“Of course we’ll have fascism,” legendary Huey Long was reported to have said. “We’ll have it under the guise of anti-fascism.” Today, of course, we see the confirmation of Long’s prediction on America’s streets in the self-parodying Antifa movement.

At the executive level, for all the mindless chatter about President Trump as Hitler or worse, it is not he who deserves the label “fascist.” By American standards, that honor goes to President Obama and his fierce little toady, Joe Biden. To gauge the fascistic impulses of Trump and Obama respectively, Merriam-Webster offers a useful measuring stick, a definition of “fascism” untainted by the politics of the moment:

A political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

On every fascist metric, Obama beats Trump by a giant goose step. One could argue that Trump “exalts nation” more than Obama, and that is true, but not “above the individual.” For Obama, like all socialists, national socialists included, the individual was expected to subordinate his interests to those of the state.

“I think that when you spread the wealth around,” Obama told plumber Joe Wurzelbacher in a carelessly honest moment in October 2008, “it’s good for everybody.” Like England’s Henry II, who reportedly said of Thomas Becket, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest,” Obama typically let his henchmen and women do the dirty work. In this case, they did not disappoint.

Within days, the New York Times struck a flurry of shockingly low blows against “Joe the Plumber.” Arguing that the defenseless Wurzelbacher deserved “celebrity-level scrutiny” for daring to question Obama, reporter Larry Rohter revealed that Joe did not currently have a plumbing license or belong to the plumber’s union. In the lowest blow, Rohter reported that Wurzelbacher owed back taxes. He even documented the outstanding liens against him.

As to which president best fits the mold of “dictatorial leader” of a “centralized autocratic government,” there can be no serious argument. Although Trump mans the bully pulpit more forcefully than Obama did, he has aggressively decentralized the government, never more obviously than during the COVID mania.

On the “social regimentation” scale, Obama and Biden are off the charts. They have been criticizing Trump for not issuing a nationwide three-month mandate that would force all Americans to wear face masks outdoors. Said Trump in response, “Americans must have their freedoms, and I trust the American people and their governors very much.” What a sorryass fascist Trump makes.

With the media looking the other way, Obama gradually assumed dictatorial powers well beyond anything Trump has imagined. In speaking about the so-called “Dreamers” in 2011, Obama admitted, “With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed.”

A year later, with the election at stake, Obama ignored those laws. With a stroke of the pen, he overrode Congress and gave as many as a million people relief from deportation proceedings. Said constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, “In many ways, President Obama has fulfilled the dream of an imperial presidency that Richard Nixon strived for.”

It is on “the forcible suppression of opposition” metric that Obama and cronies showed their real strength. Texas Tea Party organizer Catherine Engelbrecht can vouch for that. At the outset, Engelbrecht had been told it would take four or five months for her organizations to be approved for 501(c)(3) status. Two years later, with approval still pending, two years during which she had endured twenty-three distinct audits or inquiries, Engelbrecht finally sued the IRS.

Although the harassment of Engelbrecht was extreme, the targeting was not exceptional. The IRS stalled or rejected the applicants of hundreds, if not thousands, of comparable groups.

James Rosen, then chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, would also give Obama his due on the subject of suppression. For three years beginning in 2010, the Department of Justice had used a search warrant to probe Rosen’s personal and professional communications. “Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin told the Washington Post, “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.”

Challenging the White House narrative on any subject came with risks. As Sharyl Attkisson continued to report the truth about Benghazi, some agent somewhere in the deep state launched a frighteningly invasive campaign of electronic harassment against her. An analyst hired by her then employer, CBS News, confirmed the harassment. A WikiLeaks document claimed that Obama’s all-purpose fixer John Brennan was “behind the witch hunts of investigative journalists learning information from inside the beltway sources.” Brennan was just warming up.

Then there was “Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.” Obama’s DoJ spirited the filmmaker off to prison for a year after the White House falsely blamed his film, “Innocence of Muslims,” for inciting the attack on the Benghazi consulate. Ken Timmerman, who wrote a book on the subject, called the imprisonment “disgraceful, un-American, illegal, and a clear violation of Nakoula’s constitutional rights.” He was not exaggerating.

In 2015, pro-life activists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt recorded a series of undercover videos at Planned Parenthood clinics so powerful that even Hillary Clinton found them “disturbing.” To get out of the jam, Planned Parenthood execs hired Fusion GPS to discredit the videos. They then turned to their friends in Texas and California to prosecute the pair on bogus charges.

One of those friends was Kamala Harris, then California attorney general. With an eye on his legacy, Obama leaned on Biden to pick Harris as his running mate. Daleiden thought the choice perversely apt, citing Harris’s “radical disrespect and contempt for the First Amendment and for First Amendment civil liberties.”

Those first seven Obama years, in fact, were just a warmup for him and his pals in the media and the deep state. In 2016, Brennan would step up to the plate. So would Biden, Fusion GPS, and the New York Times among others. They had a candidacy to subvert and then a presidency to sabotage. Were there a Nobel Prize for fascism Obama would have won it for ObamaGate alone, this time deservedly.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, is now widely available. To learn more, see www.cashill.com.

Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13773 / CC-BY-SA 3.0