Two things are true at the same time: The anti-enforcement protests have a real social and popular base, and the anti-enforcement protests also have significant organizational and financial support from outside, and sometimes hidden or illegitimate, groups. These are not conflicting positions. On the contrary, social support and external backing together explain the size and influence of the protests.

It is tempting for conservatives and others in favour of law enforcement to point to the staged character of the protests and say, “Ah-ha! a conspiracy!” This may feel good, and it is true, but it avoids the problem of popular support for these protests, and deflects attention from the nature of that support. That support is significant in blue states, in urban areas, and most importantly among credentialed and institutionalized elites, who, while not good at governing, produce agitprop in large quantities.

The “Astroturf” Claim

Here is Laura Ingraham, a strong conservative voice, with Liz Collin of Alpha News and Asra Nomani of Fox News, illustrating my point:

Having covered the BLM riots, Collin (@lizcollin) knows Minneapolis and its progressive pathologies better than anyone (see her documentary on BLM here); Nomani of Fox has reported extensively on the funding and behind-the-scenes organization of the anti-government protests, and brings much relevant information. Her X account repays a follow: https://x.com/AsraNoman

In the clip, Nomani says that the anti-enforcement protests are, “absolutely an astroturfed movement. It is well-funded, well-organized, and well-coordinated.” Her second sentence is true, and she provides concrete examples to support her claims. There are many more in her X feed.

But the initial assertion that the movement is astroturfed does not follow from those important facts. The movement has a real social base and class and regional support. Astroturf is artificial grass, made of inorganic material. If we need a vegetative or horticultural metaphor, it would be more accurate to say that the movement is well-fertilized, and those who want a more graphic metaphor could refer to the bovine substance often used as fertilizer.

In the clip, Nomani speaks of pre-printed signs handed out to protesters off the back of a wagon. But those protesters were numerous and came from somewhere, and while degrees of commitment will vary -- some may just think protesting is kind of cool, or that it’s the happening scene, or a place to cruise -- even people who protest for social or personal reasons assent to some degree to the cause, and assimilate its premises and its vocabulary. There are a lot of such people, and neither the anti-enforcement protests nor the other leftist omni-cause protests, with which the current protests strongly overlap, could work without a large quantity of willing social cooperation.

The left tried the same tactic against the Tea Party

There is evidence that some protesters have been paid, but there are simply too many protests and too many protesters making too much noise for this to be a complete explanation. The left, with assistance from The New Yorker (see here), used to believe that the Koch brothers were behind the Tea Party or the Republican Party. But no quantity of Koch money could bring large numbers of people into the street. The idea that a significant popular movement is manipulated, contrived, or artificial is psychologically functional, offering reassurance that the enemy is not that frightening. For the left, which believes itself the party of the people, it also offered reassurance that popular support for the Tea Party was exaggerated, or even not real, thereby absolving progressive true believers of ideological dissonance, and the unfamiliar pain of further thought.

Conservatives should remember that shouting about astroturf did not help the left, even though not everything reported about the Koch brothers was false: the left’s avoidance of further analysis did not save them from President Trump, whom they hate so much more than the Tea Party or the Kochs.

Evidence of Inorganic Support

None of this means that the exposure of the networks of financial support behind the anti-ICE and other omnicause protests is not necessary or important. The networks are real and large, and their exposure is both tactically and strategically valuable, and we should value the reporting of Nomani and others who expose them. The author who posts on X as @datarepublican is another such voice, reporting on the funding of anti-ICE protests in Minnesota here, as is James O’Keefe, who has reported at great personal risk from inside the protests (link). Exposure is immediately damaging to the networks, and information is a long-term strategic gain.

In the clip above, Nomani mentions Neville Singham, a billionaire who lives in China, and organizations such as People’s Forum and the Answer Coalition. The presence of Singham does not mean that the protests are a Chinese creation, but it is a reminder that social discord serves Communist ends. The Answer Coalition has been around a long time, a fact which points to the social depth of the leftist anti-American movement. It did not appear yesterday, and unlike astroturf has roots both deep and organic, and well fertilized too. At the risk of going too far with horticultural metaphors, these leftist networks are old-growth, not new plantations.

The exposure of the left’s networks tells us not how thin and artificial they are, but how thick and socially rooted they are, and how long they have been around. They can best be fought by understanding where they come from, not by any artificially optimistic idea that mere exposure will cause them to wilt in cleansing sunlight. They are the effects of long-standing social pathologies, and exposure will help us to understand those pathologies, but it is only the first step to solving the problem.

