The Looming Fascist Menace of Donald Trump

And the Communist Man-Molesto

Whatever else you think about the left, you really have to admire their optimism. They are nothing if not hopeful about the future. No matter the current political climate, however much the dominant neoliberal regime relegates them to dull academic sinecures or theater-kid street antics, they never stop believing that the public is really on their side and that there’s a glorious Revolution just around the corner. It’s a good trait for them to have, since without it reality would be unbearable.

The face of hope and vitamin-D deficiency.

This is because by any objective analysis the left- since the days of the French Revolution- has left a wide trail of bloody fail unmatched in human history. Every time they attain power over any government it immediately descends into a murderous pageant of horrors that differs in details only according to the particulars of the victim culture. The basic pattern is the same regardless: commies kill their way to power, promise the people that their master genius economic plan will result in peace, land, and bread, fail to deliver due to their ideas being insane, blame non-existent traitors whom they murder wholesale, accuse each other of being traitors until the OG commie leaders are all dead, then the venal and corrupt trimmers who remain kill anyone left who has anything negative to say about the awesome, record potato harvest, while the new leadership imports Coca-Cola and Nikes from the evil bourgeois capitalists. In this way, in a six-decade period in the 20th century, from 1917 to 1977, leftist regimes managed to wipe out something like 100 million people, executing, starving, and enslaving on a scale that would have made Genghis Khan stand up and salute.

From his heart to you…

But again, the left is unburdened by what has been. They don’t live in the past, when all those things that totally weren’t real communism anyway happened. They look forward to a future of oppression-free economic abundance, where something-something will just spontaneously make everyone on Earth work hard for everyone else on Earth without any government or money. It probably involves mass-murder, but why get hung up on details? There’s really only one thing standing in the way.

No, not Indians . . . but close!

Yes, we need to talk about fascism. When I said earlier that the left doesn’t live in the past, one should make allowances for their victories, of which there is exactly one that anyone cares about. It’s true there was that time when the Reds took a break from murdering people for going to Church or refusing to starve to death or really just for no reason at all and came together (kind-of) as one to kill fascists instead. In doing so, the commies ended up on the side of the good guys and thus can still bask in the afterglow of their glorious triumph over evil. Of course, this requires glossing over some unfortunate historical details, but why be rude and dwell on that?

I bring all of this up because the left and their progressive liberal allies are once again indulging their taste for nostalgia and engaging in one of their signature pastimes: denouncing a Republican president as a fascist. Theodore Adorno warned us about the incipient problem in Eisenhower’s America; of Richard Nixon no elaboration is necessary. Reagan was basically Hitler (he even bullied the poor Soviet Union to prove it), and appointed the Führer-friendly Bush family patriarch as his successor, whose son, after the Clinton interregnum, launched a coup against Greta Thunberg’s grandfather and became popularly known as Bushitler. At this point the public was finally beginning to catch on the that these people who presented- in historical terms- as fairly milquetoast liberals were actually the embodiment of evil. They tried to slip McCain past us, but Seth McFarland saw right through that. Republicans took the elaborate step of running an actual Ken Doll in 2012; Americans were not fooled.

Exactly what Himmler would say.

This time, though, for real, they’re serious- the President is a fascist. Apparently using AI trained on the second-stupidest book that Naomi Wolff has written so far, leading political commentators have determined that Donald Trump is the living, Orange instantiation of the legacy of Il Duce. Granted, the public- battered by stupid wars and economic devastation- are especially susceptible to Trump’s mic skills, honed from his years in the WWE, and have thus voted him into office three two times. But that’s all the more reason to remind everyone of the horror that lies in store, a need all the more urgent for it not having happened all the other times.

This little lady gets it. Fellas?

My immediate occasion for writing this is a piece by

david roberts

, “Trump Fever.” The title isn’t a metaphor; Roberts states that he conceived of it in a kind of flu-induced fugue (‘fluge?’) state, which I think accounts for something of a dichotomy to the essay. The first part, born of his own ponderings with perhaps some assist from liberal (no pun intended) amounts of Sudafed, is a solid analysis, dare I say of the sort I tend to offer, with references to recent events, history, and culture. If you accept certain priors then Boiler Room is an interesting interpretive analogy for Trump. He supports the case he makes for Trump lacking a huge popular mandate and governing essentially through audacity; I agree to a point, though of course I see it as a feature, not a bug.

Had he stopped there, with Trump as an especially aggressive populist nationalist BSing his way past any need for bipartisan consensus, I think it would have been a highly plausible take, though one with which I disagree. I would say that Trump has surrounded himself with the most ideologically diverse cabinet, staff, and advisors since the Lincoln Administration, people who were (or still are) Democrats, Libertarians, and independents, as well as normie conservatives, tech-bro right-futurists, trads, alt-right veterans, and scores of others. It’s very much a cross-section of a realignment coming into being, a mandate making itself known gradually. But it’s at this point the essay takes a turn down an unfortunately familiar path.

