[ralusek]

What is "fascist" stuff? Earlier this year, people protesting coronavirus lockdowns were called "fascists." People protesting against government authority were called fascists.

Berkeley had to spend $600k in security to allow Ben Shapiro to speak, because "anti fascists" were accusing him of white supremacy, and being a fascist, and violently attempting to prevent him from speaking. And this was after they had successfully prevented him from speaking earlier in the year. Similar "anti fascists" pulled the fire alarm on Janice Fiamengo for speaking about men's issues. Warren Farrel had a similar experience, with people absolutely berating the attendants of one of his lectures for their support of fascism.

[mrybczyn]

Many universities will NOT spend the money. Several guest academic lectures were straight up cancelled at Univerisity of Waterloo because the forecast security costs were too high. Seems like the protest movements have learned Denial of Sevice is effective in pushing their own agendas. What a world.

[onetaboo]

>What is "fascist" stuff?

In France fascism is not illegal. There is only one thing that is really taboo, and it's badmouthing jews. Herve Ryssen, a French writer and film maker, is sleeping in jail right now because the contents of his books and documentaries was considered to be hateful.

Similarly, the only few websites that are censored by the French government are far-right websites that typically have antisemitic content (a prominent case is Democratie Participative, the French equivalent of the Daily Stormer).

That's for institutional censorship. In practice, there is an even stronger form of de-facto censorship in France (assassination) for people who draw or show caricatures of the prophet of Islam (Charlie Hebdo, and more recently a history teacher who has been beheaded; quite a few more people live under 24/7 police protection for similar reasons).

It's a pretty grim situation overall.

[core-questions]

> What is "fascist" stuff?

Most people have absolutely zero idea what Fascism is/was; they have a Hollywood confabulation in their head, perhaps mixed images of Star Wars and Harry Potter bad guys, anyone in a uniform, etc. Zero historical understanding of what Italy was all about in the early 20th century, no understanding of the modernizations and cleanups Mussolini brought to his country. I would hardly defend his every act, but the idea of nationalism combined with an aesthetic informed by history and myth has proven to be a very powerful one for galvanizing a society into action.

Evola's "Critique of Fascism from the Right" is one very good place to get an understanding of what the underlying ideology of "real fascism" is, separate from the inevitably-flawed implementation. (We don't need to pretend that perfect implementations of anything are possible, of course, and we similarly forgive communists their lack of a proper implementation of their own idea, which at its heart still has the same impetus of improving the state of mankind by changing the structure of civilization.)

Nobody is bringing that back. In a young and multi-cultural country like the USA, the founding mythos is neither powerful enough, aesthetic enough, or common enough to be a driving force for change any longer. There may be small pockets of adherents, but numerically they are insignificant, non-violent, and not worth worrying about in comparison to other drivers of change.

Instead of that specific and mostly-dead political ideology, the word "fascism" has become a standing for "authoritarianism" of any kind - whether it's left-wing, right-wing, or even what I think is more properly labelled as Totalitarian Liberalism, which is the era we are heading into now.

Remember that term: Totalitarian Liberalism. It is only under this system that you're ostensibly free, except everything is controlled by corporations, and people who pretend to be left-wing and "of the people" will defend the rights of billion-dollar corporations to restrict freedoms that were enshrined in law hundreds of years ago.

This action by Youtube is a perfect example of this. Each precedent they set is met by a legion of comments on sites like HN and Reddit that defend their actions, because of course it's only Fake News badthinking idiots that are kicked off. Nobody seems to notice that the scope of control increases each time, slowly but continually restricting free speech on the platform, in concert with efforts to make it more difficult to host things elsewhere, more difficult for locked-down walled-garden devices to be able to access unapproved content, etc.

It takes a real fool to think that this will never be used to suppress something legitimate.

[ralusek]

I agree with you here, but I don't even think fascism is used interchangeably with authoritarianism. That would be a good start. Fascism has basically begun to mean "anything outside of the far left orthodoxy." People were calling Trump a fascist for his entire presidency, when the main thing that characterized his presidency was irresponsible ANTI-authoritarianism. His administration deregulated and defunded public institutions. Lowering taxes, pulling back business regulations, pulling out of climate agreements and pulling back restrictions on energy production. I'm not saying these things are good or bad, they're just explicitly anti-authoritarian, and the precise opposite of fascism. Questioning the election results were the first fascist-adjacent action taken that weren't policies shared by the left, such as trade regulations.

[core-questions]

> People were calling Trump a fascist for his entire presidency, when the main thing that characterized his presidency was irresponsible ANTI-authoritarianism.

Yes! This is amazing. There is absolutely nothing fascist about Trump - from his complete lack of anything aesthetic, his terrible diction, his lackluster speeches (despite the big rallies, which show people are hungry for something better in this direction.)

> Lowering taxes, pulling back business regulations, pulling out of climate agreements and pulling back restrictions on energy production.

Whereas under fascism the exact opposite was in effect: new regulations, new control, and an early effort toward environmentalism was evident.