It was stated that former Vice President Dan Quayle, when addressing the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), once said that “a mind was a terrible thing not to have.” His exact quote was "What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is." He was severely as the cool cats say ‘dragged’ for this because the motto of the UNCF is “a mind is a terrible thing to waste." Given the present climate in this nation, he may have been prophetic, for a large majority of our citizenry are the representation of “A Mind is a terrible thing Not To have.”

In the wake of the mass riots over the summer after the deaths of a man in Minneapolis and a woman in Louisville by police, both of whom were black, people have gone deeper into the use of several words which they seem to know nothing about: Nazi, Fascist and socialist. I would add racist and white supremacist because as a man that was a child during segregation in the Memphis south, these are thrown around so much that they have lost their meaning, nuance and import.

Although Nazi, Fascism and Socialism are rather popular in their use, in particular by progressives and liberals, it is obvious that these were are directed toward others without the majority of the users of these words, knowing what they mean or the history behind them and their political ideologies.

In his book Against the Fascist Creep, Reid Ross's suggest that: "fascism is a syncretic form of ultranationalist ideology developed through patriarchal mythopoesis, which seeks the destruction of the modern world and the spiritual palingenesis (rebirth) of an organic community led by natural elites through the fusion of technological advancement and cultural tradition." If this is somewhat of a pedantic definition for some, I will break it down in simple language, eventually discussing Nazism and Socialism in the process.

Fascism was introduced into Italy after the First World War by Strong man Benito Mussolini. In Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg suggest that Fascists did not desire government ownership of the means of production but rather wanted the state to tell businesses how they were to operate and function. This in complete contradiction to Communists ideology. In addition, Fascists were anti-individualism as it pertained to individualism in a free market economy. Like today’s leftist ideas, they advanced laws on the minimum wage, extremely high rates of taxation, gun confiscation, staunch state controlled public school and government restrictions on profit-making.

Fascism began with socialism. As an admitted Marxist starting at age 31, once in power Mussolini employed fascism which is just another form of socialism. Some have considered outside of the ownership of the means of production, Fascism is nearly a mirror image of socialism. This is a fact albeit the modern left considers every conservative action as a form of Fascism, it is not a right-wing conservative political ideology. Historically, from the former Soviet Union, Cuba and China to Cuba, Laos  and North Korea, and from Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini, these all were leftist movement, asserting that Fascism and Communism are just competing leftist ideas of governance with Fascism being socialism with a capitalist coating. Even W.E.B. DuBois was a proponent of this form of Fascism as advanced by the Nazis.

The main doctrine of fascism as touted by Mussolini, is: "Everything Within the State, Nothing Against the State, Nothing Outside the State" From his perspective all and anything that benefited the state, should be controlled by the state including but not limited to information, free thought, what could be said and what could be written or published. To label fascism as a right-wing political ideology is a complete misunderstanding of political history, philosophy and systems.  

When we look at the Nazis, we see similar left-wing policy based in Marxism and it says so in its name - National Socialist German Workers' party. The Nazis were just German fascists. They nationalized most industries including healthcare. They did not lean toward encouraging companies rather stating that they would be shut down via police if they didn't do what the government requested. In contrast, as briefly mentioned prior, Italian fascists selected direct regulatory control. This was typically done by instituting government boards that dictated what companies would produce. Again, both would lead to the same outcome either via ownership or regulation. To put it another way, Fascism is a system of socialism that employs regulatory power to control industry just like other kinds of socialism use nationalization to control industry.

It is clear the effect of decades of the welfare state and government public school training (not education) has crippled an entire corpus of political novices by allowing to use words incorrectly. This is especially true among the liberal coastal elites with their Vassar and Berkeley degrees and their similarly educated white progressive minions who scream BLACK LIVES MATTER and calling all they oppose or disagree with Fascist, Nazi, Racist or White supremacist. This is so ingenuine that it is nauseating. This may be what Thomas Sowell meant when he said: "In a sense, the political left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy."

What we are seeing today, the censoring of political opposition and dissent, banning and burning of books, canceling people because the have differing perspectives and basically silencing opposition by an means necessary, is what we have read about literally what happened in Germany in 1938. When corporations gain state power or become the state, or when corporate heads had to be party members of the ruling political party and when a technocratic authoritarian class of billionaires and their media puppets decides who gets to speak and who isn’t a person, we have Totalitarianism. Welcome to 1984, because Fascism, Nazism and Socialism are all possible direct roads of communism and a dictatorial system of centralized government that requires complete subservience to the state. The Right are not the Fascist or Nazis, the Left is. Just pray that for saying something in the future we do not loose our employment or get banned from banks or refuse to sell certain books. Wait, that is already happening.