Thank You, Jonah Goldberg

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Your "liberal = fascist" garbage is now part of conservative Republican philosophy.

What people like Goldberg, in responding to this point, have always claimed is that there's nothing particularly right wing about the kookery of people like the Aryan Nations or the Posse Comitatus -- they're just kooks, plain and simple. So when James von Brunn shot up the Holocaust Museum this summer, Goldberg disingenuously went on Beck's program and tried to persuade us that Von Brunn wasn't a right-wing extremist -- just a garden-variety kook. Just like Dr. George Tiller's assassin, Scott Roeder.

But this is palpable nonsense. What makes these people right-wing extremists is that they not only adopt right-wing political positions, they take them to their most extreme logical (if that's the word for it) outcome:

  • They not only oppose abortion, they believe abortion providers should be killed.


  • They not only believe that liberal elites control the media and financial institutions, but that a conniving cabal of Jews is at the heart of this conspiracy to destroy America.


  • They not only despise Big Government, they believe it is part of a New World Order plot to enslave us all.


  • They not only defend gun rights avidly, they stockpile them out of fear that President Obama plans to send in U.N. troops to take them away from citizens.


  • They not only oppose homosexuality as immoral, they believe gays and lesbians deserve the death penalty.


  • They not only oppose civil-rights advances for minorities, they also believe a "race war" is imminent, necessary and desirable.


And on and on. Every part of the agenda of the agenda of right-wing extremists is essentially an extreme expression of conservative positions. And that, fundamentally, is why American fascism always has been and always will be, properly understood, an unmistakable phenomenon of the Right.


This premise is a sick, ideological twist on the old phrase, "boys will be boys." For the political arena, it's "loons will be loons" with the addendum: "It's not conservatism, because it's the liberals who are fascist."

I always suspected that the true purpose of Goldberg's book was to justify future acts of crazy, but there were so many conservative books coming out at the time, I went along with the conventional wisdom that he was just trying to cash in like everyone else.

Comments

daveawayfromhome said…
To say that Jonah Goldberg is a douchbag is far too kind. He's more of a backed-up enema bag, and his continuing status as unstruck by lightening is further proof of the non-existence of God. I've despised him since I first saw his smug face and read his loathsome opinions.
8:33 PM
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