Don Lemon claims ‘MAGA is the closest thing to the modern version of the Nazi Party’

All over social media we see blue-haired, septum-pierced, non-binary protesters complaining that America has slipped into fascism, but when asked what that is by some intrepid citizen journalist, microphone in hand, no one can really answer. Lemon has said he might run for president himself.

So I took a look in the big, fat Webster's dictionary I inherited from my grandmother and here's what it had to say: "fascism, noun, a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of the opposition (unions, other, specifically leftist, parties, minority groups, etc.), the retention of private ownership of the means of production under centralized governmental control, beligerent nationalism and racism, glorification of war, etc.: first instituted in Italy in 1922."

In America today, we do not have a one-party dictatorship, but rather two parties and a heap of factions all vying for power, none of which have a clean or easy road toward attaining that power. Unions are not oppressed but are powerful, many of them representing government workers like teachers unions, while others stage campus protests, as the UAW did, engaging with pro-Palestinian agitators at Columbia University. The only party eager to centralize the means of production are the socialists, who want government healthcare, childcare, housing, transportation, and even groceries.

Patriotic nationalism is a hallmark of our national character. At this point, racism has been partially institutionalized against the majority group. And far from being glorified, the war is criticized by right, left, and everyone in between.

So what is Lemon talking about as he sits by the side of a sparkling blue swimming pool? What did the defrocked former CNN anchor mean when he said: "The president is a fascist?"

"MAGA is the closest thing to the modern version of the Nazi Party," Lemon said. "This is America's version. It's the closest thing without the Holocaust and all that stuff, that sort of mindset." He doesn't stop for a moment to realize that what made the Nazis Nazis is the organized extermination of Jews, the ghettoization of citizens, and the eradication of opposition. There is nothing even remotely like that in the United States. It's easy to hear what Lemon said and just think it's obvious that it's false, and to think that anyone who hears these words will know that what the man said is just bats. But they don't.

"That's what MAGA is," Lemon went on, "because most intelligent people or logical people, when they get new information, and if that information is negative or not factual, then they change their minds. When they go, 'oh well, I wish I had known better, and now that I have this information, then I can readjust.' No matter what you, no matter how many facts and how much information you give them about this presidency, about the policies, they don't change their minds because they're really not voting for the price of eggs."

"They're voting for white supremacy," he went on. "They're voting for power. They're voting to have a preeminent voice. They don't, they're afraid of, they've been co-opted by many people in the Republican Party and Donald Trump to think that their failures are due to something else–the other, the black person, the woman, the Latino, the immigrant, the migrant–that person is taking your job. That person is the reason that you don't have the financial or career success that you think that you should have. It's because of them. We want to take our country back. That's what MAGA is."

When he goes on to reveal the "information," he cites the Reflecting Pool, which has been an algae-infested problem since it was installed in 1922, he cites the Qatari-gifted new Air Force 1, which was a gift in the works under the Biden administration, he cites the renovation of the East Wing, which every president since the first has made alterations, renovations, and adjustments to the White House and its grounds. None of this, not one piece of this, is fascism.

The reason the left is so willing to use these extreme terms is so that they can come up with extreme measures to fight them. They call Trump and his supporters fascist, white supremacist, racist Nazis so that there is no question about how far they must go to remove the alleged scourge from the political landscape of the United States. It's not just that they don't know what the terms mean, it's that they want to use them to muster unequivocal support for their own socialist side. And yes, we know what that term means.