of history: making sense of the race factor, Erik van Ree, Journal of Political Ideologies (2019)

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, John McWhorter (2021)

Death by Government, R.J. Rummel (2018)

Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?, Dennis Prager video on PragerU.com

Was Fascism Right-Wing (Again)?, Jonah Goldberg in National Review (2015)

This article on google docs

Acknowledgment

The author acknowledges Alex Sadovsky for many helpful suggestions, which greatly improved this essay.

The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists. — Winston Churchill

Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. — Ronald Reagan

You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal. — Benito Mussolini

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power. — Benito Mussolini

If you agree with this essay, please pass it along to friends and family.