Trigger is Not Just a Horse

I know that conservatives like to "trigger" The Libs, and seem to believe that’s the height of cleverness.  But triggering is easy. Anyone can "trigger" pretty much anyone.  Three-year-olds have made an art form of triggering their parents since early Egyptian children intentionally tipped over glasses of mead at the dinner table.  Liberals can trigger conservatives without breaking a sweat.  You just explain that fascism is a conservative political philosophy. Or point out that today's GOP is fascist. Man, conservative heads will explode.  They go crazy. It's easy.

Yesterday, I saw a comment on social media that attempted to claim that a meeting a liberals was a fascist gathering, so I simply responded that, actually, fascism was a conservative philosophy.  To my total lack of shock, it set off someone so much that he wrote back that he wanted to “educate” me.

Given the GOP standard these days for education and banning books and how parents know better than professionals, I knew I was in for a joyride.

He mentioned that Hitler was “probably the most famous fascist in world history” and then, almost as an obligatory effort, brought up the old chestnut that was elected by the “national socialist party.”  His “Aha!” moment, his evidence that the “national socialists” were liberal because, like all socialists, Hitler wanted to redistribute wealth, especially from Jewish people.

No, really.

I’m sure that many could hear my siiiiiiigh halfway across the country.  Usually, I try to compact my Twitter responses into a single tweet, since that’s easier to read.  But with Twitter limitations of only 188 character, some things just can’t be done.  So, I took a few tweets to reply…

It was hard to imagine, I said, that he actually, really, truly seemed to think Hitler was a liberal socialist.  The starting problem, of course, is that Socialist Russia was Hitler’s enemy. Fascist Spain his ally.  Indeed, 30 million Russians were killed in WWII by Germany.

What I didn’t think I’d have to explain to anyone, though, was that Hitler’s goal was not to "redistribute wealth" of Jews -- it was to massacre them off the face of the earth in specially-built gas chambers.  And after 6 million of them were eliminated have the state take their property and use it for the war effort.  Not give it away benevolently to the poor needy people.  (In fact, if you were too poor and needy, or different, you probably stood a better chance of being labeled an “undesirable” and killed.)

Almost as bizarre was that when twisting himself into knots trying desperately to re-define fascism, he was suggesting that Hitler was both a fascist AND a socialist -- which is not only totally contradictory, but a near-impossibility.  The only thing the guy got right was that Hitler was indeed a horrific fascist.  But whatever the name his party took, he was not liberal.  (The “Know Nothing Party” in early U.S. history was not trying to tell the public it was stupid.  The 1999 “Clean Air Act” actually undermined environmental protections.)  Not that I try to use Wikipedia as a source often, but they have a sentence in the entry about the term “National Socialist Party” that was too spot on not to quote.  It said that “similar names have also been used by a number of other political parties around the world, with various ideologies.”  Many of them far-right military regimes, despite the quaint “socialist” in the name.

It's like the old line that “butter” and “butterflies” aren’t related despite both being about butter.

Fascism is a conservative political philosophy.  Period.  That’s the whole point.  It’s socialism that’s left-wing. 

If conservatives want to slam liberals as socialists – as they’ve been trying to do for at least 75 years (without understanding what socialism actually is and without the country becoming socialist but remaining a democracy) – that’s what they’ll do, despite the lack of reality.  But man, do they ever get “triggered” when told that fascism is conservative.  And that today’s GOP has become literally fascist.

The difference between their claims and mine is that I can support it with evidence.

And have regularly, supported it with that evidence. For starters, this article from five years ago which I updated more recently here explains very clearly with easy-to-follow examples what fascism is, and why it's what today's GOP has become.

And if someone gets oh-so head-exploding upset and "triggered" because fascism is called a conservative political philosophy and today's GOP is called fascist, then they don't understand what fascism is.  They don't understand it anymore than they don't understand what socialism is.

In the end, this whole thing about "triggering" is very simple.  Yes, okay, conservatives go crazy when you say that the Republican Party today has become fascist.  I get it.  My theory is that if you don’t like being called a fascist -- don’t support fascist candidates and don't enable fascist policies.