by Dr. Jack Wheeler
August 31, 2006

Doesn’t it seem odd that the kids who started the 60s anti-establishment protest riots on college campuses with the Free Speech Movement (Berkeley, 1964) are the college professors or politicians today who most vehemently suppress free speech among their students or constituents in the name of political correctness?

How can this be?  How can worshipping at the shrines of Diversity, Tolerance, and Multiculturalism result in trials and expulsions for students, or jail for citizens, who express ideas with which  the worshippers are not in agreement?

The answer is the intimate connection between Subjectivism and Fascism.

The core metaphysical assertion of liberals is that there are no absolute truths, factually or morally.  What’s true for you may not be true for me, it’s all a matter of perspective, who are you to say what is right or wrong, true or false.

Truth is a matter of subjective opinion, it is relative to the values of different people.  This belief, which lies at the very center of the liberal view of the world, is known as Subjectivism or Relativism.

It’s opposite, the assertion that there are in fact absolute truths, both moral and factual about the nature of reality regardless of anyone’s opinion or desires, horrifies liberals.  They think such an assertion leads straight to tyranny and fascism.

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), the founder of Fascism as a political movement (after the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods used by Rome to symbolize strength through unity) vehemently disagreed.

In his 1921 essay Diuturna (The Lasting, that which endures), Mussolini made it clear that moral relativism was his rationale for Fascism:

“If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.”

Liberals follow Mussolini’s conclusion to the letter.  Preaching tolerance, they have no tolerance for anyone’s opinions but their own.  Anyone they disagree with they call ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ or ‘homophobic’ or some other denigration.

Liberal intolerance, of course, goes way beyond mere disagreement and name-calling.  They want to criminalize the beliefs and actions of those with whom they disagree.

They succeeded this week in California.  On Tuesday (August 29), Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law (SB 1441 sponsored by a lesbian actress turned state senator, Sheila Kuehl) specifically requiring “any program or activity that…receives any financial assistance from the state” to support transsexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality or lose state funding.

The Democrat-run California Legislature is passing an entire raft of such fascist laws.  Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez made it bluntly clear:  “Our purpose is to outlaw traditional perspectives on marriage and family in the state school system.”

He and his fellow Democrats have the Orwellian nerve to call their legislative fascism “tolerance education.”

Liberal “tolerance” is forcing people at the point of a gun to believe and act as liberals demand.  You don’t get more fascist than that.

California’s Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, is, however, trying.  He is actually trying to criminalize disagreement on “global warming.”

In his lawsuit against such prominent scientists as MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen and Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas, Lockyer accuses them of being “climate skeptics,” who are playing “a major role in spreading disinformation about global warming.”

Until recently, Lockyer was positioning himself to run for California governor, challenging Schwarzenegger.  They could have had a debate as to which one is more fascist than the other.  (No one should be shocked by Schwarzenegger, by the way.  He married a Kennedy!)

The only way to combat liberal lunacy like that on exhibit in California is to attack it at its source:  liberal subjectivism leading directly to fascism.

It will do no good for liberals to bleat about religious absolutists, be they Christian or Moslem, who believe they have a right to force people into behaving as they want because that’s what the Bible or the Koran says.

That’s a red herring.  Don’t let liberals switch the issue.  The issue here is the fundamental contradiction in their world-view, not anyone else’s.  Liberals cannot argue for relativism in morality and claim there are no moral truths, then claim their moral values magically have more validity than anyone else’s.

When you argue there are no objective moral truths, the only way to settle a moral disagreement is at the point of a gun.  Mussolini understood this, and he had the intellectual honesty to admit it.

Liberals understand it too, but they don’t want to admit it, least of all to themselves.  It still makes them fascists, nonetheless.

Demonstrating how and why liberals are fascists is their Achilles’ Heel.  Name-calling is a liberal specialty, and they are fond of calling their opponents “fascists.”  But using reason and logic to expose how they are demonstrably in fact fascists can be effective.

Combat liberalism by publicly exposing it as fascism.  California would be a good place to start.

— Dr. Jack Wheeler is editor-in-chief of To The Point News and is widely credited as the architect of the Reagan Doctrine.