“You are destroying freedom! I would give my life to protect the free speech of a Nazi”

Well, no, you wouldn’t. Don’t even say that.

And now fascism is starting to rise in America, and make no mistake that the two prongs of fascism are emerging, a fascist would-be dictator and friends, and a two digit percentage of the populous that want it.

Part of the rise of fascism in America comes from social networking. Social networks have become the easy place to advance the rhetoric, confused the opposition, create a movement, nurture the hate, and move a society in this direction. This is now speculation. It is what is currently happening.

Facebook and Twitter and similar venues are like abandoned homes turned into crack houses. I used to live across from one. The neighbors, in coordination with the police and city officials, shut it down using a standard procedure used across the US in many cities. Every time something happens at that house, from littering to loud noise to somebody passed out on the lawn, call 911. Don’t use your own address, only give the address of the house in question. That way the 911 calls all get logged to that address. There is generally a city ordinance that says that if a house has above a certain number or rate of 911 calls, the city or county can condemn the house. The owner has some options at that point, but since the owner is probably a slum lord properly company in Boca Raton, they won’t even know about it. So, the city or county takes the house, cleans it out, and either tears it down and sells the property to a developer, or auctions it off so a developer buy it, fix it up, and sell it.

Facebook is an example of a new sort of entity we have in society, but that serves the function of older forms such as homes or public spaces. If a social network like Facebook gets too many 911 calles (“911, what’s your emergency?” “A foreign dictator and posse of oligarchs, in coordination with a pretender to the US presidency, is trying to destroy civilization?” “OK, please give us the address so we can dispatch a car…”) and the owners of that network refuse to do anything about it, perhaps the social network should be taken down.

Think about a mall’s food court. Facebook is a little like a food court, in that it is a social venue. Imagine a food court where someone was killed about twice a year, someone was raped about once every two weeks, and someone was mugged a few times a day. (Not all the same person!) The pertinent governmental body would shut that place down. When my local school district (before our recent move) became a place where the suicide rate among mainly LGBT students was extraordinarily high, the CDC came in to shut the school district down, if nothing was done. Things were done.

Crack houses, food courts, school systems. This is how we do it in our society. But because of their newness, and possibly because of their tremendous hubris, places like Facebook are so far immune from such actions.

Until now. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz is the law that says that the spread of fascist propaganda shall be illegal, in Germany, on social media sites. Fines can run up to $60 million dollars.

The government will identify hate speech, inform the network that it must be taken down, then the network has 24 hours to do so. The hate speech will be spotted by anyone who cares to look, who can then fill out a form of some kind. That starts the process.

I know a lot of you will immediately say that this can’t be done, that it should not be done, or that it won’t work because it will be gamed. I disagree. It should be done. It can be gamed, but that can be adapted to. And it is necessary.

Or, if I’m wrong about that, if the people can not be protected against this nefarious aspect of social networking sites, then social networking sites have to cease to exist. We’ll find some other way to socialize. Go to the food court. Sit on a neighbor’s front stoep. Maybe even pay attention to the people in your house. I think they’re around here somewhere ….

Correction: Apparently, the part about Gorsuch creating a “Fascism Forever Club” is a falsehood! Well, that’s what we get for using the Daily Mail. (In my defense, I originally rejected this story when sent to me because of the source, but then USA Today picked it up. Even thought USA Today was still citing the Mail, the truth is, the Mail is not always wrong, so I assumed USA Today journalists had some verification. Silly me.)

The rest is accurate, but way less interesting now.

When was a kid, I started an organization called the Nature Conservation Club. NCC for short. It had a badge, and a membership card, was free to join, and our objective was to stop civilization from paving over all the forests. The very first member was Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie promised to join too, but never got to it. Then a few of my friends joined, my family. But then it kind of petered out and civilization went ahead and paved over a lot, not yet all, but a lot of the forests. Kids do the darnedest things.

When I went to high school, I didn’t start a club, but Moe and Larry did. They started a “Hallway Monitor” club. They recruited a few people and volunteered to patrol the hallways, keeping the other kids in line. Their offer was refused by the administration. By the way, the administration of this school, a public version of a private prep school if you can imagine that, were politically and socially all over the place, but most of them were college professors and at least two of them were men with long sideburns (during Viet Nam that was a meaningful symbol) and one of them had a picture of Chairman Mao on his office wall, for real. Anyway, Moe and Larry (not exactly their real names) were rebuffed.

Then the fire alarms started ringing. Every day, there would be a fire alarm. Or two. Somebody was pulling the fire alarms. The fire department, we were told, indicated that they would have to close the school if the alarms kept going off because too many false alarms itself constitutes a danger. Next thing you know, the Hallway Monitor Club gets recruited by the administration to guard the fire alarms.

Most of them wore brown shirts, one of them wore lederhosen.

A few weeks later, many of us, me included, found our names on the wall, on the bulletin board, in a memo. “The following students will report to the principal.” It was a long list, and included all three or four of the ruffians we had in that school (there weren’t many).

So, we all dutifully reported to the principle, and were sat down one at a time and told how it was not OK to traffic marijuana in or near the school yard, so just in case you were doing that, please stop.

And, in their hubris, the Hallway Monitor Club founders could not resist letting it be known that they had supplied the list of names with the accusation. A few days later, Moe stopped coming to school and Larry showed up in a cast. That was the end of that.

Kids do the darnedest things.

Oh wait, I’ve got another story. This one is about the “Fascism Forever Club.”

This is reported in the Daily Mail, not the best source, and repeated in USA Today, not much better. But it looks real.

According to this information, Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch …

… both created and headed the “Fascism Forever Club” at Georgetown Preparatory School, which he graduated from in 1985, The Daily Mail reports. The school is a selective all-boys Jesuit prep school, and now reportedly costs day students $30,000 annually and boarding students $50,000.

“In political circles, our tireless President Gorsuch’s ‘Fascism Forever Club’ happily jerked its knees against the increasingly ‘left-wing’ tendencies of the faculty,” a Georgetown Prep high school yearbook states, according to The Daily Mail.

Kids do the darnedest things.

I’m not going to say anything about this at this time, other than to ask the following question. Why are the disqualifying things disqualifying only to Democrats and not to Republicans? Why?

Write your answer in the box below. Thank you very much.