Critics are concerned that the heritage oak may not survive the move.

No political insult gets thrown around more recklessly these days than “fascist.” The word has been gutted of meaning, reduced to a club progressives swing at President Trump and people like Stephen Miller and the late Charlie Kirk. Democrats and their media allies casually smear conservatives as extremists who follow the “fascist playbook.”Joe Biden himself dragged the rhetoric to a new low. In September 2022, standing in front of Liberty Hall in Philadelphia, he declared that “MAGA Republicans” are extremists and enemies of democracy. “They embrace anger,” Biden thundered. “They thrive on chaos. They live not in the light of truth, but in the shadow of lies.” Weeks earlier, at a fundraiser in Maryland, he even called the MAGA movement “semi-fascist.”The smear reveals less about conservatives and more about the authoritarian streak buried in the left’s own philosophy.Say what you want about Trump’s sharp elbows in politics, but he never demonized American voters as enemies of the republic. Biden did — and Democrats have repeated the smear ever since. The question is: What happens to a country when its leaders brand millions of citizens “fascists”?The goals of the MAGA movement are plain: Protect natural rights, foster prosperity, expand energy access, secure the border, reduce crime, preserve domestic peace, and pursue a foreign policy rooted in prudence. These aims hardly resemble fascism. Yet defenders of liberty now find themselves caricatured as authoritarians.To see how absurd this charge is, it helps to remember what fascism actually means.A (very) short history of fascismThe intellectual father of fascism was Giovanni Gentile, an Italian philosopher born in 1875. Following Hegel, he saw the rational state as the end point of history. He defined “true democracy” not as liberty but as the individual’s willing subordination to the state.For Gentile, public and private interests were one and the same. To serve society was to serve the state. His student, Benito Mussolini, turned this philosophy into doctrine: “All is in the state, and nothing human exists or has value outside the state.”Contrary to today’s rhetoric, fascism did not begin on the right. Mussolini himself was a Marxist. He and Antonio Gramsci broke with Leninist revolution but retained socialism’s collectivist core. Fascism emphasized nationalism, racial particularity, and the total authority of the state — summed up in the term “blood and soil.” Its very name came from the Latin word fasces, the Roman bundle of rods bound to an axe — symbolizing unity and power.Fascism arose in the economic chaos of the 1920s and ’30s. Italy and Germany launched massive public-works programs, funded by confiscatory taxes, borrowing, and printing money. As with communism, fascism treated every citizen as an employee and tenant of the party-run state. Force and coercion were essential. Mussolini was blunt: The individual’s “anti-social right” to resist the state did not exist.In his 1928 autobiography, he wrote:The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the anti-social right of rebelling against any law of the Collectivity. The Fascist State with its corporative conception puts men and their possibilities into productive work and interprets for them the duties they have to fulfill. Fascism and the New DealThe American version of the 1930s response to the Great Depression, of course, was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today it’s remembered as democracy’s answer to authoritarianism. But at the time, many noted striking similarities between Roosevelt’s programs and those of Mussolini and Hitler.John T. Flynn, a leading conservative writer, warned in “As We Go Marching” (1944) that the New Deal looked like a “good fascism” — regulation and planning at home, military adventures abroad, and growing state power. Others saw the same trend: massive public-works projects, charismatic leadership, centralized propaganda, and the creation of a “voluntary compulsion” that blurred the line between civic duty and government coercion.Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s remarkable 2006 book, “Three New Deals,” compares the era’s regimes. He did not equate Roosevelt with Mussolini or Hitler, but he highlighted the parallels: grand projects like the TVA, monumental architecture, direct appeals from the “leader” to the people, and the constant use of war imagery. Roosevelt even warned that those who resisted his programs were “enemies” of recovery.The difference, of course, was that America retained constitutional checks that Europe discarded. Yet the centralizing impulse — and the temptation to vest extraordinary authority in a leader — was real.Progressive rootsThe resemblance should not surprise us. European fascism and the New Deal both grew from the same philosophical soil. The American founding drew on John Locke and natural law. “The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one,” Locke wrote. “And reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind.” The Declaration of Independence, in turn, proclaimed that rights are endowed by the Creator and cannot be erased by government.European thought took another path, from Machiavelli to Hegel, exalting the state as the source of order and authority. By the late 19th century, American Progressives imported this vision. Woodrow Wilson and other intellectuals trained in German universities rejected the founders’ natural-rights philosophy and embraced statism.RELATED: The next generation of Marxists is marching through the institutions Photo by Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News via Getty ImagesProgressives, like their European cousins, placed the state at the center of political life. They taught that rights flow not from God but from government — positive, material entitlements dispensed by bureaucrats. Over the past century, Democrats from Wilson and FDR to Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama have built a regime that subordinates every aspect of American life to the federal leviathan.The real ironyGiven this history, 21st-century progressives should think twice before flinging “fascism” as a slur. Their own intellectual lineage shares far more with Mussolini and Gentile than anything found in the MAGA movement.Trump supporters want liberty secured, prosperity restored, and sovereignty defended. Progressives want the state elevated above all. The smear reveals less about conservatives and more about the authoritarian streak buried in the left’s own philosophy.