To be clear, I think Roberts made a good and good faith effort to understand a phenomenon that no one now living can really fully grasp; to some extent, as with all eras, obtaining a fuller grasp of the significance of the events now unfolding will be the work of our descendants decades hence. What Trump is is honestly something like the Affleck-analogy Roberts offers. What he is not is a fascist.

Roberts cites Noah Berlatsky as his main source for this, linking to an article Berlatsky wrote called “Trump’s Weakness Is Not At Odds With His Fascism.” I should note here that I have a bit of a history with Berlatsky. During the “Substack Against Nazis” contretemps of last year (or so) I wrote a piece called “Nag-Swarming Substack” wherein I offered gentle, warm-spirited mirth and constructive criticism directed toward those misguided souls who sought to ban people like myself and my friends from the platform for not using their pronouns or something (I honestly forget). Berlatsky showed up randomly, called me some unkind names in a comment or restack or something, and then promptly blocked me before I could respond. Since I hadn’t mentioned him in my essay I wasn’t sure how he found me or why he bothered to say anything to someone who at the time had fewer than 500 subscribers. I still don’t know. But something about the name sounded familiar. Where had I heard “Noah Berlatsky” before? And then I googled it and… well…

There’s a lot of that out there; if you doubt me, pop a fistful of Dramamine and read this piece from

Sohrab Ahmari

. Berlatsky is a leftist writer who decided to put a cherry of refined perversion on top of his crazy commie sundae by going to work for an organization called Prostasia, which sounds like some kind of David P. Goldman-helmed think tank, but is actually a pedophilia-normalization outfit. If you push through all the shaded language and euphemisms (“minor-attracted person”) what you have are a bunch of people who want you to think there’s nothing morally wrong with being sexually attracted to children, though they still claim- at this point at least- to be against acting upon those feelings. Berlatsky was (is?) their communications director; I’m not sure if he’s still there or in what capacity as they’ve gone dark and scrubbed a lot from the internet (and have been scrubbed by others when they refused to GTFO of various social media outlets) but I can’t find any evidence he’s repudiated his past work, which is quite well documented.

Perhaps one day we’ll see him appearing alongside famous social media personalities?

Let me state categorically that Noah Berlatsky is an absolutely vile human being; even without the chomo-promo he’s foursquare behind every malignant social evil facing society today. But in anticipation of what the reader is no doubt thinking, no, I’m not actually making an ad hominem attack here. Berlatsky’s Kindergarten cop-a-feeler advocacy is not distinct from his wider political project and his critique of America as an oppressive society.

In case you run into him … in Minecraft. Seriously, tell someone if you see him hanging around in Minecraft.

Leftists’ only consequential achievement was their contribution to the defeat of fascism, with which progressive liberals share a kindred pride. Thus, by way of the sympathetic magic of their ideology, anything they hope to conquer in the present must first be made over into the image of their victim. Fascism thus becomes a nebulous category into which can be placed the postwar quietude of Ike, the technocratic California Republicanism of Nixon and Reagan, the decadent WASP neoliberalism of the Bushes, and the failed Axis of Cuckery that preceded Trump. The great project of the modern left and their progressive allies is the reconceptualization of fascism as something other than a phenomenon emerging from and basically exclusive to particular political conditions in certain European countries between the World Wars. As the rationale for this is political expediency, however, whatever the updated definition of fascism is always amounts to some form of special pleading.

Berlatsky’s essay is his end of an argument with another leftist about the nature of Trump’s looming menace, wherein his opponent claims Trump isn’t in fact a fascist because fascists are competent, Trump is not, QED. Berlatsky makes a meandering and incoherent series of points, first arguing that fascists can be incompetent, then that they often are, before concluding that being incompetent is in fact a diagnostic characteristic of fascism. Along the way, he does offer Robert Paxton’s more substantial description of the phenomenon:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. [italics mine]

Paxton is a serious scholar- or was- but now seems to be something like Carl Bernstein, an ancient relic of leftist power unwrapped every time something needs to be compared to some past conservative albatross, in his case his academic specialty of Vichy France. He dutifully denounced Trump as a fascist after years of denying the president was such due to Trump’s encouraging the Mostly Peaceful Electoral Justice Protesters to storm the Capitol on January 6th, which Trump didn’t do. But Paxton’s definition precedes Current Year political drama, owing more to Boomer lefty desires to re-fight their parents’ battles against much more accommodating opponents then freikorps fresh from the trenches.

“Well Mr. Stelter, if you ask me, Trump doing [INSERT DAY’S ACTIVITY] is just…like… (breath)… Watergate.”

“Thank you Carl, now back to the tomb.”

