The federal government is arresting the president’s critics, persecuting his rivals, raiding the private homes of harmless, unarmed citizens who oppose the president’s policies, and trying to imprison anyone who challenges his dubious election. This after our Leader went on television and called anyone who doesn’t support him a “semi-fascist” who “threatens democracy” in America.

You’ve heard about Peter Navarro slapped in leg irons, Steve Bannon being perp-walked, Mike Lindell getting ambushed … even as Democrats who run down Republican teenagers get sent home on bail. You know about the FBI targeting dissident parents who go to school board meetings.

Pro-Lifers Get the Randy Weaver Treatment

Here’s the latest step in America morphing into a tinpot dictatorship: A vocal pro-life American and Catholic father of seven, Mark Houck, getting his home attacked by an army of heavily armed FBI agents in body armor. Lifesitenews (a crucial, heavily cancelled news source you should be following) reports:

[T]he SWAT team of 25 to 30 FBI agents swarmed their property with around 15 vehicles at 7:05 a.m. this morning. Having quickly surrounded the house with rifles in firing position, “they started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it.”

Before opening the door, [Mrs. Houck] explained, her husband tried to calm them, saying, “‘Please, I’m going to open the door, but, please, my children are in the home. I have seven babies in the house.’ But they just kept pounding and screaming,” she said.

When he opened the door, “they had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” Ryan-Marie described.

When they came in, they ordered the kids to stay upstairs. “Our staircase is open, so [the kids] were all at the top of the stairs which faces the front door, and I was on the stairs as well, coming down.”

“The kids were all just screaming. It was all just very scary and traumatic,” she explained.

After asking them why they were at the house, the agents said they were there to arrest Mark. When Ryan-Marie asked for their warrant, “they said that they were going to take him whether they had a warrant or not.”

A Sin Against Moloch

What had Mark Houck done to merit the Randy Weaver treatment? Had he tried to assassinate a Supreme Court Justice? Had he intentionally mowed down dozens of citizens of another race at a holiday parade? Or firebombed a police car or federal courthouse? No, those are peccadillos in modern-day America, the kind of thing that people concerned about social justice sometimes get carried away and do … but the government won’t prosecute it (nor our Stasi media report on it) with the gravity and relentlessness of genuinely serious crimes. Crimes like the one Mr. Houck is accused of committing. Again, from Lifesitenews:

The warrant charged Mark with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, due to a claimed “ATTACK OF A PATIENT ESCORT.”

Ryan-Marie stated this charge comes from an incident that had already been thrown out of the District Court in Philadelphia but was somehow picked up by Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice.

On several occasions when Mark went to sidewalk counsel last year, he took his eldest son, who was only 12 at the time, she explained. For “weeks and weeks,” a “pro-abortion protester” would speak to the boy saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” such as “you’re dad’s a f**,” and other statements that were too vulgar for her to convey.

Repeatedly, Mark would tell this pro-abortion man that he did not have permission to speak to his son and please refrain from doing so. And “he kept doing it and kind of came into [the son’s] personal space” obscenely ridiculing his father. At this point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back.”

“He didn’t have any injuries or anything, but he tried to sue Mark,” and the case was thrown out of court in the early summer.

Since the Biden administration has taken power in January 2021, Garland’s Department of Justice and the FBI have committed dozens of SWAT team raids that have been characterized as a political “weaponization” of the federal agencies against pro-lifers, Trump supporters, conservative Christians, and medical freedom advocates.

…

After the FBI’s unprecedented August 8 raid on President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called it “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents.”

Soon after Joe Biden’s September 1 speech where he declared war on conservative Christians, dozens of Trump allies had their homes raided by the FBI, which Steve Bannon referred to as “a Gestapo tactic,” and said it was “all about intimidation.”

What Is Truth?

The federal government endangering the lives of an entire Christian family to avenge a shoving complaint made by an abortion enthusiast … that’s what I mean by “fascist in the negative sense.”

Words are important. How important? “In the beginning was the Word,” and “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” The Bible uses “word” to indicate order, meaning, and truth.

Our use of words makes reasoning itself possible, so you might say that real, meaningful words are what mark us off from the animals. Not empty, meaningless sounds that just sound like words, such as when your parrot (as trained by your tweens) says “Let’s Go, Brandon!”

Or when Brandon himself, wheeled out in front of a lectern, pronounces the syllables (are they just spelled out for him phonetically, do you think?): “Owr bor-dur iz suc-yur.” Or he goes off script and promises Americans “badakathcare,” or “trunalimanumapurzure.”

So I will always endeavor, as I have here in my title, to use words very carefully — to avoid misleading people, or giving needless offense.

Our God Is a Well-Above Average God

“Fascist” is a word of some importance. It points to a powerful historical movement that launched multiple vicious wars and historic genocides. There is no other word that captures specific political and economic arrangements that really existed for millions of people, and the social movements that brought such governments to power. So we really do need the word, and need for it retain that particular meaning, which points to staggering evil. 

However, the word has been cheapened, hollowed out, twisted, debased like a Weimar Reichsmark. It’s used to speak of everything and nothing, employed like a dog whistle to evoke automatic reactions, deployed like Pavlov’s bell to induce some obedient mammal to obey its conditioning.

This happens with other words. There was a time when you could say, with Nehemiah, that Our God is “an awesome God,” and not sound like we’re channeling Moon Unit Zappa’s “Valley Girl” impression. No more, alas, no more. “Awesome” no longer means “worthy of awe,” even bordering on “awful.” Now it means, at best, “well above average.” Our God is a well-above average God doesn’t convey what we really mean.

How to Get Cancelled

Likewise, I think it’s needful here to point out that when I say “fascist” I don’t mean it in any of the positive senses which the word has sadly begun to acquire, because you might get called a “fascist,” or a “hater,” or worst of all a “Christian Nationalist” for doing any one of the following worthy things:

• Telling a sullen teenager to finally change his underwear.
• Informing a public school teacher he can’t wear enormous rubber fetish breasts to work.
• Opposing Marxist Critical Race Theory, or degenerate Queer Theory, being taught to vulnerable children.
• Trying to stop profit-hungry transgender clinics from performing ghoulish operations that castrate and mutilate children.
• Raising evidence-based questions about dubious, politicized voting practices imposed in the name of COVID and financed by leftist billionaires.
• Questioning the ethics and science behind a rushed DNA therapy developed using organs from aborted babies, then forced onto billions of people without their informed consent, in violation of the post-Mengele “Nuremburg principles.”
• Offering alternatives to women who feel pressured into abortions.

You might be labeled as a fascist, or banned permanently from Twitter (as I was last Friday) for “hateful conduct” for any of that.

Or most especially for violating what seems to be the central taboo of our Priests of Baal and their new religion: Raising a hand or your voice against letting perverts groom little kids. That is the sin against the Spirit of the Age, whose name is Legion.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”