Riot by progressive students at the University of California, Berkeley against right-winger, Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos
Screen shot of ABC news report

The Democratic hysteria   and that of their mainstream media allies only grows with time to the amazement of all those who are not progressive. Over the last eight years of Obama’s administration, most of the media (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times being among the most prominent examples) have been extremely reliable allies of the Obama administration, the Democratic Party, and progressives in general. It would seem most of the managers and reporters in these news organizations are very committed progressives themselves, eager to push the party line.

And now that progressives and the Democratic Party have been quite throughly checked by the results of the 2016 elections, they are being driven by shock and fear to attempt to destroy the Trump administration and the Republican agenda in any way they can. Cries abound from many progressives that Trump and Republicans in general are “fascists” and “racists”. Quite evidently these progressives are filled with hatred for neoliberals (erroneously known as “conservatives”). Progressives should be very careful about the possibility of inducing an even greater counter hatred from those they hate. This extremely dangerous social environment could quite easily escalate into the catastrophic general violence of a civil war.

The Source of the American Left’s Anger and Fear

The American progressive elite  is suffering the same agony of rejection by a significant fraction of the electorate that we are seeing for the elites in the rest of Western civilization. Governments that try to control and manage their economies to stimulate their growth and direct their activity according to the desires of the elites are failing miserably all over the developed world. As a result, we see “Brexit” and the ascendancy of the Tory Party in the United Kingdom, the rejection of both establishment parties in France, the Five-Star movement in Italy, and the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States.

In the United States, the disaster for the progressives was far more than just losing the presidency and ceding control to the Republicans of both the Senate and the House of Representatives for at least another two years. Republicans now also hold the governorships of two-thirds of the states, and in 50 percent of all the states they possess the governorship along with control of both houses of their state legislature; Democrats control only four states to this degree. The GOP now controls a record 69 of 99 state legislative chambers. In addition, President Trump has begun to wrest the federal judiciary away from progressive control with the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a raft of other “conservatives” to lower federal courts.

Beyond all that, the fact that President Obama, following the authoritarian instincts of progressives, ruled so much through issuing presidential edicts, provides at least one very easy way to create neoliberal change. All Trump has to do is to issue his own presidential executive orders withdrawing all of Obama’s. Among these Trump orders are the following:

• “Executive Order Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”: This order instructs federal executive officers to minimize the economic burden of Obamacare on citizens and companies until it can be “repealed and replaced”. The Secretary of Health and Human Services and other federal officers are instructed to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation” of any part of the law that places a fiscal burden on the government, businesses or individuals. This includes waiving the individual mandate.
  
  
• “Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals for High-Priority Infrastructure Projects”: This order directs that environmental reviews of “high priority” infrastructure projects (roads, bridges, airports, highways, oil pipelines, etc.) be expedited.
  
  
•  “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States”: This order concerns illegal immigrants, changing some immigration policies and stripping federal grant money from sanctuary cities. It also directs the Department of Homeland Security to hire 10,000 more immigration officers.
  
  
• “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements”: This executive order is the companion of the previous one, directing federal spending toward the construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
  
  
• “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs”: This order is a direct attack on the progressive regulatory state. It requires that before an executive department or agency can propose a new regulation, they must eliminate two. In addition net changes to regulatory costs must be less than or equal to zero dollars, with any new regulatory costs offset by reductions from eliminated regulations.
  
  
• “Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the ‘Waters of the U.S.’ Rule”: A herald for a major revision of Barack Obama’s Clean Water Rule, this order instructs the EPA and the assistant secretary of the Army for Civil Works to propose a new rule that either eliminates or revises Obama’s rule. The current Clean Water Rule has been widely interpreted as a federal power grab to gain jurisdiction over the use of water on farmland, or even its existence as puddles in your backyard or in drainage ditches.
  
  
• “Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth”: This is another order to the EPA to review and replace another Obama executive order instituting a Clean Power Plan. Obama’s Clean Power Plan was aimed at reducing American carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere by gradually making the use of fossil fuels uneconomic. This is despite the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are now dangerously low for the continued existence of life on Earth. Trump’s order asks federal departments and agencies to review any regulations that could “potentially burden the development or use” of fossil fuels or nuclear energy.
  
  
• Plus many, many more!

Given this vast neoliberal counterattack against their most dearly held policies, it is no wonder progressives are so filled with fear and loathing of Trump and the Republican party.

The Democratic Party and Their Media Allies Sow the Wind, and Might Well Reap the Whirlwind

In reaction,  Democrats and progressives are lashing out in all possible directions. They accuse Trump and Republicans of all being fascists, racists, homophobes, misogynists, and anything else that is evil. Once it was discovered Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee’s computers and  (allegedly) released the hacked files to Wikileaks, Democrats howled about collusion between the Russians and Donald Trump, with Trump being the ultimate Manchurian candidate. Trump, they screamed, is a traitor who must be impeached and removed from office! So says the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.

A really big problem with this narrative is there has been absolutely no evidence of  collusion between Trump and his associates with Russia. So says Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), as evidenced in the video below.

So says former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, as evidenced in the video below.

https://youtu.be/ycZj5-5KJwA

If after such a long time since the start of the 2016 campaign there is still no evidence discoverable by national intelligence groups that Trump had colluded with the Russians, one must seriously suspect that evidence just does not exist. Nevertheless, progressives soldier on to remove Trump from office.

