In the past, I have repeatedly posed the question “Who are the real X?”, where X has been e.g. extremists and science deniers, pointing out that (a) the accusation of being an X usually comes from the Left, but that (b) the label is much more apposite when used about the Left, it self.
Here, I will give some additional thoughts, beginning with a discussion of Fascism and Harris/Trudeau vs. Trump.
Past writings (that might or might not be integrated here at a later date) include texts on science deniers, extremists, and, with a reversal of direction, the enlightened.
The topic has also been somewhat recurring in other texts on a smaller scale or more indirectly.
In late October 2024, shortly before the POTUS election, I encountered (a) renewed attempts to hypocritically and wrongfully smear Trump as a Fascist (and/or equate him with Hitler) by Harris and other far Leftist, (b) a very interesting take on the situation in Canada under Trudeau, which shows what might happen in the U.S., should Harris be allowed to gain power, and (indirectly) how much more worthy of the label “Fascist” the likes of Harris and Trudeau are. Below, I will give some details.
As discussed repeatedly in the past, “Fascist” is so abused and used in so many “non-Mussolini” meanings that it is hard to tell what meaning is intended. Except in one of these meanings (namely, the “is not sufficiently compliant with the right Leftist ideology”, as e.g. used against Trotsky by Stalin), Harris would likely fare worse than Trump with all meanings. Below, however, I will focus on the general family of totalitarian and anti-democratic meanings, which is almost certainly what Harris et al. intend.
For a more literal comparison in terms of “Mussolini” Fascism and/or a Trump–Hitler comparison in terms of ideology, I invite the reader to consider my text on political scales (including various links from there).
A potentially interesting and paradoxical point is that the anti-Trump rhetoric goes with “Fascism” and/or “Hitler”, but, from what I have seen, leaves a “Mussolini” out. Moreover, “Nazi” is not unheard of, but seems rarer than “Fascism”—maybe, because “Nazi” is still a less generic and less vague term. (But I caution that I might simply not be aware of sufficiently many of these demonizing accusations.)
To first consider some aspects of the issue of Trump and Fascism/Hitler:
Trump is not the first Republican POTUS or POTUS candidate to be referred to as “Hitler” by the U.S. Left. I have myself seen the same accusation repeatedly raised “live” against George W. Bush during the Iraqi conflicts (and note both that Trump was opposed to the invasion of Iraq and that he is a different breed of Republican than Bush). I have also, reading up on the past, seen it raised against Reagan (utterly, utterly absurd!) and at least heard the claim that it would have been raised against George H. W. Bush (whether also in regard to Iraq, I do not know).
This, then, covers three or four out of the last four Republican presidents—with the potential for others (Nixon?) as we go back in time. (When it comes to POTUS candidates, I have less information and the matter might or might not stand differently. I do note the horrifying smearing of Goldwater, however, which helped to remove a true opportunity for the U.S. and brought another four years of the disaster that was LBJ.)
Trump used to be quite popular with the Democrats. This changed dramatically with his involvement with the Republican party and, in particular, his 2016 candidacy.
Trump has already served four years. If he had been a Fascist or a second Hitler, this should have been, but is not, reflected in his record—and no proof has been given that he would suddenly have turned into something else during the Biden era.
This is the more notable, as a “Trump is X” (for various negative X) was pushed even back then and never materialized.
What about J6?
I have yet to see even a shred of evidence that Trump made any attempt at a coup, to instigate a riot, or similar—this is something that existed in the minds of the Left and in Leftist rhetoric. On the contrary, his statements urged that his followers proceed peacefully.
Moreover, the events of the day (in general) are routinely exaggerated and the true scandal is how much more harshly the J6 victims were and are treated than, say, BLM rioters. This includes some who peacefully and in a good-faith belief that they were welcome entered the Capitol—only to later be charged with this-and-that.
In contrast, the Biden presidency has been filled with anti-democratic problems caused by the Left, including lawfare directed at Trump and Trump adjacent Republicans (e.g. Guiliani) and attempts to prevent Trump from entering the race.
