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[Editor’s note: This article is adapted from remarks Robert Spencer made at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend on November 14, 2022 in Phoenix, Arizona. See the video of his talk HERE.]
There has been a great deal of discussion of late about how the midterm elections were rigged, if not with outright fraud, at the very least with mail-in ballots and in so many other ways that elections can be manipulated to achieve the desired result. But what is the end game? Where does the Democrat Party want to be in five years, or ten or twenty? We saw that very clearly on September 1, 2022, when Joe Biden made his infamous speech with the red and black background.
Biden gave a speech that was without parallel in American history. It was an extraordinary departure from 200 years of American political tradition, and it was extremely important. It reveals what the Left is trying ultimately to do. The best analogy for that speech is not in American history at all; it’s actually in German history, in a speech that the Chancellor of Germany named Adolf Hitler gave on March 23, 1933, in the Reichstag.
This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. Godwin’s Law holds that if you invoke Hitler or compare some contemporary figure to Hitler, then you lose. That’s all very well, unless you’re talking about real fascists. Joe Biden is a real fascist. The Democrat Party is at this point a fascist party. Biden, on the other hand, has called conservatives fascists, and Trump in particular. But what exactly is a fascist?
The Latin word fasces means bundles, like bundles of sticks. On the United States dollar bill, there is an American eagle clutching a couple of bundles of sticks. The idea is that a single stick is weak and can be easily snapped in two and destroyed, but if you hold a bundle of sticks together, they can’t be so easily broken. The idea is that out of unity comes strength. The statement E Pluribus Unum, which is on the dollar and is one of the mottoes of the United States, “out of many, one,” is in one sense a fascist statement, because it is saying that we are all stronger together than we are separately.
The Founding Fathers were not remotely fascist. America is not fascist. They were just emphasizing the importance of unity among the various states. But fascism as an organized political ideology shares that idea of strength in unity. It arose in the beginning of the 20th century in Italy, and of course, spread to Germany and elsewhere, and was thought to be completely discredited at the end of World War II. However, the People’s Republic of China today is more fascist than communist, and Joe Biden’s United States of America is a fascist state as well.
When Hitler came to power, there were a lot of socialists in his government. His party was called the National Socialist German Workers Party. There was a great deal of what we would think of as leftist Marxist rhetoric in the Nazi program. There were people who wanted him to nationalize all the industries, but he refused. Instead, he called in the captains of industry, the big industrialists in Germany, and made it clear to them that they would do exactly what he said, or they would be killed, and they did do what he said. But they maintained ownership of their industries.
So while communism nationalizes industries, seizing control of the means of production, fascism does not. Fascism allows for private ownership of the means of production, but coordinates them all, applying the principle of “out of many, one,” a bundle of sticks. A fascist regime coordinates them all together to work for the same goal. So both fascism and communism are totalitarian systems, and are quite similar to one another. The idea that fascism is extreme Right and communism is extreme Left is baseless; it’s actually leftist propaganda.
The reality is that fascism and communism are closely aligned and very similar to one another. They’re both totalitarian systems that extinguish individuality and coordinate everything for the good of the state. There are two primary differences. Fascism tends to be nationalist, and fascism does not seize the means of production, but merely controls the means of production.
Now think about the United States of America today. What we have is a President of the United States and his party with one point of view. That same point of view is shared by all the major corporations, all the social media giants, and all of the media. That’s fascism: out of many, one. Bundles: they’re all bundled together, and they’re all working for the same goal.
The fly in the ointment came when Donald Trump became president. The entire fascist machinery was stopped in its tracks, because suddenly the executive branch of the government was not on board with the rest of the program. And so the fascists got together and did everything they could to remove and destroy Trump.
Joe Biden just repeated that as an imperative of the ruling group. After the election, on Wednesday, November 9, Biden was asked about Trump. The questioner said, “His movement is still very strong.” Biden laughed derisively and said, “Oh, yeah?” He thought, or wanted his audience to think, that Trump’s movement was broken. Biden added: “I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.”
What does that mean? How can Biden do that? The Constitution says nothing about eligibility for the Presidency of the United States except that one must be a natural born citizen and 35 years old. It also says that the president can be removed from office if found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Biden likely meant that leftists are going to indict Trump for treason for something related to the allegedly classified documents that he allegedly had at Mar-a-Lago. This will be considered high crimes and misdemeanors and bar him from the presidency. But what Biden is really trying to do, as he made clear on September 1, was to criminalize opposition and make only one political point of view acceptable in the United States. That is where everything is tending in the fascist system in which we are living today.
The social media giants have already normalized the idea that people who speak things that are unacceptable get banned, even if they have neither engaged in or advocated for any criminal activity. Now there is a big debate because Elon Musk bought Twitter, over whether he should allow the freedom of speech, and how much of it he should allow. Biden actually said that the government is going to investigate Musk for daring to try to reinstitute the freedom of speech. So how much does this administration value dissent? Investigating Musk for not working in coordination with the agenda of the government and the other social media giants is pure fascism.
