The first part of this title came from a post I saw on Twitter by Joel Webbon, a pastor from Texas and leader on the dissident right, or New Christian Right, or whatever one calls that these days. Sadly, he was referring to other people on the right who use this “kill switch” to try to discredit and shut down conversation about possibly uncomfortable issues. Joel’s description of this rhetorical sleight of hand comes from a friend on Twitter:
It dehumanizes. It demonizes. It’s meant to silence, to isolate, to destroy reputations, and ultimately to frighten the next man in line from ever speaking up.
And that’s the real strategy. The left used to do this, but now the neocon right has adopted it. “We’ll smear you as a Nazi, and everyone else will take the hint.”
I’ve only been active on Twitter (X for the purists) for the last year and a half, and this kind of stuff only started popping up in the last year or so. We lived through peak woke during the Biden administration. Which is why it’s disconcerting, now that Trump has started the process of cleaning our societal house, to see people on the right use the same cancel tactics the left uses to stifle dissent and limit the scope of acceptable discourse. One phrase, for example, that annoys me because it is doing exactly this is “ethno-nationalism.” There are some who argue that an ethnic monoculture, i.e., not “diverse,” is better for societal flourishing than a cultural United Nations. I’ve read and listened to their arguments and find them plausibly persuasive, but when others call them “ethno-nationalists,” the implication is . . . Nazi! White supremecist isn’t far behind. They, it is implied, should be shunned. Uh, no they shouldn’t. Sure, some on the outer edges, the fringe, should be identified as lines must always and will be drawn in any society, but the Nazi line is weak and almost never justified.
I responded in a comment that it’s a shame most people have no idea where the rhetorical effectiveness of this “kill switch” came from, but I will tell you. It’s a tactic the left has used since shortly after World War II (and even some prior), and yet another of the woeful consequences of what Pat Buchanan called an “Unnecessary War.” (If that triggers you, I would suggest you read Buchanan’s book, Churchill, Hitler, and /The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Agree or not, his case is not a frivolous one.) Let’s see how we got here.
The Post-World War II Consensus
Seeing fascism as a phenomenon of the right is part of what some of us see as the toxic stew of the “post-World War II consensus.” I’ll get to that below, but we need to address this so-called consensus first. Worldwide tyranny and totalitarianism were the great fear coming out of the war, and the Western nations were united in their commitment to not allow its worldwide expansion. The Soviet Union, a product of the first Great War, which gave us the second, ended up dominating much of the world anyway because of Allied incompetence or treachery, take your pick. The Cold War was the result. Godless communism was the great enemy of the time, and there was a consensus for transnational cooperation to keep it at bay. Only Ronald Reagan thought Soviet Communism could be defeated, and it was. Another area of consensus is that fascism in the form of Nazism was the apotheosis of evil in the modern world, the apex of the apex, top of the mountain, never matched in the history of the world, and to be avoided at all costs. In this consensus it is assumed fascism is a phenomenon coming from the cultural and political right, and few question that. All agree, though, it must not be allowed to fester, thus the “rhetorical kill switch.”
Liberal democracy is also an unquestioned good in this consensus, and this is true on the left and right. I realized I was a conservative in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and I had no idea the conservative movement was a liberal movement. None, and for decades. I knew there was “something rotten in Denmark” for a long time, but I couldn’t identify it. All conservatives did was lose. At best, conservatism was committed to slowing down the gains of the progressive liberalism of Democrats since Woodrow Wilson, but reversing it didn’t seem to be part of the plan. Oh sure, they talked a good game, but when push came to shove, they didn’t do anything. I had learned about William F. Buckley and National Review magazine back at the beginning of my conservative journey, and he was a hero of mine for 35 years, then he wasn’t. In the very first issue of the magazine in 1955 he wrote of the mission of the magazine and by extension the fledgling conservative movement, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” At best conservatives became those who pleaded, “Please slow down a little.”
I struggled wondering in my disillusionment exactly what I was politically if I wasn’t a conservative. Maybe a libertarian? I quickly realized that was basically evil; choice as the ultimate good is a stupid moral standard—one that leads to destruction. Thankfully, a New York billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star came down an escalator on June 16, 2015, to save me from myself. It just took a while to realize God had put my political salvation in the most unlikely package. Over the Trump years I’ve come to realize the conservative movement is basically filled with liberals in skirts, just another form of modern liberalism, classical liberalism some call it, but one that believes in tradition. Most conservatives buy into the secular political and cultural order just as much as liberals and most are not all that different than liberals. They all believe in the secular myth of neutrality, that pluralism is a positive good, and that no one religion should be privileged in government or the public square, including Christianity. The phrase Christian Nationalism is anathema to them, and a Christian nation an oxymoron. One of my favorite conservatives in the world actually said that, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn, and I challenged that in a post last year. And they all believe fascism comes from the right.