Indeed, anti-democratic problems during the Trump presidency also predominantly came from the Left, including impeachments that were motivated by politics, not true misdeeds.
Indeed, anti-Trump measures began even during the second Obama term, notably in form of the discredited “Russiagate” investigations.
Indeed, there have been massive democratic problems of other types with the Left going back to long before the Obama era (albeit, they saw a considerably intensification during that time) and still with no end in sight. These include, but are not limited to, the abuse of colleges for Leftist indoctrination, attempts to prevent or censor disapproved-by-the-Left speech, the abuse of the judicial branch to push law-making-by-judges, and ongoing attempts to increase government power over the citizens and federal power over the states. (See a great number of earlier texts.)
But note that Leftist misdeeds are not automatically misdeeds by an incumbent Leftist president.
Looking at actual political stances towards e.g. free speech, election integrity, and democracy, Trump fares far better than the Left.
(That the Left cries to high-heaven about election manipulation, or whatnot, when someone tries to strengthen (!!!) election integrity, while the Left tries to lower it, does not make the cries truthful. What they do is to give us insight into the perverted takes of the Left.)
A longstanding observation of mine is that what the Left accuses others of being, doing or planing on doing, whatnot, tells us more about the Left than about the accused: The accused is usually innocent of the accusation; the Left, quite often, guilty.
Indeed, if the wrong candidate wins the upcoming election, there is a severe risk to fear the end of true democracy in the U.S.—but that wrong candidate is Harris, not Trump. Consider further impositions of propaganda and censorship, further lawfare against non-Leftist, court packing to return the SCOTUS to the tool for the Left that is has been for so long stretches beginning with FDR, further weakening of election integrity, etc.
That democracy in the U.S. survived even the Biden era was not a given: if it had not been for senators Manchin and Sinema (who both repeatedly went against the Democrat “party line” in important votes) during the first two years, and the mid-term Republican victory in the House, the point of no return might already be behind us.
In fact, I predicted this death already after the finalization of the 2020 election, once it was clear that Biden-as-Potus was complemented by Democrat control of both the House and the Senate. In this prediction, I had (understandably) not counted on Manchin/Sinema. Moreover, I had underestimated how much remaining influence the states had and how the likes of DeSantis gave at least some counterweight.
(Whether the incompetence of politicians also played in, I do not know; however, this is one rare area where that incompetence could be of benefit to the people.)
To next turn to the aforementioned take on Canada under Trudeau, a text by Jordan B. Petersone, by means of some selected quotes:
The overall text is well worth reading and contains much that is off-topic for this page, including economic problems, growing anti-government attitudes, Trudeau’s failed or pretended attempts to bring in more women into his cabinet, and Trudeau’s hypocrisy. I keep a focus on what can be broadly viewed as Fascist in the used-against-Trump sense. (And even here I have cut out most, to avoid exceeding the borders of reasonable quoting and fair use.)
Many items cited are an illustration of how the Left is very keen on handing more power to the government and/or the Left (in Leftist conceptions, of course, the government is supposed to be permanently under Leftist control), of removing obstacles to action that serve to protect the citizens from governmental overreach and arbitrariness, etc. This is virtually the opposite attitude of many or most Conservatives, virtually all Libertarians, and the makers of the U.S. constitution—which the U.S. Left would love to get rid of, be it entirely or through the type of “living” constitution that have proved so problematic in Canada, what is better referred to as an “undead” constitution.
As to the below quotes, changes to or loss of formatting might have taken place for technical reasons.
What evidence do I have for [the situation in Canada being far worse than it seems]? The sheer unadulterated farcical horror of much of the legislation that is currently in process during the waning days of the Trudeau years. Analysis of one Bill, C63, makes that starkly and surreally clear. I use those rather dramatic adjectives advisedly. Such legislation has become the norm, rather than the exception, in Western societies with a modern “progressive” bent around the globe.
Quite so. The “hate speech” aspects discussed by Peterson are particularly (but not singularly) problematic. The more so as “hate speech” often amounts to “disagreeing with the Left” and has been known to (in Leftist classifications) include even statements that are supported by scientific evidence.