The Social and Class Base of the Left

Any examination of the social roots of the omnicause will have to contend with what Marxists would call its social base: the large number of students, baristas, urban gig workers, teachers, academics or aspiring academics, and bureaucrats in the streets. They constitute what has been called an under-employed elite. They have been taught that they have special knowledge, acquired over many years in the madrassas of cultural Marxism that we call universities, and yet now they shuffle paper, rewrite emails, or serve cappuccinos or deliver Door-Dash, while Orange Man Bad makes decisions. Their feeling of impotence and of caste dishonour is as real as the anger it begets. That anger is socially important.

Also important are the credentialed elites who write for high-status newspapers and prestigious journals like The Atlantic and The Economist (links to examples of their falsehoods). Following those elites are the readers of those publications, both of which have large, paying, financially and socially upscale readerships. The Atlantic graces the tables of faculty clubs and lobbyists; The Economist those of CEOs. The social base of the anti-American omnicause combines an insurgent street-fighting Antifa sub-intelligentsia with a managerial class consisting of bureaucrats, intellectuals, and corporate executives. There are more than a few contradictions here, but many powerful social movements have brought together objectively opposed classes. The tensions can be productive, and it is usually only after the revolution that the Jacobins guillotine the moderates.

Too great an emphasis on the social base and structural roots of the left can lead to a paralyzing or black-pilling pessimism: how can one oppose a movement supported by so many powerful forces? But too great an emphasis on the mechanics of their movement can also lead to the opposite error, implying that it is all contrived by some guy in Shanghai, that nothing substantial is there, and that mere exposure will defeat the omnicause. Knowledge of their funding and methods is good intelligence, but intelligence must lead to analysis of the social roots of the anti-American movement, without which money and organization would have little effect.

Exposure is an immediate tactical victory, but tactics are not strategy. The information provided by the solid journalism of Nomani at Fox, along with @datarepublican and many other independents, is both tactically effective in the short term and a necessary form of intelligence-gathering. But we also need to know more about the organic social roots of what can only be called a low-level insurrection against the legitimacy of the United States.

As I wrote yesterday, the “our democracy” people have it exactly backwards. Abusing the legal system to target the opposition party and its nominee is the opposite of the rule of law. The Harris/Biden administration believes half the country to be “fascist” MAGA extremists, and wishes to exclude them from the realm of legitimate political life.

Many use that expression to mean a strict or severe enforcement of the law, when in its original sense, deriving from the English legal theorist A.V. Dicey, it refers to an equal application of the law without regard to personal identity or political allegiance. This is clearly not how the law is applied to Trump, nor to his supporters, and not even to conservatives as a group, all of whom are targeted for arbitrary prosecutions.

Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for the same supposed offense that Hunter Biden and Merrick Garland did not go to prison for, with the sole exception that Bannon and Navarro were found in contempt of a Congressional committee that violated established precedents that permit the opposition party a voice.

Anti-abortion protesters have been jailed. Parents concerned about gender ideology were called “domestic terrorists,” and the administration only backed off when there was a public outcry.

Political opponents like Tulsi Gabbard were put on terror watch lists. Critical journalist of was visited by IRS agents on exactly the same day he testified before Congress. Journalist James O’Keefe was arrested by the FBI, and the contents of his devices leaked to The New York Times. The IRS and the FBI punish whistleblowers who complain about politicization.

What will happen if Harris is reelected? She (or whoever is making decisions) will be unconstrained by the media, that one-time opponent of arbitrary power, which now swallows the Administration’s narratives whole. She will have four more years to appoint more judges and more prosecutors, including special prosecutors, to pursue vendettas against opponents. Anyone who protests against this administration or its policies will risk being labeled an insurrectionist or a terrorist or an extremist, and arrested and imprisoned on spurious charges. Lawyers who defend them will face professional and career consequences, and the press has shown itself unconcerned with the civil liberties of deplorable garbage people.

This is the conclusive argument against Harris: if re-elected, this administration will have unchecked power, supported across the left-dominated institutions, from law enforcement, to the intelligence agencies, to the unelected bureaucracy, to the legal profession, to much of the judiciary (including especially the all-important DC courts). The regime will have the full support of the media, which no longer scrutinizes power but instead runs interference for it, and the tech companies and social media as well.

