Thoughts in a Haystack

Bryan Fischer waxes lunatic over the shooting spree by a racist neo-Nazi in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin:

You know what the Nazi Party stands for? It's the National Socialist Party. What about the word "socialist" do you not understand? They were the National Socialist Party - that is a left-wing political philosophy. And you think even here in the United States, who was the part of racism? It was the left, it was liberals who were the part of racism. It was Democrats that supported and defended the institution of slavery. It was Democrats that resisted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. It was Democrats that instituted Jim Crow laws. It was Democrats that created the Ku Klux Klan. It was Democrats that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-1960s.

So much crazy in so few words!

First of all, argumentum ad label? Because the Nazi Party called itself "socialist," therefore they were liberals? Has Fischer ever heard of "fascism"?

FASCISM

often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

Now, I know that wingnuts like Fischer expect the UN black helicopters to fly any day now and view any action by government as autocratic but social regimentation? Just who is it that wants to put the LGBT community into concentration camps? And who is it that exalts the nation above almost everything? Besides, if the Nazis were liberals, why did they hate the communists so much?

Then notice the shift in language from "liberals" to "Democrats." It is quite true that the Democratic Party of the 1840s through the 1860s and beyond supported slavery, instituted Jim Crow laws in the south and resisted the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The only problem is that the Democrats at the time were the party of conservatives and it was the Republicans who were the flaming liberals. Thereafter, and not for the first time in political history, two parties swapped philosophical identities.

By the time of the Civil Rights Acts, it was, for the most part, the nominally Democratic "Dixiecrats" who opposed those laws and it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who ruthlessly twisted arms to get them passed. Interestingly, the Dixiecrats soon fled the Democrats for the Republican Party, where they rest comfortably to this day, churning out the new version of Jim Crow called voter ID laws.

But, of course, for delusional, morally bankrupt morons like Fischer, "liberal" is just a code word for whatever it is he does not like and it doesn't matter to him or his followers whether it is used in a way that the rest of the world would understand the term ... as long as their ingroup can hear the dog whistle.