[...] [The bill] purports to do nothing less than protect children (“think of the children!”) from the predations of online psychopaths and purveyors and collectors of pornography. [...] But the apparent positive impulse is camouflage for something far darker [...]
As is often the case with the Left—use something noble-seeming to do evil and often by abusing the many noble voters who fail to see through the problems. (Cf. e.g. portions of [1].)
A complication is that it is not always clear when the Left acts out malice and in perfidy and when out of incompetence and in good faith, but here the former seems clear. (And so is often the case with the U.S. Democrats, who e.g. try to weaken election integrity in the name of democracy or pack the SCOTUS with Leftist judicial activist to “modernize”, or whatnot, the court.)
With a temporary switch of context:
[Bill C16] claimed to do nothing less laudable than to bring even more of the poor oppressed intersectional masses of the world under the shelter of legal protection [...] while simultaneously compelling the use of certain forms of private speech [...], as well as further confusing and then seriously harming children already confused by the idiot ideologies of the fringe.
[...]
[Peterson’s prognostication of “a positive epidemic of psychopathology”] has come true with a vengeance, as the vulnerable young women it confused have been lining up in droves of thousands — many of them minors — for the utterly brutal double mastectomies that have now become far more common as a form of “gender expression”. [...] surgeries, which in the case of the boys affected means castration [...]
While Peterson adds this in order to give credibility to his predictions about C63 (that he made claims that some viewed as unlikely about C16 and was proved right), the above is notable for another reason: The great amount of surgical and medical intervention to alter the bodies of the very young, with minimal true scrutiny, with no concern for the great dangers of mistakes, etc., well matches both the general ruthlessness of large parts of the Left and the patterns displayed during the COVID-countermeasure era. (It is also an example of a lack of evidence-based politics.)
For some comments on the Left and attempts to play on the nobility of others, see above and [1].
But back to C63. To control “online harm,” the Trudeau administration would establish a new ‘Digital Safety Commission’. This will produce an entire bureaucracy (in essence, a parallel judicial system), which — given the extreme threat that such online harm hypothetically produces — has frighteningly unlimited powers.
[...]
Some of the intent is the control of pornography, particularly that involving children but the rest is oddly but very purposefully and cunningly devoted to the “hate crime” that is now used so much as an excuse for nothing but restriction of freedom.
[...] The Bill would:
“...create a new hate crime offence of committing an offence under the Criminal Code or any other Act of Parliament that is motivated by hatred based on certain factors...race, national or ethnic origin, language, colour, religion, sex, age, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression. {The perpetrator} is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.”
(I have replaced square brackets used by Peterson with curly braces, above, to avoid confusion with my own edits.)
This repeats many past errors around alleged hate crimes, beginning with the vagueness of what is hate, the typically low connection to hate, the trouble of proving a hate-based motive, the question whether a hate motive should legitimately alter the scope of punishment for something already illegal, why these specific groups and not others, etc.
That motive has an effect on punishment is not unusual, but usually it is the act that is important. In as far as other motives are considered, of course, the question is raised why the same cannot be done for alleged hate within the existing framework. If other motives are not, the special treatment of hate becomes the harder to defend.
To use specific enumerations, instead of more generic groups, in various laws is a very common error. (E.g. to speak of, say, a “discrimination by sex, race, religion” instead of “discrimination by group belonging”.) This is a problem, in part, because it makes the law too ungeneric, which can create a hole, where one group can be abused until (if at all) the law is amended; in part, because certain groups are given artificial advantages over others. For instance, I have seen at least one case that gave women a protected status but left men unprotected. (I believed this to be the Swedish “hets mot folkgrupp”, but appear to have been wrong. More generally, a division of the world into, on the one hand, non-minority men and, on the other, women and members of minorities is common. Likewise e.g. quotas that dictate a minimum percentage of women instead of a minimum percentage for both men and women.)