Reasonable people can differ about tariffs or taxes. But with an administration that arrests its critics, those issues are beside the point. This is a civil liberties election, and President Trump is the only candidate who has never arrested his political opponents.

After the obligatory misrepresentations of Trump’s words (an example, and many others are possible, here), the editor of The Globe wipes the spittle from the keyboard, and produces the following helpful paragraph:

The Globe is correct to say that democracy is not immutable, but not in quite the way they mean. The range of democratic decision-making has been contracting for some time, and I name below a large number of prominent issues that hegemonic elites, in the adventitious form of Kamala Harris, would like to remove from the realm of democratic decision-making, all the while shouting about “our democracy.”

The Globe’s second sentence explains that “democracy is, rather, a story we tell ourselves.” This is a neologistic use of the term, and not how most of us understand it. In its normal sense, democracy is a system for choosing leaders and for choosing government policies, and not just a story, or a myth, or a comforting fiction, let alone a bunch of things we are instructed to believe. The Globe’s third sentence states explicitly that our shared stories must tell us that our society’s institutions function well (specifics below). But what if those stories are in fact false? That is a question they avoid because in that case, Trump would be the true small-d democrat.

Democracy as a System for Choosing Leaders

Going back to democracy in the old and normal sense, where the people choose leaders, it is plain that Trump is the democratically chosen nominee of his party. He was chosen by primary voters, over the objections and certainly the hopes of much of the Republican machine.

No such thing can be said of Harris, who won no primaries in this cycle, or for that matter in the last. She is a machine politician (even her supporters at The Economist admit that) who went from being Willie Brown’s mistress to being Vice-President because she checked the right DEI identity boxes, and has now become the nominee because Biden avoided any real primary contest in the current cycle, and could no longer hide his mental decline. She is a default nominee chosen by a coterie of panicked party grandees after frenetic backstairs skullduggery that we shall only learn about after the election. To call this “Democracy” requires a lot of storytelling.

Democracy as a System for Choosing Policies

Democracy should be about choosing leaders, and also policies. Without arguing that a democratic government should operate by plebiscite, or that every policy should be popular, there should be some correspondence in a democracy between a government’s policies and its platform, and also between the popular will and the policies of the government.

Herewith a list of issues in current US politics, in a rough order of prominence:

• Immigration and border security

• Abortion

• Crime

• Foreign policy and war

• Women’s rights and spaces, and gender ideology

• DEI and racial preferences

• Tariff and industrial policy

• Environmental policy

• Censorship

My point is not that Trump or Harris is right or wrong on any of these. It is simply that on none of these issues can Trump’s policy be called undemocratic. On each, Trump’s position is advocated clearly and loudly (this is Trump, after all). By contrast, two things are notable about Harris’s positions: they represent elite over popular preferences, and are often simply not mentioned in her speeches, being passed over in silence because she and her handlers know they are not popular, but intend to go ahead anyway.

What a Marxist would call the social position of the two campaigns’ policy positions could not be more different: Trump’s position is normally that of many ordinary people, Harris’s that of elites, and often elites who want to avoid the matter for the duration of the campaign. Running through the list above in more detail, and in the same order (TL;DR readers can skip forward):

Open borders and mass immigration: This is a policy followed furtively, with migrant flights arriving literally in the middle of the night, and the open border has been closed for election season because the Harris people know that it is unpopular. Mass immigration is favoured for ideological and electoral reasons by Democrat and left-wing activists, but denied in public. This is the opposite of democratic policy-making.

Abortion: Abortion is the topic on which Trump is politically weakest (certainly in the view of the Harris campaign, which bangs on about it). Trump’s position is that policy should be made by voters at the state level, and not by judges in Washington. Whatever one thinks of the substance of the question, this is hardly undemocratic.

Crime: The American people are assured that crime is declining and all is well, based on questionable statistics contradicting popular experience (as Rupa Subramanya argues here). Again, what Trump talks about openly, Harris passes over in silence, reserving the matter for policy elites, while surrogates blather about “misinformation.”

Foreign and Defence Policy: The Democrats’ foreign policy positions are little mentioned by the Harris campaign (and also contain large internal contradictions, as I argued here.) Trump’s nationalism and his aversion to foreign entanglements are disdained by Washington policy elites, and answered only with McCarthyite cries of “Putin!”.

