The Authoritarian Progressives

Do you really think anything will change with a Democratic landslide in November?

Photo by goodfreephotos.com

(Audio here)

We see that willful angelic cluelessness on the left as from the finger-pointing right—“They’re the racists and homophobes, they’re the anti-science side, they’re the censors and free speech haters,” and especially, “They’re the violent assassins and mass shooters, not us!”—despite thirty years of research showing near-monopolist market share violence from the right, with an uptick in left-wing violence only in the past two.

How gobsmacked progressives are when I point out they have a bigger jones for antisemitism than Tucker Carlson’s fanboys. How the left taught the right how to censor and oppress free speech. The faces they make when I challenge their pediatric genderwoo; institutionalized racism, just like ‘No Coloreds’; how countries have the right to decide who to allow into the country, or not; how ‘defund the police’ only sounds trendy in safe neighborhoods; how you’re not ‘antifascist’ for defying the Trump administration when you’re screaming for the Intifada.

I just finished Veiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam by Yasmine Mohammed, a self-published author whose book has been widely read and quoted.

She barely mentions liberals until the last chapter, focusing mostly on her memoir as an abused child in a fundamentalist Muslim family and whose arranged-marriage abusive ex-husband became a prominent Bin Laden terrorist.

But she does excoriate liberals earlier when, as an eight-year-old, she reported her horrendous abuse to a schoolteacher who brought in the authorities, and the liberal judge dismissed her case, arguing that “corporal punishment wasn’t against the law in Canada, and due to [her] ‘culture’, sometimes those punishments can be more severe than in the average Canadian household.” The ‘corporal punishment’ in question was bastinado and regular beatings for minor infractions like failing to remember prayers properly. Not all Canadian citizens are equal in progressive eyes, especially when they’re children. What would be unacceptable in a white family was perfectly okay when a culturally relativistic judge sat on the bench. Beatings and abuse, Mohammed points out, aren’t any less damaging to Muslim children than they are to those of German or Dutch descent.

The progressive love affair with Islamic authoritarianism negates any claims to ‘antifascism’ as it excuses the gross abuses of women, children, homosexuals, and the transgenders they otherwise passionately defend when it’s white men ‘oppressing’:

Mohammed’s story exemplifies the very worst of a pervasive progressive racism: Brown children aren’t as entitled to the same human rights as lighter-skinned Canadian children, or simply Canadians who were fortunate enough not to be born into a religious fundamentalist family.

Authoritarians don’t respect the rule of law, and as they damn the Trump administration for it, progressives do exactly the same. Criminality is excusable if you’re from a different culture. The darker one’s skin, the better the chance liberals will excuse or even applaud looting, stealing cars, assaulting others, rioting, and spouting racist thoughts.

Many who consider themselves ‘liberal’ are not. Many who regard themselves as ‘progressive’ are not. They’re illiberals, like their counterparts on the far right, and they simply prefer their own brand of authoritarianism.

Many believe the Democrats are headed for a landslide this November, including, possibly, even the Senate, for which they only need four seats. Many Americans hope and pray they will deliver us from the insanities and inanities of Donald Trump.

I wish I could believe them.

Kamala Harris was never our savior

Countries go bad when ‘good’ liberals embrace hierarchizing humans and granting them special rights others aren’t allowed. The ideology is enforced through social controls like speech policing, content policing, gaslighting, public ridicule and ostracization, surveillance and monitoring, and cancellation. Eventually, they pass laws and policies mandating practices like DEI and ‘loyalty oaths’; refusing college admission applications for coming from the ‘wrong’ color applicants or who fail to espouse the ‘right’ political opinions; and forcing parents to accept decisions about their children’s welfare to which they object, whether it’s for puberty blockers or vaccinations.

This is the playbook for both right- and left-wing authoritarians. See: Fascist Germany, Italy and Japan, the WWII Fascist Fun Trifecta. See: Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union.

The 2024 U.S. election was less a decision on whether to head down an authoritarian path, but rather which one.

Kamala Harris didn’t tote her own Project 2025 for America, nor did she espouse anything nearly as dangerous as Trumpitarianism. But neither did she promise to address some of the worst existing authoritarianism problems in America, some Democrat-created, like the criminals freely allowed to enter the U.S. via Biden’s open-door policy. She had nothing to say about addressing the Nazi problem among woke progressives, people who claimed to hate Nazis but screamed for the death of the Jews and the end of Israel, and who have driven an appalling jump in antisemitic acts, nearly consequence-free wherever progressives call the shots. She made it clear that male-driven ‘trans rights’ were more important than women’s safety. She suffered Sudden Onset Dementia when she denied ever supporting taxpayer-paid transition surgery for convicted criminals. And did she have a clear stand on anything? Her word salads approached Trump’s sometimes.

‘Woke’ progressivism’s oppression had been such an authoritarian nightmare for so many years that many Americans decided Trump really couldn’t be as bad. However they feel about their vote now, I can’t fault them for voting ‘anything but Democrat’. I did too, just not for Trump. Democrats are the party that claimed Nazis were only on the right while jumping on antisemitism like Harvey Weinstein on a new starlet, goaded by professional antisemites in Congress like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.

This is the party that punishes pronoun resistors more swiftly and virulently than Jewish synagogue vandalism. Or religious fanatics who beat a little girl’s feet.