A potentially interesting point is that who does or does not need protection can change rapidly. For instance, the situation for Jews in large parts of the world took a rapid (and paradoxical, even absurd) downturn after the “October 7th” massacre, and has likely worsened further due to the ongoing conflicts around Israel in the year-and-change since then. For instance, who is hated by the Left can change very rapidly (but, then, the Left has no interest in protecting others against the Left).
Looking at men and women, the typical roles, earnings, and whatnots changed continually and comparatively fast during the 20th century—and various sex-specific laws/regulation/precedents often failed to keep up. For instance, Sweden had a (women’s only) widow-pension, based on the idea that the husband worked and the wife stayed at home. If the wife was now widowed, she would have no or only an insufficient pension from her own work and would need special protection. This window-pension was only abolished in 1990 (!), and grandfather (grandmother?) clauses allowed the old rules to have effects far past 1990. Moreover, of course, this widow-pension was for wives, not women who had formed a family with a man (let alone another woman) without being married.
From another point of view, given that someone has been the victim of a crime based on group belonging, why would it matter whether that group would otherwise be more or less at risk than some other group? It reeks of an inequality before the law and sometimes one that can, it self, be seen a violation of law (in the U.S., e.g., where it arguably violates the “equal protection clause”).
More generally, politicians (not restricted to the Left) seem to be very short-sighted, and might reason that “X is not a problem today; ergo, we ignore the possibility of X being a problem at all”, something seen e.g. with the decades of low inflation that preceded the COVID-countermeasure era and how poor the preparations for new inflation were in many places.
[...] Members of the ‘Digital Safety Commission’ [...] can delegate any of their powers to any of their employees, with some minor restrictions. [...]
Delegation of such types is not only problematic from a democracy point of view but has a long history of causing problems, for reasons that include issues with accountability and arbitrariness. I have myself been a victim of an absurd case, where a German chimney sweep (who, absurdly and as a leftover of an archaic system, still had some governmental power from the days when chimney sweeps were governmental employees and largely acting on behalf of the government, despite, here, running and acting as a private business) could just declare me guilty of an infraction and have me fined—despite my innocence of anything that moved beyond a technicality and despite his motivation, by all signs, being my objections to his consistent prior customer hostility and lack of professionalism. (And note how much smaller his powers were than those suggested in e.g. C63.)
The bill then burdens those who operate online services with the requirement to report to the government the details of their compliance with the act, in precisely the onerous manner that will make it impossible for Canadians who aren’t giant idiot corporations to manage. Thus, one “minor” consequence of C63 will be that the small operators who give much value to the web and what it offers will find it very difficult — indeed dangerous — to continue. This alone should give its formulators pause, although such eradication is in the best interests of much of the woke mob.
A problem here is whether malice of incompetence dominates: On the one hand, yes, reducing the number of businesses or whatnots in a field is often of advantage to the Left (by no means restricted to “the woke mob”), because the remainder are that much easier to control. On the other, a consistent observation of mine is that many politicians (in general) and almost all Leftist politicians (in particular) fail to think side-effects and long-term developments through. The above could be an illustration of either problem.
The Commission also has the power of a superior court of record, and can act in that manner. However, the members of the Commission are not defined with regard to the necessity of any professional competence (such as legal training). Worse: it says explicitly in the bill that their actions are not “bound by any legal or technical rules of evidence” (!).
I am not familiar with the Canadian court system, and various terms tend to have different meanings in different countries. Correspondingly, I am not certain what the implication of “superior court of record” is; however, it seems plausible that a court beyond the “entry level”, e.g. a district court in the U.S., is intended. How far beyond a district court I can only guess.
To create extra-/para-judicial courts is a favorite of the Left, exactly because they are easier to fill with the “right” persons, there might now be a two-fold chance to get someone, etc. (Those pesky selection criteria, that restrictive due process, ... It is not easy to be an activist.)
A good example is how some organizations, e.g. U.S. colleges, take it upon themselves to have quasi-judicial proceedings in lieu of, or in addition to, whatever might happen in the (proper) legal system—and do so free of even the most basic constraints. For instance, I have heard tales of men being expelled from college over an alleged rape based on word-against-word situations that would not hold water in court—but where some “believe women” fanatic effectively served as both prosecution and judge/jury. If that takes hold elsewhere, we will descend into the legal travesties that make Soviet Russia look like a Rechtsstaat.