DEI, Gender Ideology and Women’s Spaces: Trump takes the popular position, the “trans women are women” dogma being a bureaucratic and faculty club position. As with racial preferences, Harris avoids the topic in public, except when her campaign accuses Trump of racism.

Tariffs and Trade: Free traders are much higher on the social scale and also richer than those who support Trump’s call for protectionist tariffs. Reasonable people can disagree about trade policy, but neither position is inherently undemocratic.

Environmental Policy: Climate change is a dinner party and not a popular cause. RFK’s version of environmental policy, focusing on chemicals in food and pollution in places like East Palestine, commands wide popular support, but elite disdain.

Censorship: The Harris/Biden policy of censorship, as revealed in the Twitter Files and also in the Facebook Files, is supported by Beltway elites but not defended by the Harris campaign, which would prefer to avoid the topic. “Misinformation” is the new false consciousness, essentially an argument that the populace is too stupid to make its own decisions about who to trust.

One does not need to agree with all or indeed any of Trump’s positions to see that they are not in themselves undemocratic. Trump’s positions in fact find social support from what an earlier generation would have called the popular classes. It is Harris’s policies that are supported by elites and followed over popular objections, and attempts are made by Harris’s media supporters to remove them from the realm of polite conversation. If either campaign is against democracy in the commonly understood sense of popular decision-making, it is that of Harris, who would like policies on important topics like mass immigration, gender ideology, women’s spaces, war, and censorship to be reserved to credentialed elites operating without too much popular interruption.

The Stories of Democracy (New Sense): Mostly False

This is where democracy in the old popular decision-making sense meets democracy in the neologistic stories-we-tell-ourselves sense. The Globe’s cherished stories are myths that Trump has rudely interrupted, and managerial elites are very upset. Here are The Globe’s obligatory stories:

• “Our elected legislators have our interests at heart”: Many legislators persuade themselves that they have our interests at heart, but that is not quite the same thing;

• “That our political opponents deserve our respect”: Some do, but others like Harris (and Trudeau) imprison their opponents (nor do Trump or the “garbage” people get much respect);

• “That the courts are fair”: failure to believe this would make the critical race theorists and until this campaign most Globe journalists enemies of democracy. It is transparently the case that the courts are not always fair (more below);

• “That the media are balanced and honest”: No reader of the mainstream media can believe that (examples from the Globe here);

• “That bureaucracies are competent”: the people of western Carolina would not agree, nor the Marines who died in the Afghan chaos, nor the residents of long-term care homes;

• “That elections are safe from interference”: In 2020, Zuckerberg (with $400 million for ballot harvesting) and the 51 intelligence agents who said the Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” obviously did not agree, and interfered anyway, and to great effect;

• “That democracy’s incremental nature is preferable to revolution and upheaval”: sometimes upheaval may help to avoid worse;

• “That we do not want to be ruled by a single, unaccountable, all-powerful person”: true, but nor does anyone want to be ruled by an all-powerful unaccountable bureaucracy operating through a cipher like Biden or Harris;

• “That the rule of law is paramount”: The Globe, like so many, does not understand this concept and supports an arbitrary use of the law against those it considers deplorable.

The Rule of Law

I have mentioned the rule of law last, and it is the most important of these points. Many use that expression to mean a strict or severe enforcement of the law, when in its original sense, deriving from the English legal theorist A.V. Dicey, it refers to an equal application of the law without regard to personal identity or political allegiance. This is clearly not how the law is applied to Trump, nor to his supporters, and not even to conservatives as a group, all of whom are targeted for arbitrary prosecutions.

Trump has been prosecuted for matters relating to classified documents and mistresses, while obviously Biden and Clinton have not. These prosecutions were aimed at him personally. The prosecuting District Attorney in New York ran for office with explicit “I’ll get Trump” ads. This is the opposite of the rule of law.

Similarly with Trump’s supporters: Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for exactly the same thing that Hunter Biden and Merrick Garland did not go to prison for. Peaceful January 6 protesters have faced prison sentences,1 and even those who were guilty of violence face long sentences and spurious “terrorism” enhancements, unlike protesters for more privileged causes like BLM, Antifa, or Hamas who normally go free. There is much more that could be said, but the long and short of it is that the Harris/Biden administration holds political prisoners. This makes it an enemy of the rule of law, and the elite media run cover for it.