I have discovered through my MAGA journey what I am politically, thanks in large part to Steve Bannon. I would now call myself a Christian populist-nationalist conservative who is deeply suspicious of the post-World War II consensuses. This also includes the accepted narratives of 20th century wars. I would again highly suggest Buchanan’s Unnecessary War, and at least you’ll know there are valid questions about the narratives, agree or disagree.
Because of Trump I began to question many things, and because of Covid came to question everything. I am determined not to turn into a cynic, which I believe is sinful, but to have a healthy skepticism about everything. Writing my last book I learned about the true origins of “the Nazi kill switch,” and it puts into perspective experiences those of us on the right are all too familiar with.
Adorno, Marcuse, Anti-Fascism, and Repressive Tolerance
We have cultural Marxism to thank for “the Nazi kill switch.” It goes back to the Frankfurt School in Germany in the 1920s which migrated to America prior to the war. The Marxist intellectuals in this movement realized traditional or “orthodox” communism based on class oppression wasn’t working, so a change in tactics was required. The primary insight of the cultural Marxists wasn’t that “orthodox” Marxism didn’t bring the fruit of revolution Marx promised, but that the revolutionary consciousness required would clearly not arise spontaneously; it must be assiduously cultivated via culture. They recognized Western societies produced cultures almost completely resistant to revolution. Marxist revolutionary consciousness had to find its way into the worldview of the average prosperous Westerner, and that could only happen through the transformation of the culture. Thus in due course arose the strategy of the “long march through the institutions.”
One of the cultural Marxists, Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), had developed the concept of “cultural Hegemony,” meaning the dominance of one group over another through cultural norms. This dominant position of a particular set of ideas leads to them becoming commonsensical and intuitive, especially traditional religion, and cultural Marxists were determined to take it all down, replacing specifically Christian and capitalist ideas with Marxism. Marxist revolutionary consciousness would then “naturally” develop, or what we know today as woke. The effectiveness of this strategy is remarkable, and through it we have “cancel culture,” only certain accepted speech can be tolerated. This mentality has been endemic to the left, but it took a while for the “long march” to make it widely acceptable in Western culture. We largely have Adorno and Marcuse to thank for that.
The rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and fascism thanks to Mussolini, was the narrative in which woke incubated. The Nazi rhetorical kill switch was already being used prior World War II as interventionists were trying to get America into the war. Since Hitler and Nazism were ultimate evil and soon to take over the world, those not sufficiently bellicose were called Nazi sympathizers. It wasn’t widespread because the vast majority of Americans had no interest in getting into another European war, but Roosevelt and his administration sure were. The war and the Holocaust seemed to prove the ultimate nature of Nazism’s evil, but that’s only because the allies and the left played down the wickedness of Stalin and communist atrocities. In a contest between totalitarian tyrant baddies, I’d vote for Stalin to get the grand prize, with Hitler getting the runner up. And one last World War II point. Hitler, despite claims to the contrary, never had designs on worldwide conquest, while Stalin sure did; it’s baked into the communist cake. The Cold War proved it. But nobody today, left or right, uses “Commie” as a “rhetorical kill switch” to stifle debate and discussion. Let’s see why.
Theodor Adorno (1903–69) – Adorno published a book in 1950 with the loaded title, The Authoritarian Personality. The default position ever since is that fascism is a phenomenon of the right, and communism of the left, a convenient distortion for our
cultural elites. Dinesh D’Souza in his book The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left has a section titled, “The Deceitful Origin of ‘Anti-Fascism.’” He writes that after World War II, “Nazism became the very measure of evil. So Marcuse and Adorno knew that anything associated with Nazism or fascism would automatically be tainted. They set about putting this obvious fact to political use on behalf of the political Left.” Fascism in this distortion of reality would now be associated with capitalism and moral traditionalism, which a la Marx must be “abolished.”
D’Souza argues persuasively that Marxism and fascism are ideologies of the left, but because of Adorno they came to be associated with two different ends of the ideological and political spectrum. This has some plausibility because Hitler hated communism, but that doesn’t make National Socialism any less an ideology of the left. In his book Adorno introduced the F(ascism)-Scale as D’Souza explains:
The basic argument was that fascism is a form of authoritarianism and that the worst manifestation of authoritarianism is self-imposed repression. Fascism develops early and we can locate it in young people’s attachments to religious superstition and conventual middle-class values about family, sex, and society.