Canadians so affected by the bill — or suspected of being persons of interest — are compelled by specific provisions to comply in any manner the Commission deems appropriate, which also means turning over all of their material and electronic assets for examination and potential seizure.
In other words, rule of law is disabled in favor of “rule by dictate”. (There might or might not be a means of appeal outside the new system, but, even then, it will take time and money to appeal even the most unreasonable dictate.)
The investigation and seizure of electronic assets is problematic for other reasons, as digital evidence is so easy to plant, so hard to investigate without violating privacy, etc.
[...] the scope of action of the Commission is essentially unbounded:
“If the Commission has reasonable grounds to believe that an operator is contravening or has contravened this Act, it may make an order requiring the operator to take, or refrain from taking, any measure to ensure compliance with this Act.”
Rule of law it ain’t. Note that the quote does not even stop at “any reasonable measure”, which would be bad enough, through the interpretability of “reasonable”, but actually says “any measure”. (Such constraining adjectives are otherwise common. I cannot rule out, however, that some amelioration is found elsewhere in the overall text.)
[...] Hidden deeper still inside this bill’s wordy and deceptive moralising and purposeful obfuscation is its true purpose, in my opinion: the monitoring and punishment of “hate speech”. [...]
There is no truly relevant response to this question, other than this: who defines ‘hate’? The answer to that is twofold: first, the very snitches and informers that this bill enables and rewards, and the very last people you want to provide with that power if you have an iota of sense; second, those who hate speech, and who wish to regulate or, indeed, forbid it, so that the only things that can be said or, eventually, thought are favourable or agreeable to them.
Also note the parallel woke trend of misdefining words like “hate” and “offensive” to take objective criteria and the actual intents of the “perpetrator” out of consideration. We often have situations where Leftists deem something “hate” because they do not like it or something “offensive” because they decided that it so was, regardless of whether the offense was even remotely reasonable, and even when the alleged offense was directed at someone else and that someone else was not actually offended.
The play on words that turns those who shout about hate-speech-this and hate-speech-that into those who hate speech might be a slight over-generalization, but it is often spot on. (I suspect that I will make use of this play, myself, in the future.)
Anyone in Canada can, in accordance with this legislation, accuse anyone they choose of making said accuser “fearful.” Fearful of what, you may ask? That the person so specified may, in the future, commit a hate crime, as broadly defined. This is not only a future crime that has not yet occurred, but a future crime defined only by someone’s “fear” that such an event might occur. [...]
The “future crime” aspect might go beyond anything that I am aware of in the modern West. (But it is not entirely unprecedented in more specific cases, including the mentally ill—and fake accusations of mental illness has been a tool for the Left. An interesting case is the German “Sicherungsverwahrung”, which can be used exactly to keep someone locked up to prevent a future crime, but which, in my understanding, is limited to those already convicted of a crime, e.g. in that someone convicted of murder, and deemed sufficiently likely to murder again, might be kept off the streets even after serving his official sentence.)
Arguments based on fear are depressingly common on the Left, especially, where women and or Feminism is concerned: if a woman has a fear, it does not matter whether the fear is well founded. Note e.g. the German use of reserved-for-women parking areas exactly to reduce fear—not danger, fear.
If the magistrate in question is convinced (and remember just how ideologically captured the judiciary is becoming, particularly but not uniquely in Canada) then the person so accused can be restricted to their house, with an electronic monitoring bracelet affixed to their leg, denied access to their friends and family, either in person or online, and be required (!) to provide samples of their bodily fluids whenever requested for a period of no less than one year.
The absurdity and overreach of this speaks for it self. However, I have to express my disappointment in Peterson, who first became known as a defender of correct pronouns. His abuse of “their” as a generic third-person singular is one of the small ways in which the Left wins. A small concession by the one generation, be it deliberately or out of ignorance, becomes the norm for the next, and the Left can continually push the borders further towards whatever the ultimate goal is.