Afraid Of Their Own Shadows - The Left Scurries For Cover As The Fascist Label Sticks To Them

Bob Muzelle was still incredulous that Donald Trump was in the White House.  Stunned in November after the election results were in, furious at the inauguration, and incensed at the President's six months of terror.

'Fascist' he shouted from the lectern at Duke University, condemning the man with renewed vigor and passion. 'In six months Donald Trump has installed himself as the emperor of a new, white, Aryan race of bullying thugs.  He has sent his Secret Police storming into homes in a modern-day Kristallnacht, herding occupants into cattle cars headed for concentration camps, the ovens of hate, sending responsible asylum seekers up the chimneys in smoke'

It was Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka all over again, he said, the dawn of another horrific, unconscionable era of Nazi hatred, virulent nationalism, and racist pogroms.  This cannot stand! 

He wiped his brow as the audience stood and cheered, raising their fists in solidarity and commitment to the cause. 

'A fine one' Bob's wife Karol said to him as she helped him from the stage, arm in arm walking through the throng of cheering students.  'You touched a chord'. 

Bob drew his wife closer to him and smiled.  Yes, he had sent a message not just to the students and faculty in the audience of Parker Hall but to America.  He had called out evil, boldly and assertively naming evil for what it was, here in the Oval Office, a Satanic incarnation, the embodiment of hatred. 

Of course by this time the President had so asserted his will, so forcefully made good on his commitments, and so stunned Washington with a revolutionary reform never before seen that Bob's fiery speeches were increasingly seen as the apoplectic death throes of a movement which had finally been outed for the sham it was. 

The black man on top of the social pyramid, innocent child of the forest, in tune with the primal environment of life, sensitive, intelligent, and spiritual? The coming climate Armageddon, scorched earth, incinerated forests, flooded cities, millions of Americans dying in a new Dust Bowl of their own making? A new sexuality defined by choice not chromosomes? An emptying of the national treasury in unaccountable giveaways? A toadying, otherworldly foreign policy? A cancelling of American history, reviling everything that has come before the present, a Pol Pot Khmer Rouge Maoist Year Zero?

'Bullshit' was the new meme outside of liberal coastal enclaves.  'Horseshit', Bob was told to his face as he pointed to a picture of George Floyd hanging where that of George Washington recently hung. 

Now, George Floyd, a black criminal who while resisting arrest contorted himself with such violence and hatred cut off his own air supply and died, was no hero but a confected one, a Francis Bacon distortion, a fabricated symbol of police brutality, white racism, and elitist privilege.  So when Bob's assailant drew up within inches of his face, and pointed to the hagiographic painting of the phony black martyr, the lid on the pressure cooker exploded.  Enough was enough. 

Bob of course treated the incident as just another example of right wing stupidity, a profound backwoods ignorance that was at the heart of the MAGA movement. Such outbursts were to be expected from such intellectual troglodytes. 

Nothing could have been further from the truth as outbursts such as the one Bob faced were happening throughout the country.  Americans were no longer intimidated by the Left.  The absurdity of their ideas, the demeaning, hostile dismissal of foundational principles, their gulag-mentality, and the arrogant presumption of righteousness was finally out in the open.  Donald Trump had simply called out the bullshit from the White House, blowing its cover, and giving free rein to the millions of Americans who had been the targets of liberal invective for so long. 

'Don't give up the ship, dear', Bob's wife said; but Bob had to admit to himself that he was a bit shaken by the George Floyd/Washington episode.  No one during the Biden years would ever have challenged him so.  He thought for a minute, shook his head clear of doubts, and concluded that such rabidness was not a sign of legitimate political anger but simply the bullying ignorance of the Right. 

The more Trump went on the offensive, calling out the stupid, ignorant, mindless ideas of the Left and whaling away at the downright stupidity of his most outrageously unhinged critics, the more ordinary Americans took up the cudgel and voted down arbitrary laws in states, counties, and municipalities.  Each victorious lawsuit against recalcitrant sanctuary city mayors, anti-Semitic colleges, and wasteful bureaucracies, energized Trump supporters and made borderline progressives pause. 

An op-ed piece in a mainstream newspaper called out the hypocrisy and the intellectual fraud of the Left:

The label 'fascist' should be placed squarely on those of the Left who with never a forethought, with no understanding of history and with seemingly no knowledge of the horrors of Nazism, the camps, the gas chambers, and the ovens, brand the President and his supporters as fascist.  They, the Left, are the fascists for their universal censure of criticism, their cancellation of present-day and historical figures with distorted, primitive, and self-serving argument.  The agenda of the Left is no different from Mein Kampf or the edicts of Stalin's politburo.  Hitler, Stalin, and the would-be dictators of the Left are all the same - they all want absolute, undeterred, unmitigated obedience to the notions of their addled minds

When Bob had finished reading the piece, he threw the newspaper out the window and watched it come apart in sections, floating down onto the passersby on K Street.  This ordinarily reserved, temperate journal writing this? 

Now, more objective observers quickly saw that with the election of Donald Trump, resentment of the elite, untouchable American political Left would come out in full force and flower and would be expressed from top to bottom, from the intellectual press to the Walmart greeter.  The time of intellectual fraud was over. Not only would the new President reform government and restore historical values, but he would call out the bald absurdity of the Left's suppositions.  It was no surprise that the op-ed piece and many like it were appearing in previously cautious journals. 

To top it off, invitations for Bob to speak were few and far between. At his last appearance at Brown University, formerly one of the claque of Ivy League schools in lockstep with the progressive agenda, the hall was less than half-full, and half of that half left before Bob was finished. 

'What's happening, Karol?' Bob pleadingly asked his wife. 'Have I missed something?'.

As much as she loved him, she had admitted to herself that he had.  In fact as his arguments became more and more unhinged, as he tangled himself in hateful invective, and the worst kind of virulent personal attacks, losing all sense of propriety and logic, she knew that his time was up.  America had had quite enough of his increasingly unhinged rantings. 

She had hesitated before, but now she didn't. She put her arms around her husband, looked him in the eyes, and said, 'Florida'.  

 

Apostasy, Bob thought. Treachery, and from his own wife.  Even the suggestion of giving up the good fight was casting his entire career into doubt.  The Freedom Rides, the Pettis Bridge, marching with Martin and Ralph, the black man...Didn't that matter?

Of course it didn't matter as the quick turnabout of the Donald Trump showed; for in one fell swoop, The President erased all the cant and idolatry of the Sixties. It was as if Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman never existed. 

This is the problem with legacy, the desire to leave something behind.  History has no favorites, and before you know it, wham, bang, thank you, ma'am, what you thought was not what you thought.  Bob never once in his life had second thoughts which is the problem with true believers.  At the end of their lives, finally realizing the futility of absolutes, the face the void as desperate as Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich. 

'Come on, Bob, let's practice.  Here's a sundowner I made especially for you'.