Conservatives have long noticed a disturbing pattern: Hispanic illegal aliens appear again and again in drunk-driving cases. Recent news searches bring up multiple examples, some involving the deaths of children.This summer’s tragedy in Wisconsin made the problem impossible to ignore — yet the corporate left-wing press tried to do just that. Two high school sweethearts, Hallie Helgeson and Brady Heiling, died when a drunk driver going the wrong way slammed into their car. Just weeks earlier they had gone to prom together.Americans deserve more than platitudes and silence. They deserve honesty about the cultural, biological, and policy factors behind drunk driving.The driver was Noelia Saray Martinez-Avila, a Honduran illegal alien who had racked up multiple drunk-driving charges. She lived in a sanctuary jurisdiction that shielded her from deportation. Only under the Trump administration’s renewed immigration enforcement did local authorities finally hand her over to ICE.A cultural problem that fuels tragedyThe Wisconsin case was heartbreaking, but it was not unique. In 2007, the Raleigh News & Observer published a rare report on the problem. A Mexican man admitted he thought he “drove better after a few beers” and that drunk driving was normal in Mexico. At the time, alcohol-related crashes caused by Hispanic drivers in North Carolina were three times higher than for non-Hispanics.The national data confirms the trend. Hispanic drunk-driving rates are roughly double those of whites. Alcohol-use disorder is three times as common. More than a third of Hispanic alcohol-dependent users relapse, compared with 23% of whites.Binge-drinking drives much of the danger. Hispanics are more likely than whites to consume large amounts of alcohol in one sitting. Forty-two percent of Hispanic drinkers admit to three or more drinks per day, compared to 30% of whites.The numbers don’t lieMexicans, who make up half of the illegal alien population, show the highest risk. Mexican-Americans are three times more likely than whites to develop alcohol-use disorder. FBI crime data reported last year shows that Hispanics, 19% of the U.S. population, account for 30% of drunk-driving arrests and 44% of public drunkenness arrests.In California, where Hispanics made up 37% of the population at the time, they represented 44% of DUI charges in 2012 (the latest I could find). In North Carolina, Hispanics were just 8% of the population but accounted for 18% of 75,000 DUI arrests in 2007.New Mexico illustrates the deadly stakes. With a population that is half Hispanic, the state suffers nearly three times the national alcohol-related death rate. Five people die every day from alcohol. Before reforms in the 2000s, New Mexico’s DUI crash rate stood 70% higher than the national average.The pattern reflects Mexico itself. In the United States, drunk drivers cause 31% of traffic deaths. In Mexico, the figure is over 70%. About 24,000 Mexicans die annually in alcohol-linked crashes — more than twice the U.S. toll despite the population difference. Until recently, most Mexican states had no legal blood-alcohol limits, and licensing often required little more than paying a fee.Native populations face even steeper risks. In McKinley County, New Mexico, where the population is 80% Native American, the alcohol-related death rate is three times higher than the state average and ten times the national average.Research points to genetic factors. Enzymes that mediate alcohol’s effects vary by ethnic group. Indigenous populations, exposed to alcohol only in the last 300 years, show far higher vulnerability. With Mexicans being heavily Mestizo — roughly 20% indigenous and 60% mixed indigenous (Mestizo) — the biological risk compounds the cultural one.The media silenceGiven decades of national campaigns against drunk driving, one might expect attention to this ethnic dimension. Instead, the media downplay or ignore it. An America First lobbying group once tried to enlist Mothers Against Drunk Driving to raise awareness, but the effort went nowhere.RELATED: ‘Imminent hazard’: Trump administration shuts licensing loophole after illegal alien trucker allegedly causes fatal crash c_sorvillo via iStock/Getty ImagesAcademics sometimes excuse the problem by claiming Hispanic immigrants drink out of depression or isolation. Yet the biggest consumers are Puerto Ricans, not Mexicans. Cuban-Americans drink the least. Mexican women report the lowest rates of all, meaning the averages are driven almost entirely by men.And claims of “racial profiling” ring hollow. Most offenders are caught at night, their identities confirmed by arrest records, not stereotypes.Why it mattersDemocrats dismiss these realities for the same reason they ignore illegal aliens’ broader lawbreaking: victimhood politics. They portray Hispanics as downtrodden and conservatives as cruel.But the grief of families like the Helgesons and Heilings is not a talking point. It is permanent loss. It is trauma that echoes for generations.Americans deserve more than platitudes and silence. They deserve honesty about the cultural, biological, and policy factors behind drunk driving. They deserve leaders who will enforce immigration law, reject sanctuary loopholes, and tell the truth about the risks that put their families in danger.

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