The left’s favorite F-word

Randi Weingarten, the US teachers’ union boss, has screeched out a new book: Why Fascists Fear Teachers. That’s right. If you thought the problem in our schools was cratering test scores or chronic absenteeism, you’re misinformed. The real menace stalking America is jackbooted conservative parents goose-stepping through PTA meetings.

The left’s unhealthy obsession with the word “fascist” has become less of a warning than a tic, a nervous verbal cough. Every time a Weingarten-style progressive spots a parent questioning the school board, a voter challenging an irregular ballot, or a grief-stricken mourner at a Charlie Kirk vigil, the F-word erupts.

Before we let this tic define the debate, a little perspective: If words matter, so should history. Hayek saw it with clarity in The Road to Serfdom: While conservatives and classical liberals may be responsible for many sins, one of which they are not guilty is constructing the deadliest authoritarian regimes in human history. That honor belongs not to the “oppressive right,” but to the left.

Mao Zedong alone snuffed out more than 65 million lives. Stalin was not far behind. Add in Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Il-Sung, and a few other “People’s Republics,” and you have a ledger of death that makes anyone else’s butcher’s bill look amateurish.

This uncomfortable truth blinds the left while they hurl “fascist!” like a meringue pie across the political stage. They sneered at the “fascist” Mitt Romney while excusing Mao. They mocked well-known fascists George W. Bush and John McCain while romanticizing Fidel. Today on college campuses, where the ignorant instruct the unaware, they hiss at Donald Trump while sporting Che on a T-shirt. The left calling the right “fascist” is like Bud Light calling Guinness weak. It’s as if they’ve outsourced historical memory to TikTok.

Here is Hayek’s point, put plainly: Socialist planning, state control, and the “we’re all in this together” collectivism of Zohran “The Grocer” Mamdani cannot be enforced by polite suggestion. It requires power. Lots of it. It demands restrictions on liberty, suppression of dissent, and regulation of every corner of economic life. And once those tools are handed to the state, they are never returned to the people. 

The irony is thick. The left, which insists on saving us from fascism, is the political convention most prone to it. In theory, their goals sound noble: equality, solidarity, justice. In practice, they must build a vast machinery of coercion to achieve them. A progressive ideology that promises to make you equal must also prevent you from becoming unequal. It must turn freedom of speech into freedom from speech. If necessary, it will do so at the point of a gun, as we have too recently seen.

Yes, conservatives sometimes lose their bearings, as when US Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks of abandoning free speech to prosecute progressive “hate speech.” But at least she has principles to violate.

The right, in the classical liberal tradition of John Locke, prefers to let citizens order their own lives, speak freely, associate as they choose, and fail without dragging everyone else down. Freedom is messy, but it does not require firing squads to keep it neat.

So, while Madame Weingarten tells us “Fascists fear teachers,” perhaps the better title would have been Teachers Fear Freedom. It is freedom that makes state-run monopolies obsolete, exposes bad ideas to competition, and empowers parents to raise their own children. Liberty terrifies Weingarten, and that tells us everything.

The left shouts “fascist!” at every opponent, but their own kettle is not merely black; it is the darkest history has ever boiled. If “fascism” means authoritarianism, a record-breaking body count, mass coercion, and suppression of dissent, then socialism, as it is practiced, not just as it is preached, checks every box. Progressives should dial down this sort of rhetoric. For all their shrieking on social media, “fascism” is the mirror in which they can see their own image.