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President Joe Biden threw away his governing mandate on Thursday evening with a prime time address that described his political opponents as enemies to democracy, and demonized half the country as violent extremists.
It was an act of unprecedented dishonesty and demagoguery, made worse by the fact that the news networks gave Biden time to spew his propaganda as if it were a genuine matter of national interest.
The speech was also bizarrely fascist in its stagecraft. Biden was flanked by Marines, with Independence Hall behind him bathed in red light. It looked like a Chinese Communist Party event, or worse; social media erupted with comparisons to Nuremberg in 1938.
It was unworthy of the office.
Let us first consider the word “fascist” — the “semi” is superfluous, a way for Biden to pretend he isn’t using the first, while using it.
“Fascism” used to mean something. The U.S. fought a World War against fascism — against the fascist regimes that murdered tens of millions of innocent people. Some of the victims are remembered at the U.S. Holocaust Museum; some are remembered at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where President Trump sent the first U.S. delegation to an annual “March of the Living” in 2019.
To use the word “fascist” to describe Americans who voted for the last president, and who support the minority party in Congress, is to desecrate the millions of victims of actual fascism, as well as the memory of those Americans who gave their lives to defeat it.
The only reason Joe Biden is president is because he promised to unify Americans — though he was not always clear about that: he kept telling voters that he was waging a “battle for the soul of the nation,” which is an oddly martial way to describe coming together.
But voters, weary of riots, division, and chaos saw in him what they wanted to see: the only Democrat with a demonstrated history of working with people from across the aisle, the only one who dared — however belatedly — to condemn political violence in 2020.
In his Inaugural Address, Biden used the word “unity” eight times — repeating it, at several junctures, for emphasis. “[T]o restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words.
