Will the Real Fascists Please Stand Up? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Will the Real Fascists Please Stand Up?
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Why do people fixated on the evils of fascism behave like evil fascists?

YouTube this week banned a 2019 speech delivered by Giorgia Meloni at the World Congress of Families. It sat on the platform for several years without running afoul of the Silicon Valley Savonarolas. Only after Meloni’s Brothers of Italy outpaced all other parties in the recent election, making Meloni the presumptive prime minister, and parts of the speech went viral did YouTube determine the video too dangerous for the public to watch.

Meloni spoke of choosing life over death, responsibilities over desires, our roots over their ideology, and the uniqueness of the individual over the blahness of homo economicus. More so than what she said, the way she said it — with the English subtitles turned off — captivated. That mesmerizing style, perhaps more than anything else, gives license to her enemies to compare her to the charismatic Italian who took power exactly a century ago.

Ironically, in deflecting charges of backwardness, she exclaimed, “I think the ones who want to go back to the past are those trying to bring back censorship.”

As if on cue, YouTube, without a hint of understanding its own irony, banned the video for violating “community guidelines.” Whose community? That question arises from both the censors and the censored.

Why do a small number of people increasingly presume to choose for the wider community?

Outrage over this arrogance ensued. YouTube, whose parent company, Google, famously instructed its workers, “Don’t be evil,” pivoted against the evil it perpetuated.

The fascism of the Left manifests itself in tactics far more brutal than censorship.

“Upon careful review, we determined this video is not violative of our Community Guidelines and have reinstated it,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, explained. “We enforce our policies regardless of the speaker’s political views and when it’s brought to our attention that a video has been mistakenly removed, we review the content and take appropriate action, including restoring the relevant videos or channels—as we have done with this video.”

The fascism of the Left manifests itself in tactics far more brutal than censorship.

Deroy Murdock outlined three September examples of this ideologically fueled violence in an article here at The American Spectator that appeared earlier this week.

These include the shooting in the back of an 84-year-old canvasser for a pro-life Michigan ballot initiative by a political opponent who lamely claimed the gun accidentally went off after he feared the elderly woman might hit his wife with a clipboard; the pummeling of a black, gay Republican who was left bloody and hospitalized after protesting an appearance by “the Squad” in Somerville, Massachusetts; and the killing of a North Dakota teen by a drunk and disturbed 41-year-old who rationalized mowing the young man down with his vehicle by strangely characterizing the youngster as a Republican extremist.

Of course, anyone who watched the political violence of 2020 unfold on television can grasp the mental gymnastics — the CNN “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests After Police Shooting” chyron comes to mind — undertaken by journalists to suppress any story showing jackbootery in pursuit of causes they favor. To that end, MSNBC, CNN, and other major networks ignore such stories as the ideologically inspired murder of a teen by a leftist crackpot or the shooting of an elderly pro-life woman by a left-winger as they play the sad events of Jan. 6, 2021, as though on a loop. Particularly in Portland, Oregon, where an antifa activist followed and then murdered a Patriot Prayer member, did events convey that those who inveigh against extremists and fascists often show themselves as both.

So why do those obsessed with fascists behave like them?

Maybe the answer ironically comes from the philosopher most closely, and unfairly, associated with fascism.

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned. “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

Daniel J. Flynn
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Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor of The American Spectator, is the author of Cult City: Harvey Milk, Jim Jones, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco (ISI Books, 2018), The War on Football (Regnery, 2013), Blue Collar Intellectuals (ISI Books, 2011), A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002). His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, New York Post, City Journal, National Review, and his own website, www.flynnfiles.com.   
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