Former President Donald Trump has taken to warning Americans that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His poll numbers in free-fall, his opponent Joe Biden, the man whose policies have seen millions of foreigners pouring across the souther border of the United States, is alleging that Trump lifted the phrase from Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf, Hitler uses terms like “blood poisoning” and “blood pollution” to promote the idea of racial purity, arguing that racial intermixing, particularly between Aryan and non-Aryan races, would lead to the degradation of the Aryan race.
The controversy, which is having some trouble findings its legs, comes with the Supreme Court of Colorado, in a 4-3 vote (all of the dissenting justices in the Colorado court’s decision were Democrat appointees, for the record), exploiting the Fourteenth Amendment as a pretext for removing Trump from that state’s 2024 presidential ballot. This action is being used by corporate state propagandists to raise the specter of the Confederacy alongside the specter of National Socialism.
Whether they know it or not, the fallacy of reductio ad Hitlerum embarrasses those who use it. The confusion over the literal and the metaphorical is obvious and deliberate. The question of whether something is fascist or not is not a line in a book or in a speech by Hitler. The question of whether something is an instantiation of fascism or nazism is a political-economic determination. Questions to be asked: Is this social formation a belligerent form of corporatism, e.g., the corporate state resorting to lawfare to disqualify political actors it doesn’t want interfering with the establishment agenda? Are citizens punished for their utterances and compelled to act in bad faith by using speech aligning with a particular ideological line? Are street-level subalterns being mobilized by corporate state actors to intimidate and terrorize groups the establishment seeks to silence? Are the organs of the administrative state issuing decrees and mandates that bypass the democratic process and violate civil liberties and rights? Is the security state apparatus engaged in surveillance and harassment of citizens? If these things are present, then the corporate state has arguably moved from its soft corporatist character to a hard corporatism associated with fascism. In the current period, all these things are manifest.
What is not fascism is the desire by citizens and their leaders to defend national integrity. There’s nothing fascist about defending the republic, its national borders and its cultural traditions, which are the bases for having a functional and integral nation-state. Most European countries (most countries around the world, in fact) reckon citizenship through ancestry, literally using the Latin phrase for “right by blood.” The American principle of jus soli, i.e, citizenship by virtue of having been born in a territory, is, in it unrestricted form, unique to the hemisphere. If European countries are fascist (and many of these countries increasing are), it’s not because of jus sanguinis, but because of the political-economic character of the system. There’s nothing racist about recognizing that governments exist for a people, i.e., citizens who share a language, a culture, and a heritage. Ancestry is not race. Ethnicity is not race. Nation is not race. The Japanese are not racist because they wish to keep Japan Japanese. Etcetera.
The multiculturalists (or cultural pluralists) who accuse patriots of “fascism,” “nativism,” “racism,” and “xenophobia” are hard at work undermining social and national integrity in a decades-long project to culturally and politically disorganize the people in order to deconstruct the free republic and reintegrate depoliticized civilians in a global order of things. The slurs all reduce to “witch,” the accusation here being that the patriot is a heretic in the eyes of a religion progressives, i.e., those advancing the transnationalist agenda, have assumed for all of us. It’s the same trick being played with gender ideology, a project designed to disrupt intuitive and ordinary understandings of natural history. Gas lighting is a trick authoritarians play. You know them by their actions not their speech acts. They don’t seek deliberative democratic input on decisions that affect everybody because they know the people will resist. So they colonize the institutions, implement policies, create a web of assumption, and then target individuals for marginalization and cancellation when they bear witness and resist. If any one thing that is the chief characteristic of fascism—and it’s not coming the patriots who have put Trump at the top of the polls. It’s coming from the progressives who are doing everything they can to eliminate Trump as a possibility.
freedom and reason 