Obama and his brown shirts

One historical fact that has eluded most Americans, thanks to the illiberal education they receive in school and from the infotainment media, is that fascism has always been popular among so-called "progressives" – despite their tendency to mislabel and mischaracterize their political opponents as followers of the national socialist ideology.

Benito Mussolini was nearly worshipped by the left in his time. It was only Adolf Hitler who gave fascism a bad name with progressives – and then not until he broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact with Josef Stalin and their adored Soviet Union.

That's why I fear fascism today much more than I fear communism.

Communism is a withered old discredited religion with few observers left besides balding political science professors at American colleges and universities.

It's fascism we need to guard against, to be vigilant about opposing, to recognize and fight at every turn if we want to preserve any vestige of freedom in our republic and around the world.

What is fascism?

It is a thoroughly socialist ideology that feeds on class warfare and sustains itself on authoritarianism or even totalitarianism, central economic planning, subsidies of favored "private" businesses and something we're seeing more and more of in the United States today – so-called "public-private partnerships."

One thing very important to understand – fascism is not a right-wing ideology; it is a left-wing ideology. It always has been and always will be. It is about statism, not individualism.

Throughout history, it has often been characterized as a "third way" between capitalism and communism. Now who have you heard use that term in contemporary company? It is a popular euphemism for fascism employed today by the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama.

The big bailout of the mortgage industry is an excellent illustration of a fascist economic concept. It's about utilitarianism, not principal – pragmatism, not morality.

Another characteristic of fascism is intimidation, coercion, bullying tactics and a self-righteousness that leads its followers to believe the rules simply don't apply to them. The end justifies the means. People working on behalf of the cause are to be excused from accountability for any excesses. In fact, they would find it hard to believe they could ever commit excesses.

We got a whiff of this kind of fascism in Missouri last week when Obama partisans in various law-enforcement capacities pledged publicly to use their official police powers to go after anyone they believed to be unfairly portraying their candidate in political advertising.

In other words, they decided to throw the First Amendment out the window.

St. Louis County Circuit Attorney Bob McCulloch, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, Jefferson County Sheriff Glenn Boyer, along with Obama and the leader of his Missouri campaign, Sen. Claire McCaskill, pledged to form a so-called "truth squad" to stop any political advertising that claimed the Democratic presidential candidate was anything other than a devout Christian or that he planned to cut taxes for all Americans earning less than $250,000 a year.

The campaign was not limited to Missouri, either. The Gestapo tactics included sending "threatening" letters to several news agencies in Pennsylvania and Ohio demanding they stop airing ads exposing Obama's gun stance, according to the National Rifle Association.

As Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt put it bluntly: "The only conceivable purpose … is to frighten people away from expressing themselves, to chill free and open debate … to strangle criticism of Mr. Obama, to suppress ads about his support of higher taxes, and to choke out criticism on television, radio, the Internet, blogs, e-mail and daily conversation about the election."

It was and is an amazing story, really. Take it from someone who tracks amazing stories for a living. This one took my breath away. I implore you to watch the local television news report that first brought this story to my attention.

This, my friends, is the way fascism works. This is the way it creeps into our lives. Acceptance of this kind of police-state tactic leaves us but an election or crisis away from descent into the netherworld of political barbarism. The brown shirts are at the door, once again.