...As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.

One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”

Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.

Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.

Hitler and Pinochet are good!

Peter Thiel, PayPal Silicon Valley elite and Vance mentor said 'democracy and freedom' weren't compatible years ago. So fellas, authoritarian fascism it is? No Way.
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Editorial: Are Freedom & Democracy Compatible? (Is Peter Thiel Mr. Potter?), FCNP, July, 2024. - Ed.

Super rich financial backer of Trump and J.D. Vance, Paypal founder Peter Thiel, gay and married since 2017, recently wrote that he has found “freedom” and “democracy” to be incompatible, and that he prefers “freedom.”

Of course, that is based on Thiel’s notion of what this “freedom” is, and that subject cuts to the heart of the matter in terms of the state of our culture, much less politics, that has us on the brink of an authoritarian coup today. Far too many of America’s covert social engineers who create and massage our culture by introducing key ideas and social idioms on a regular basis falsely equate “freedom” with “democracy” in their efforts.

They have helped fuel the coup that is confronting us in this fall’s presidential election. Theirs is a fallacy of understanding that goes all the way back to when the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover tasked notorious right winger Ayn Rand with providing a critique of the 1946 Frank Capra movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Hoover saw it as a pro-communist, anti-American product. In that film, the Jimmy Stewart character, George Bailey, gives over his personal dreams to help others in his community, and when things look particularly bleak for him, an angel arrives from heaven to help by showing him what life would have been like if he’d never existed.

The vision includes showing him what his antagonist, the heartless banker Mr. Potter, would have caused Bedford Falls to look like if he’d had his way. (In a height of irony, Capra was a Republican who never voted for FDR). The “freedom” that Thiel desires is the freedom of Mr. Potter, to wreak havoc on humanity if that’s what he desires. The choice to do awful things or not should be his alone. But democracy demands something different. It protects people.

What is commonly called “regulations,” for example, may be better understood as “protections,” because they are ultimately designed for that purpose..Protecting people is not communism. It is civility, the kind of civility that animated America’s Founding Fathers to craft a republic and a Constitution dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal, and therefore are deserving of equal protection under the law. It is an anti-bullying concept, one which stands firm against those like the crafters of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025...
https://www.fcnp.com/2024/07/17/editorial-are-freedom-democracy-compatible/