You Might Be A Fascist If…

Are you a fascist? Many people are fascists and they don’t even realize it. And sometimes, they know it all too well, but hide and deny it. Most of the time though, it’s obvious who the fascists are. For instance, you might be a fascist if…

1. You believe in rule by the few, in which a few powerful wealthy people control how the country is governed and decide what the population as a whole can or cannot do, often making rules that infringe upon the personal liberties of others just because you believe a certain way.

2. You are obsessed with national power and pride and believe your country doesn’t have to follow the rules and shouldn’t ever apologize for doing things that are wrong. You think your nation can do whatever it wants without criticism or consequence.

3. You consider homosexuality, birth control, contraception, prostitution, and pornography deviant sexual behavior and seek to outlaw all.

4. You disrespect women and think their place is in the home. You believe women are weak and cannot do things that men do. You make every effort to make sure you get to control women’s bodies and make reproductive decisions for them. You believe that sexual harassment or assault is no big deal and that the only thing women are good for is cooking meals and having babies.

5. You are obsessed with national security and war. You feed this obsession by spending trillions of dollars building up an over-sized military force and are willing to sacrifice domestic programs your people count on to keep your military huge. You start unnecessary and costly wars and you are paranoid of other nations.

6. You are driven to indoctrinate others into your way of thinking. So much so, that you try to re-write history, change the way school children are taught and you brainwash the ignorant.

7. You fear and demonize intelligent people who have a higher education because they are the ones who can thwart your effort to brainwash people. You then attempt to prevent others from achieving a higher education because you want the people as ignorant as possible so you can convince them that your way is the right way.

8. You have a deep hatred and fear of communists and you instill your followers with hatred and fear of others by accusing your political opponents of being communists. Any person or policy you don’t like is branded as communism so you can convince your supporters to oppose it by playing on the fears you instilled in them.

9. You use the media as a political propaganda machine to target a specific audience and to push your agenda on others. You make sure your media machine demonizes your opponents and takes your side on nearly every issue. Your media machine disregards facts in favor of flagrant rhetoric and misinformation. You use your propaganda machine to generate fear and hate towards others, especially those you disagree with.

10. You strongly align yourself with corporations and you support corporate money and influence in government. You despise government regulations that keep corporations honest because you believe everything should be controlled by the free market and that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they please.

11. You are obsessed with your perverted brand of Christianity. You seek to declare a Christian State and to impose religious laws on all the people across the country and the world. You believe other religions are inferior and that those who practice them should be converted, destroyed, or have their lives turned into a living hell.

12. You believe your race is superior and seek to disenfranchise or humiliate other races. You believe in legalized discrimination and fantasize about a return to times when the races were separate or when those of color were enslaved. You use code words in an attempt to hide your racism and you make laws that weaken the influence of those of color. Immigration and voting laws in particular.

13. You absolutely despise unions. To you and those like you, labor unions represent the empowerment of workers. Since you believe corporations can do whatever they want, you see organized labor as a threat because they fight for higher wages, health care, safety regulations, less hours, vacations, sick days, and holidays off. This obviously threatens the amount of money corporations can give to you and your cause so you brand unions as proponents of socialism and make laws that severely weaken them so that corporations can have a cheap, powerless labor force they can abuse.

14. You are obsessed with crime and a major supporter of punishing those who commit crimes. So much so, that you don’t care about the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You are proud of executing people and aren’t bothered if an innocent person is killed. You seek to make harsher laws, especially laws that target specific groups of people such as immigrants, women, and people of color. You even defend a militarized police force that uses heavy-handed tactics. You also try to insert religion-based laws into the civil law so you can persecute people who haven’t adopted your strict moral code. You also oppose Miranda rights and using humane interrogation tactics and you seek to undermine the independent judicial system.

15. You believe every election should go your way and to reach that goal, you push voting laws that disenfranchise those who traditionally vote for opponents such as people of color, the elderly, college students, and the poor. You even stoop to fixing elections in some cases, especially through gerrymandering to guarantee you’ll win every time. And you complain when your opponents challenge the vote counts.

16. You believe in rewarding your friends with positions when you gain power and you reward those who support you with government contracts and money, especially corporations. You also do your best to aid your supporters in any way you can, such as repealing undesirable pieces of legislation and regulations.

17. You create scapegoats to blame when problems arise. Whether it’s communists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, immigrants, or non-Christians, one thing is for certain. You and your propaganda tool will blame each and every one of those groups for bad things that happen even if you were the cause of the problems in the first place.

18. You take advantage of a national disaster such as an economic collapse or an attack to demonize your opponents and push your agenda, especially agendas that include huge military forces and less regulations for corporations. You use these events to strike fear into the population in an attempt to scare people into voting for you and your cause.

19. You believe in survival of the fittest, an every man for himself social mentality that causes you to believe that poor people and sick people are weak and must be punished. You think rich people are strong because they are wealthy and that they should rule us, which also ties into rule by a few. You also believe your race is superior to all others and you work diligently to keep it that way.

20. You hate liberal democracy and dream of a single party state where you have perpetual control and your opponents can no longer stand against your agenda.

And there you have it. 20 aspects of being a fascist that you may or may not have known about. And perhaps you even recognize most of these traits in a particular major political party in America today.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

A version of this article previously appeared on Addicting Info.