Answer this, meatheads: How exactly are Tea Parties fascist?
Jonah Goldberg smashes some left-wing “wisdom”:
Meme – “These (tax) protests are unpatriotic astroturfing by plutocrats.”
So much for “dissent is the highest form of patriotism”!
I find it sort of amazing that when groups like ANSWER, a Mos Eisley cantina of America-hating nut cases, take to the streets it’s a full-flowering of democracy in action. When ACORN pays their ragamuffins to protest, or when Rainbow/PUSH shakes down businesses through racial extortion, it’s the sort of direct democratic action Thomas Paine dreamed of. And when labor unions pay people to protest, it’s populist. But when a bunch of independent Americans, talk-show hosts, and email campaigners organize hundreds of protests around the country, it’s astroturfing.
But more importantly, he attempts to set the record straight on what statist fascism isn’t, not that anyone hurling these ignorant epithets would listen or understand anyway:
Meme- “The populist anger out there is the real face of America’s homegrown fascism.”
How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn’t a libertarian doctrine! It just isn’t, never will be, and it can’t be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism, or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish, and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.
If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.
Emphasis his.
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