Until recently, I have always found it somewhat ironical and slightly amusing that progressives would call neoliberals fascists. Now, I just find these accusations increasingly irritating. As I have documented elsewhere, fascism is a form of socialism in which the economy is firmly in the dictatorial control of the state. A fascist state is different from a communist state only in that the fascist state allows a “polite” fiction that private individuals actually own and manage their companies. In reality, those private “owners” are firmly under the thumb of the fascist state, devolving them into apparatchiks of the state.

Now, if Trump and other Republicans actually were fascists, would they not be trying to increase government control over the economy? Instead they are actively attempting to reduce government control. They are significantly reducing government regulations, trying to repeal the Obamacare control over the American health industry, and attempting to drastically reduce taxes of both individuals and companies. This is all very curious and puzzling behavior for fascists.

In a like manner, one must also strongly suspect progressive accusations that Trump and Republicans are racists to be false. If they are racists, why would so many in their number be minorities? Why would Dr. Ben Carson, a notable neurosurgeon and a black man, be Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development? Dr. Carson was seriously considered as a possible Republican candidate for president, as was Herman Cain, another black man and a very successful businessman. I could go on and on, listing many more black, hispanic, and Asian members of the Republican Party. Such a list would include names like Tim Scott, Mia Love, Nikki Haley, Allen West, Clarence Thomas, Jason Riley, Bobby Jindal, Elaine Chou, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and many others. Perhaps ideology and not race is a more indicative characteristic for who will join and support the Republican Party. This is all very curious for an allegedly racist party.

The enraged howling of Democrats and their media allies seem to be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing except their own fecklessness.

Perhaps Progressives Are the True American Fascists

In the last section  I noted how little the neoliberals of the Republican Party resembled fascists. The Democratic Party and progressives unfortunately can not stand such scrutiny. In contradistinction to the Republicans, Democrats have been actively seeking greater government control over the economy. In the last presidential campaign, they advocated increasing taxes to be able to dictate the allocation of a larger fraction of GDP. If anything, the political pressures from last year have pushed the Democrats much farther to the Left, toward more authoritarian positions. I have presented evidence for this increasing Democratic Party authoritarianism in the following posts.

• The Corruption of the Democratic Party
• Progressives’ Disrespect for the U.S. Constitution
• The Limits to Free Speech
• Democrats Want to Imprison Scientific Skeptics?
• The Anti-Freedom Bias of Progressives
• Progressives Are NOT Liberals
• Are You Unconvinced Democrats Are Growing More Authoritarian?
• The Progressives’ War On the Separation of Powers
• How a Democracy Evolves Into Fascism
• Obama’s Seizure of Legislative Power

With their surging frustrations, the increasingly authoritarian progressives are showing a rising penchant for violence. They even have their own version of the Nazi brown shirts (die Sturmabteilung), called Antifa that is short for anti-fascist (note the irony). Antifa is a decentralized, international movement ostensibly against fascism, but at least in the United States it is really anti-neoliberal. Concerning Antifa members, Matthew Vadum, senior vice president at the Capital Research Center and author of “Subversion, Inc.,” told the WorldNetDaily (WND.com):

Most of them are communists or radical anarchists, which in American politics is virtually the same thing. They are nihilistic thugs who want to destroy everything that is good in America. They’re a leftist counterpart to skinheads and neo-Nazis. They call themselves anti-fascists but they use fascistic tactics against their targets. Just as Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, or SA, beat up and terrorized political opponents, ‘antifa’ assaulted Trump supporters and Republicans when they shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’ recent speech at UC Berkeley. These people are crazed fanatics and they will never stop.

Consider the following list of violent events in which Antifa has been implicated.

• February 1, 2017, Berkeley, CA: A violent riot led by Antifa caused the cancellation of a speech by right-winger Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California, Berkeley.
• February 27, 2017, Clemson, SC: Antifa group promotes violence against “conservatives” at Clemson University.
• March 2, 2017, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont: Antifa thugs violently shut down a talk by conservative academic Charles Murray. In the process, they injured a progressive Middlebury political science professor, Allison Stanger, severely enough to send her to the emergency room,
• April 15, 2017, Berkeley, CA: Pro-Trump supporters at the University of California, Berkley are attacked by Antifa goons using mace, thrown bricks, bottles, and M-80s as weapons. Apparently, even though the Trump supporters were weaponless, Antifa lost the brawl. leading them to seek combat training and firearms for future battles.
• April 25, 2017, Portland, OR: Antifa threatens violence should the Portland, Oregan GOP and Trump supporters not pull out of a local annual parade. The Portland Rose Parade was canceled as a result.
• May 1, 2017:  In Portland, Oregon, Antifa protestors attacked police officers, emergency responders, and destroyed property in a May Day march. Simultaneously, in New York City Antifa members attacked Trump supporters.
• May 13, 2017, Boston, MA: A free speech rally by a “conservative” group was opposed by a screaming progressive “anti-fascist” group, Boston Antifa.

I do not pretend this list is exhaustive, and it is quite possible I might well have missed some of Antifa’s engagements. Nevertheless, this record does point out that a non-negligible, sizable fraction of progressives is completely finished with political toleration. In their view, the civil war has already begun.

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