So a la Marx, religion and the family must be “abolished.” The book and ideas were swallowed hook, line, and sinker by an already liberal academia and media, becoming the accepted perspective that fascism was a phenomenon of the right. It’s a complete lie, but that’s what Marxists do. Sadly, the right largely accepted this taxonomy, as if Nazism and communism were on opposite sides of a continuum of political totalitarianism. We should reject this, let alone use it to verbally tar and feather those on our side of the political, cultural, and religious spectrum.
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) – After the war Marcuse decided to stay in America. Adorno went back to Germany but returned to America in the early 50s for a time in order to not lose his American citizenship. Marcuse was the most significant figure to come out of the Frankfurt school. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1940 and served as an intelligence analyst for the precursor of the CIA from 1941 to 1944. After the war, he continued in that work for another agency, and then made his way back into academia. He taught at Columbia and Harvard universities (1951 to 1954), Brandeis University (1954–65), and the University of California, San Diego (1965–76), where after retirement he was honorary emeritus professor of philosophy until his death.
He is most famously known as the father of the “New Left” and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The “Old Left” were those who embraced the old orthodox forms of Marxism, and especially that as practiced in the Soviet Union. Young Marxist radicals, by contrast, were disaffected with Soviet Communism and looking for new ways to bring down the capitalist West; the cultural approach of Frankfurt would come to dominate American Marxism through the pen of Marcuse. During his time in academia, he attracted young radical disciples like Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman among many others.
Marcuse, a prolific author, wrote Repressive Tolerance in 1965. That counter intuitive title comes from his argument that tolerance is “repressive” when it tolerates ideas from the right. Written as part of a book called A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Marcuse argues that “tolerance today, is in many of its most effective manifestations serving as a cause of oppression.” From the perspective of a cultural Marxist, of course it is. The perverse Marxist logic of Marcuse has to be read to be believed. In this upside down, inside out world, tolerance “actually protects the already established machinery of discrimination.” Free speech and the First Amendment are considered dangerous; a common trope on the left is “speech is violence.” If that is true, of course it must not be tolerated, and we’ll see why from Marcuse’s perspective.
Adorno allowed Marcuse to develop “the Nazi argument.” It was a diabolically genius move paying cultural dividends to this day. First Marcuse lays his cards on the table:
Liberating tolerance . . . would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the left.
Then he gives us the punch line:
In past and different circumstances, the speeches of the Fascist and Nazi leaders were the immediate prologue to the massacre. The distance between the propaganda and the action, between the organization and its release on the people had become too short. But the spreading of the word could have been stopped before it was too late: if democratic tolerance had been withdrawn when the future leaders started their campaign, mankind would have had a chance of avoiding Auschwitz and a World War.
It’s a short trip from this to “speech is violence,” and by definition it can only be speech from the right. This led to a common phrase the New Left used in their protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, “No free speech for Fascists.” Thus what we know as cancel culture is a necessity to keep the right from doing what Fascists and Nazi’s always do. Not cancelling people on the right and their speech would be a dereliction of duty, the First Amendment be damned. Of course, all the political violence is on the left, but that is justified violence because it’s used against the Fascist right. A group using violence today can be called Antifa, for anti-fascists, with a straight face. You can’t make this stuff up!
Now That We Know?
Since we now know where the “Nazi rhetorical kill switch” came from, can we use it in good conscience? Do threats from potential fascists and Nazi’s actually exist? Is the “dissident right” full of “angry young men” who are susceptible to the “the authoritarian personality”? While I conceded there are some angry young men who are rightly frustrated at the dominant globalist establishment manifested in the post-World War II consensus, is it valid to “cancel” them? To discredit them in a way that seeks to silence them? To ignore their concerns? Or discredit their arguments without at least understanding them? It seems to me the questions answer themselves.
When I see, for example, this tactic being use on, of all people, Stephen Wolfe, who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, I call garbage. I am deeply uncomfortable with the antisemitism among some of this crowd, but I’ve tried to engage with them and understand where they are coming from, while rejecting their fundamental premise that Jews are “the problem.” Outside of that, I have no problem with this slice of the conservative Christian right questioning the “consensus”, the accepted narrative of political and cultural reality since the end of the war. I myself once accepted the dominant narratives of everything from the Civil War on, then Trump. Covid then destroyed the credibility of all the supposed “experts,” and created millions of skeptics who were otherwise not inclined to question things. Even the Lord of Glory says, “Come now, let us reason together,” (Is. 1:18), so let us discuss things without assuming the worst motives of our interlocutors, and everyone will benefit as we continue bringing God’s kingdom on earth as Christ taught us to pray.
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