This just in: Authoritarian progressives still scorn free speech

According to FIRE, students saying it’s okay to shout down a speaker, block her entry to the venue, or stop it entirely are at “all-time highs”. Barnard College, Columbia University, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Northeastern University comprise the bottom-feeding Filthy Five of FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings. And they wonder why the cancelmonkey Trump administration attacks universities and pulls their funding. He’s no better than they, but Kamala Harris would in no way have attempted to bring diversity of thought, expression, or political opinion to overwhelmingly progressive universities. Just like Trump is trying to exorcise any opinion to the left of the farthest-right as unforgivable treason. Meanwhile, woke progressive academics decry the same reason and rationalism he scorns, calling it ‘white supremacist’.

I’m not at all convinced the Democrats and progressives are our only hope for saving us from the Trumpocalypse. I cheer while I watch them resist ICE: Warning others of their approach, reporting on them, and documenting the brownshirts’ many crimes against their own citizens. I’m happy they’re speaking out and challenging Donald Trump and his minion Nosferatu Stephen Miller. Yet these are the same people who have shut me down on blogging and social media platforms because they didn’t like my anti-woke articles. These are the same people who would disrupt my speech or deplatform me if I was important enough to speak on a college campus. These are the people who claim to be pro-science yet support the insanely nonsensical ‘gender-affirming care’ for children. The same people who, if I was in their family, would disinvite me to family celebrations because I refused to vote for The Brat. These are the ‘antifascists’ who worship New York socialist love god Zohran Mamdani who’s pretty near-Communist, an ideology that oppresses its unfortunate citizens every bit as effectively as right-wing dictatorships. So of course woke progressives ‘bend the knee’ for it, not against it.

Yeah, tell me again how Democrats and progressives will save us. They offer, instead, Stalin rather than Hitler.

Research shows that liberals skew the highest on reported mental health problems, while conservatives skew the lowest. It wasn’t always so. While mental health distress rose highest in liberal girls around 2012 when smartphones and social media really took off, liberal theories connecting it to the ‘awful things conservatives were doing’ failed to note that 2012 marked the second term for Barack Obama, bringing four more years of liberal governance. Try again, ideologues.

Liberal women, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argued, adopted the disempowering ‘Three Great Untruths’ which lighter social media-using conservative young people did not. These were cognitive distortions pushed by progressive universities that taught youth exposed to them to trust their emotions over reason, to avoid all bad experiences, and that there was no middle ground in human conflict; the sides were straight-up all-good or all-bad.

Social media algorithms drive what we want. If your authoritarian bag is progressive rather than MAGA political outrage, then that’s what you’ll see. If you’ve got Trump Derangement Syndrome, it will feed you more. Or maybe it’s the cause of your TDS.

When progressives need to conserve

I don’t see any authoritarian relief for America so far, and I don’t have high hopes for Canada either. Had the Democrats stayed in power I think we would have seen that same relentless march toward their ever-growing list of thou-shalt-nots, and protection of identity groups far less marginalized than advertised. Their Gestapo wasn’t ICE agents on the streets, but anonymous anti-free speech cyberbullies on Twitter. Both ruin lives. There’s simply more visual drama when burly, unqualified men wrestle a woman to the ground or shoot one smiling at them in a car, or an armed man who never brandished his weapon, than there is in someone fired because he refused to take his employer’s ‘unconscious bias’ training or a DEI consultant put on leave for addressing the ‘wrong’ racism.

After the Republican War On Democracy, I don’t expect the Democrats to reinstall the guardrails once they return to power. I expect them to take advantage of their new freedoms. With a vengeance. MAGAs, Republicans, and anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders should be afraid.

It won’t be as bad, initially. They’ll dial back Trump’s worst excesses, but also, the things he got right. They’ll return DEI. And men to women’s sports teams. And genderwoo (Make Gay Kids Straight Again!). Authoritarians believe they know what’s best for us, and don’t tolerate dissent. The woke social justice set has made that abundantly clear. They’ll go after their political enemies (again). They’ll reinstate language policing.

Alligator Alley and other Trump concentration camps may be repurposed for their own ‘enemies’.

Liberals’ and progressives’ big mistake was in not knowing when to quit and instead, to conserve what they’d accomplished. Instead of acknowledging their many great victories—civil rights, gay marriage, more equality for women, making bigotry uncool—they kept looking for more fights, which led them down the road to finding and fighting problems that weren’t there, like ‘microaggressions’ and humor. What those accomplishments needed was guardrails for those who’d roll them back. While they were fighting for pronouns, the right slowly chipped away at abortion rights until—well, you know how that ended.

Conservatives conserved traditions and not all of them were good ones. Those were the liberal victories. Other traditions needed protection, and liberals failed them. Instead of reaching across the aisle they demonized their opposition. Worse, they assimilated the right’s discriminations and moral wrongs by changing them a little. They turned historical hatred against blacks to hatred against whites; misogyny into misandry; and Enlightenment values replaced evidence with ‘feelings’.

I woke up the morning after the 2024 election wondering who I’d be happier with as the winner. I found I didn’t really give a damn. Oh, Trump won again. This time I shrugged and said, “Okay, whatever.” It was easy to do safely in Canada. But I would have reacted to the same to a Harris win. It didn’t matter.

Authoritarianism is bad for whoever are their enemies. As a freethinker, a skeptic and a social critic, both parties hate me. What interests me is this: Which authoritarianism will Democrats and progressives ultimately choose: Communism or Islamofascism? Or will they surprise me and return to a commitment to level-headed, normie democracy?

We’ll find out.