This creates a problem, because it doesn’t take into account the forms into which leftist grievance has mutated in the years since, with identitarian-based victimhood and calls for extralegal redress now being just part of the righteous struggle. Granted, leftism has always foregrounded a narrative of bloody revenge on the part of the oppressed against their victimizers- it’s basic to Marxist historiography- but post Critical Theory that neat, catholic, class-based revenge fantasy has morphed into a bewildering array of intersectional resentments much akin to Protestant sects. To the degree fascism emphasizes vengeance and victimhood , it’s because that ideology is not a reaction to incipient leftist triumph but an emergent property inherent to leftist failure. Fascism is for resentful, violent malcontents just like leftism, but the desire to dissolve the self into a greater purposeful whole is instead more particular- race and nation rather than the more nebulous international working class. Mussolini began as a socialist, after all. Actual conservatives and reactionaries looked upon Italian Fascism and German Nazism as either weak-sauce modernism or vulgar and thuggish nonsense; see Evola and Jünger on those points.

To return to Paxton’s definition, does it fit the Italian regime? Arguably, yes. The problem is, it also neatly characterizes Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Are they fascist? Not unless you ask Jonah Goldberg, but then, what can such a definition really tell us? And how could it possibly fit Trump? To get to something like what Paxton means you basically have to go full Interpretatiō Hitlerō on all of Trump’s public statements, mining what seem superficially to be policies in accord with his publicly expressed commitment to Boomer-consensus color-blind meritocracy for hints of some hidden kampf against minorities. That Trump often speaks extemporaneously and hyperbolically does allow for more of this than is typical for a Republican president, and his rise has left as many people within his own party ready to denounce him as his formal opposition. He is in that sense unique, but in his heart represents something politically between Bill Clinton and Pat Buchanan. His coalition is racially and religiously diverse, in a way that actually leaves some of his more rightist supporters looking askance. He’s temperamentally conservative rather than ideologically right-wing, much less fascist.

But he’s all about banning the tranning, one might argue. Certainly that’s part of Berlatsky’s beef with him, and here we come full circle to what I mentioned earlier. Rightist scholars like Paul Gottfreid (do read his work on fascism) often emphasize the discontinuities between classical Marxism and modern leftism, the class-based economic materialism of the former giving way to multifaceted, esoteric schemes of oppression involving race, sex, gender, and how fat you are, among other things. But for my part I think there’s more overlap than such scholars foreground. After all, a key element of the Communist Manifesto was the elimination of the family, a policy BLM heartily endorsed until Soros or someone like him told them to purge it from the website. Consider this:

Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

And then Berlatsky:

Parents don’t have to use physical violence to torment their children. They have broad latitude to make young people’s lives miserable in a wide range of ways. Parents can for example forbid children to talk to their friends. They can forbid them to leave the house . . .

Some of the worst parental cruelty is directed at queer youth. Young people often don’t feel safe coming out to their parents—and with good reason. Parents often throw queer kids out of their homes, or make life so miserable that queer youth leave. Only around seven percent of young people are LGBT, yet they make up forty percent of homeless youth.

The systems put in place to oppress marginalized people are generally justified on the grounds that the marginalized people in question are incapable of making wise choices or of caring for themselves. This has been the rationale for laws and customs which target Black people, women, the mentally ill, and the poor. Tyrannical power is always excused as necessary by the people who wield it.

Parents’ authority over their children is of a piece with the exploitation of capitalists over workers and cisheteropatriarchy over queer youth. Prostasia gets it:

In combination, this [pedophiles being banned from social media advocacy] has left the support professionals who work with non-offending MAPs [pedophiles] at a disadvantage, and has largely reduced spaces for public online discussion about minor-attraction to the echo chamber of alt-right conspiracy theorists and sexual conservatives, who wield the stigma around pedophilia as a potent weapon to undermine the progress of the LGBT movement, the anti-fascist movement, and their other political enemies.

Advancing the cause of “MAPs” is one with that of anti-fascism and defeating the alt-right and sexual conservatives. For Noah Berlatsky, fascism equals oppression, which manifests as both mass murder and age-of-consent laws. It’s a package deal for him and is consistent with basic leftist theory. His beef with the Nazis wasn’t that they burned books per se, but rather that he’d prefer Bibles go into the bonfires than much of what the SA were actual burning.

As a reasonable, centrist moderate, I understand that people can hold a range of opinions about Donald Trump that are at once divergent and reasonable. And I would also like to think that we can avoid both Holocausts and “MAP Support Clubs” where 13 year olds who think they might be incipient pedophiles can talk to adult “MAPs” about their feelings. This was deemed too disgusting… FOR REDDIT AND DISCORD! THIS IS A THING THAT BERLATSKY’S GROUP PROMOTES.

As such, I would urge people to come together, in the spirit of Donald Trump’s humble and gracious genius, to say that we can disagree about things politely, and also that pedophiles and the people who support them should be [THINGS THAT WOULD GET ME BANNED FROM SUBSTACK]. But I’d like to end on a positive note, and encourage Mr. Berlatsky to repent of his degeneracy and evil. There’s still time, until there isn’t. From my perspective it’s pretty doubtful, but for God all things are possible, so let’s hold out hope.

Grok, what might happen- theoretically- if I looked at Berlatsky’s hard drive?