This is the administration that put together the Disinformation Governance Board last year; it was going to work out of the Department of Homeland Security, quite ominously, in order to combat alleged disinformation. That disinformation would be judged, of course, by the Board itself, and prosecuted presumably under the auspices of being a national security threat.
In his red and black speech on September 1, 2022, the 83rd anniversary of the beginning of World War II, Biden said that Trump and his supporters represented a grave threat to the Republic itself. That was what was so unprecedented in American life, and why his speech was more like Hitler’s Reichstag speech than any speech of an American president. Biden was saying that essentially half of the electorate was a threat to the Republic and outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.
Do you think that they are going to peacefully allow those whom they have thus branded to recapture the White House or the House or the Senate? This is an effort to rule Trump supporters, that is, America First patriots, out of the bounds of acceptable discourse, and to criminalize their perspective.
What Hitler did was in response to the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933. Hitler blamed the communists for the fire, and banned the Communist Party. As it happened, the Communist Party had enough deputies in the Reichstag to prevent him from being able to pass the Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers. After Hitler blamed them for the Reichstag fire and outlawed the party, he had a majority in the Reichstag. On March 23, 1933, he said that the communists were a grave threat to the republic, and so had to be removed. The rest of the deputies voted in favor of the Enabling Act, and the Nazi dictatorship was established.
In the United States of America, it’s happening more slowly. We have a long democratic tradition. The Weimar Republic was only fourteen years old when Hitler made his speech. Our Republic, by contrast, goes back to the eighteenth century; to destroy it will take longer. We had the Reichstag fire event: that was January 6, which is cast as an act of high treason that is being blamed on the opposition group. Then we had the Biden speech that consciously copied Nazi imagery.
What Biden was saying was very clear: we have the military behind us, and we are going to come after you. We are going to make what you were saying and doing a criminal act. We are going to rule you out of the political life of the United States of America. What Joe Biden was doing was a quintessentially fascist act. He has all the corporations and all the media, as well as all the industries behind him. They all work for the same point of view, and now he is moving to eliminate the opposition.
So when we look at the election of 2022, it’s very clear what happened. There was a decisive majority for the Republicans in the popular vote, yet it didn’t translate to seats in the House or the Senate. Why not? Because the Democrats have already rigged the maps. The gerrymandering has been quite successful, so that Republicans won big in their Republican districts, but this didn’t translate to statewide victories.
This was one step toward eliminating the Republicans altogether, or at very least the MAGA Republicans. Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and the rest will be the acceptable opposition. The acceptable opposition is a controlled opposition, that is, an opposition that doesn’t really oppose, that just goes along.
In a similar vein, at Arizona State University, the students voted 90% for Katie Hobbs. One disconcerting aspect of this was that someone tweeted out this information and the responses were enthusiastic, with people praising the young for supporting Hobbs. But this kind of result was reminiscent of the elections we used to see in the old Soviet Union. When they had elections, 99% of the people voted for the Communist Party. Now the same thing has been set up organically here. Those people are going to grow up and will be the only ones voting, and they’re going to vote 90%, 95%, 99% for the establishment Democrats. That’s what the fascists in power want.
Yet one of the most disconcerting and disappointing aspects of the 2022 election was that no Republicans were talking about any of this.
Republicans were talking about inflation, which is important, and the border, which is also important. But where were the Republicans calling attention to the fact that this is a fascist administration that’s against our fundamental freedoms? This is an administration that is trying to foreclose on legitimate political discourse. This is an administration that is consciously aping the institution of authoritarian totalitarian regimes in recent historical memory. Yet no one even mentioned it.
Nonetheless, it’s very clear. They have sicced the FBI on parents protesting at school board meetings. They keep saying white supremacists are the biggest terror threat that the nation faces, despite the fact that we see very few incidents of white supremacist terror. What they mean is that MAGA Republicans are white supremacists, and they are going to take away the franchise from those white supremacists and destroy them utterly.
The plan may not work. One of the reasons why we have had mass migration into the United States was because the Democrats assumed that Hispanics would be completely on board with them, and would give them a reliable voting majority for the foreseeable future. That has all fallen apart. And it will continue to fall apart. There are a lot of people in the United States who believe that there ought to be the freedom of speech. Thus even though there is an alarming number of people who are against it, and it is under grave threat today, at the same time, there are a great many people who are not willing to see it go, and it will not go lightly. But tough times are ahead.
My next book will be out in January. The Sumter Gambit: How The Left Is Trying To Foment a Civil War discusses the Left’s concerted efforts to provoke conservatives into striking back violently so that they can justify repressive measure. The reason why the imagery of Joe Biden’s speech was so flamboyant and so in-your-face was because they actually wanted us to notice it and strike back, so that they could claim that further authoritarian measures were reasonable and necessary.
Above all, we have to not take the bait. We must instead proceed peacefully, but all the more energetically to tap the sentiments of those who did give us this big majority, and do everything that we can to restore the electoral viability of that majority, and to roll back, with the heroic efforts of people such as J. Christian Adams and others, the gains that they have made to rig the system so that even when we win, we lose.
The motto of the great State of South Carolina is Dum Spiro Spero — while I breathe, I hope. Words to live by in these turbulent times.
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