The Contradictions of Democracy (New Sense)

The “our democracy” people are in favour of what General Pinochet called guided democracy: there will be elections within firmly policed boundaries, and with few real policy choices. The differences between parties will be differences of personality and style, at best of emphasis, rather than of substance.

Under “democracy” (new sense), the electorate will choose between alternating groups of Washington insiders. Under “democracy” (new sense), the cultural left will control all the institutions and make all important policy decisions on anything elite opinion cares about, from mass immigration to DEI, from women’s spaces to crime, from war to censorship. Under “democracy” (new sense), the voters will have an occasional choice of cipher, perhaps selecting an affect or a cackle, a skin colour or a gender, though in this election even that was lacking on the Democrat side.

Trump is the only candidate supporting democracy in the normal popular choice sense of the word, indeed the only candidate supporting constitutional government and the rule of law over the rule of a deadening bureaucratic state able to censor and when necessary to arrest its opponents.

This is the central contradiction of the elite’s conception of “democracy”: it removes most decision-making power, even over matters as basic as civil liberties, economic policy, and war, from the realm of democratic choice. It talks incessantly about “our democracy,” but really thinks the populace too stupid to make important choices, which it would reserve to purported experts and Beltway elites. It is a contradiction at the core of the Harris campaign, and we should thank Canada’s national fishwrap for making it so plain.

1

One example: https://x.com/julie_kelly2/status/1851651507927613928; ’s substack contains many more, scandalously many.

Declassified with Julie Kelly

Breaking news, analysis, and commentary related to the weaponization of the U.S. Department of Justice. Unique coverage of January 6 and pending criminal indictments of Donald Trump. Occasional recipes and food pics as bonus.

At election time, the Democrats want to be the party of Harry Truman, but their most committed supporters think the U.S. to be at root the country of George Wallace and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

While the activists rail against colonial genocide and capitalist partriarchy, the suit-and-tie inside-the-beltway wing of the Democrat Party wants to administer a global superpower managing crises around the world, not to exclude a war or two.

"We are morally tainted, but follow us anyway," is not a convincing message. It requires leaders to speak out of both sides of their mouths, with the result that no one believes anything they say. It results in the absurdities of Marxist BLM flags flying from US embassies, woke transgender ideology being pushed by the State Department, stern-faced generals preaching against “white rage,” and a regime that despises its own people holding forth about democracy.

Reduced to a visual vignette, the central contradiction of this ruling party is expressed by the contrast between the fluorescent Karine Jean-Pierre, checking so many boxes, racial, sexual, and identitarian, and the stolid Admiral Kirby, a man in a gray suit, but at least in command of the basics of names and places, and aware of the facts his duty requires him to obfuscate.

The old Bush-era neo-cons believed that the US was a good and virtuous country, so powerful and so compelling as to be capable of bringing democracy even to the most atavistic corners of the Islamic world. Whatever its other problems, the democratic evangelism of the neo-conservatives was at least not internally self-contradictory.

The flight of many Bush-era neo-cons, now including the Cheneys, from the vulgarity of Trump into the welcoming arms of the Democrat Party emphasizes the internal contradictions of that party. A party that refuses to secure the borders of the United States wants to fight for those of Ukraine and Iraq.

President Trump's position is that the US is a good country with serious though soluble problems, a country that needs to pull back and look to its own interests. Trump’s view has the advantage of internal coherence, and unlike the globalist philanthropy of the Bush years, it does not require the cooperation of any foreign powers, least of all of Islamic fanatics.

Trump’s denial of the self-hating premises of the Democrats’ woke ideology motivates their endless charges of racism, and those charges while wrong in any precise sense are at least authentically felt: the woke Democrats honestly believe that dissent from the ideology of white American guilt is racist. The Beltway Democrats with equal horror and also equal anger agree that Trump’s self-contained nationalism represents a repudiation of their worldview, and also a threat to their jobs. The internal contradictions of the Democrats, the anti-nationalists and the super-nationalists, are forgotten though not resolved in their hatred of Trump.

But the hatreds of the two wings of the Democrat Party, though converging on Orange Man Bad, come from diametrically opposed motives. The left hates Trump because he loves America and wants it to be a strong country, the establishment because he wants the United States to be a normal country and not a global hegemon.

Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard often highlights the ground-level realities behind these abstract considerations: few of the Democrats' leaders and fewer of their activists have served in the wars, while Trump, notwithstanding bone spurs long ago during the Vietnam War, represents those who fill the ranks though not of course those who fill the E-ring. The Trump position is more coherent and also more authentic, while the Democrats' quadrennial facade of patriotism is just manipulative.

We saw last week a statement signed by 741 generals, admirals, and senior security-state officials. I don’t doubt the patriotism of the 741, nor their horror of Trump’s mercurial personality. But their patriotism is in plain contradiction with the core ideology of the woke activists who form the Democrat Party’s base. The 741, like the managerial elite they represent, want to run an assertive and essentially hegemonic foreign policy, necessarily resulting in periodic wars. Successful war, like successful empire, requires behind it a martial society and a measure of moral backbone rooted in a social consensus. The lack of that consensus, steadily eroded by the para-Marxist half of the Democrat coalition, almost guarantees failure.

The Trump policy of recuperation and rebuilding enjoys by contrast the united and enthusiastic support of his party. It is genuinely held, honestly advocated, and congruent with the interests and aspirations of his supporters. And Trump’s position — a strong America, seeing to its own interests — has the great advantage of not being internally self-contradictory.

None of these things can be said of the self-abasing globalism of the ruling Democrat Party. The contradiction between the anti-American pseudo-Marxism of the party’s base and the globalist ambitions of its elite is most conspicuously displayed in the flip-flopping tergiversations of Vice-President Harris, who cannot decide if she wants to be Harry Truman or Ilhan Omar.

Here, we have not a basement fulminator but an account associated with VP Harris's presidential campaign calling President Trump "fascist". This is new and dangerous ground:

https://x.com/harris_wins/status/1838696548613468377

The Harris campaign's specific allegation refers to Trump's insistence that he would fire generals who push woke ideology. The allegation is ridiculous. Civilian control of the military is a basic constitutional principle.

But it is the source of the absurdity that is most disturbing: it is common to hear leftist demonstrators, professors of sociology, and other woke ideologues bang on about "fascism," but not the Vice-President of the United States, nor her surrogates. A slogan once restricted to the anarchist Antifa left has migrated into the Vice-President's office. The Overton window is moving rapidly leftward.

The charge of fascism is an old Marxist habit. It comes naturally to those who think themselves on the correct side of a preordained history, expressing their anger at the failure of reality to conform to ideology. This is particularly the case when ordinary people, like President Trump's many working-class supporters, are guilty of supporting the wrong party. The Marxist reaction partakes of the anger reserved for the renegade.

The charge of fascism reflects the easy habit of arranging political beliefs on a left-right spectrum, and since President Trump's diverse supporters are clearly not socialists, Marxists, or other good Democrats, they must be over on the deplorable right, and since they are not Mitt Romney and wouldn't fit in at the opera, they must be far-right fascists. We get a lot of such one-dimensional thinking from the party of intellectual sophistication. They find the easy conclusion useful and also motivating, and intellectual laziness reinforces partisan anger.

It is from the original fascist Mussolini that we get the word "totalitarian." Mussolini boasted that under his rule Italy was a totalitarian state, where the state controlled everything, and the individual was as nothing in comparison to the nation. A fascist government was the biggest of big governments. To call President Trump, who wants to contain the state within its proper and limited boundaries, a fascist is historically ignorant as well as ideologically one-dimensional.

In practice, the allegation of "fascism" labels its target as illegitimate, beyond the pale, and certainly beyond discussion or engagement. And if argument is not possible, then all that is left is force. In the streets, this incites rioting, and in the minds of cranks, it may incite assassination attempts. In the Oval Office, we have no assurance it will not result in the use of anti-terrorism powers created to fight Al-Qaeda against domestic political opponents.

This wouldn't be new ground for the current Biden/Harris administration. Political opponents such as (@TulsiGabbard on X) have been put on a terrorist watch list, and critical journalists like (@mtaibbi on X) have been harassed by the IRS. And J6 protesters, including many who were peaceful, have faced vindictive prosecutions and terrorism charges.

Today, the charge of fascism is inflammatory and therefore dangerous. It calls into question VP Harris's judgment, and recalls the authoritarian tendencies of her party: if Trump and the Republicans are fascist, why not just arrest them all?

(also on X/Twitter: https://x.com/mfproudman/status/1839125409545253311)