Back there in the mists of time, April 22, 2014 to be precise, I wrote a column in this space that was titled:

The New American Fascism

In which I cited some twenty incidents of leftists shutting down or attempting to shut down conservatives. Here are a few:

August 7, 2008: The New York Times reports a leftist group has organized to confront donors to conservative groups, “hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.”

October 15, 2009: ESPN reports that Rush Limbaugh will be dropped as a limited partner in a bid to buy the NFL’s St. Louis Rams franchise. Leftist owners and players united to deny Rush any ownership of the NFL team.

October 16, 2009: I reported in this space that several liberal Mainline Protestant churches along with the Catholic Bishops had banded together to send a “Petition for Inquiry into Hate Speech in the Media and Request to update report on The Role of Telecommunications in Hate Crimes” to the FCC. The demand: to remove Rush Limbaugh from the air for “hate speech.” It also targeted Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and Lou Dobbs, the last then at CNN. A month later, Dobbs abruptly quit CNN after being targeted for removal by, according to the New York Times “Hispanic groups” who opposed his opposition to illegal immigration.

April 20, 2012: News arrived that “Obama for America, the website of the Obama re-election campaign, runs a list of eight major donors to the campaign of Obama opponent and soon-to-be GOP nominee Mitt Romney. It calls one, Frank Vander Sloot of Idaho, a finance co-chair of the Romney campaign, “litigious, combative, and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” Vander Sloot is also investigated by an individual connected to the Democratic Party. The news launches an assault on Vander Sloot’s company. He loses 200 customers in the first two weeks of the controversy, going through what he calls a “living hell.”

I went on with the list of attacks designed to silence and intimidate conservatives, ending by quoting the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises in his classic Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Said von Mises of the Left:

They are: “… utterly … intolerant zealots … they entirely disregard the possibility that there could arise disagreement with regard to the question of what is right and expedient and what is not. They advocate enlightened despotism … convinced that the enlightened despot will in every detail comply with their own opinion.… They are utterly intolerant and are not prepared to allow any discussion. Every advocate (of the Left) … is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends’ unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow citizens. He prefers to ‘liquidate’ them. He scorns the ‘bourgeois’ society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed.

I added:

Von Mises is short and sweet about all of this. This is fascism. The “principle of dictatorial oppression of all dissenters.”…

This is fascism straight up. The New American Fascism. It is wrong — and more to the point it is dangerous.

Time has passed. Seven years’ worth of it. And this situation has gotten worse, not better. There have been repeated attempts to remove Fox hosts from the air. There was a move by Democrats in Congress to force cable carriers to remove Fox, Newsmax, and One America News, silencing all three. Conservative speakers have been barred from college campuses. Only in the last few days Michele Tafoya, a sideline reporter for NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” has been yanked because she had the nerve to appear on ABC’s The View and make critical comments about leftist ex-NFLer Colin Kaepernick.

The January 6th Committee and its members are but the latest players in the bid to remake America as a fascist state. My colleague Melissa Mackenzie headlined this just this week:

Nancy Pelosi Is Collecting the Phone Records of the Conservative Movement

Melissa cites a CNN report saying the January 6th Committee has issued subpoenas to over 100 Americans other than ex-Trump White House Chief of Staff, including Republican Members of Congress Lauren Boebert, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jody Hice, Jim Jordan, and Scott Perry.

She writes:

The subpoenas include all individuals on the subscriber’s account and everyone those people messaged or spoke to. The time frame the committee demands data on is far-reaching: any and all contact with the individual for two to three months prior to January 6 and all the way to January 31, 2021. This is tens of thousands of moms, children, clergy, reporters, and Republican and conservative influencers who were in touch with everyone from White House aides to prominent activists.”

In other words, as warned in this space back there in 2014, the New American Fascism is on the rise. The question here: why in the world is Wyoming’s Rep. Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger — Cheney the ranking GOP member of the Committee handpicked by Nancy Pelosi — participating in this seriously wrong and dangerous move to silence dissent and intimidate conservatives and Trump supporters?

Reading the private texts of Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade, as Cheney did, aloud, raises the all too obvious question.

When will she demand that subpoenas be issued to Speaker Pelosi, her fellow members of the January 6th Committee, and their staffs? An honest investigation would want to know what Pelosi knew ahead of January 6 — and when did she know it? And what did she do about it?

But make no mistake, what’s happening with the January 6 Committee is the latest episode that signifies the quite dangerous rise of the New American Fascism. To borrow from von Mises, Cheney and fellow GOPer and Committee member Kinzinger, not to mention the rest of the Committee and Pelosi herself, epitomize:

… utterly … intolerant zealots.… They advocate enlightened despotism … convinced that the enlightened despot will in every detail comply with their own opinion.… They are utterly intolerant and are not prepared to allow any discussion.

Not to mention that, as von Mises also said, they “scorn the ‘bourgeois’ society that worships law and legal procedure.”

Make no mistake. When Melissa Mackenzie reports that those subpoenas to other Republican members of Congress plus more than 100 others are attempting to vacuum up their personal phone, email, and text records, subpoenas that will affect “tens of thousands of moms, children, clergy, reporters, and Republican and conservative influencers who were in touch with everyone from White House aides to prominent activists” — this is the New American Fascism in action.

With Republicans Cheney and Kinzinger as collaborationists.

Shameful? Yes.

But more than that, this is very, very dangerous.