Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It’s cloud’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all
–Joni Mitchell

The media firestorm condemning President Donald J. Trump is not because of what the President said last Saturday denouncing the political violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, but because Trump refused to condemn only one side’s violence.

Trump is a few years older than I am and I remember anti-Vietnam War protests infiltrated by communists carrying North Vietnamese flags. Communists also tried to take over Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights marches.

A protest against removing a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee doesn’t make all those protesters Nazis, KKK, or White Supremacists any more than communists turned anti-war protests or civil-rights marches into communist rallies

I’m a libertarian who is neither left nor right. Attempts to align libertarians with either the right or the left have repeatedly proved to be disastrous.

You go to the left and find politically-correct socialists. You go to the right and find pietistic social conservatives. You go as far as you can to the left and you find communist dictatorships. You go as far as you can to the right and you find fascist dictatorships.

Nazis don’t exist on any political spectrum. Adolf Hitler’s surreal movement might as well be the extraterrestrial Kanamit people-eaters from the classic Rod Serling-Damon Knight episode of The Twilight Zone, “To Serve Man.”

There are no neo-Nazis, just demented political cosplayers who think putting on Nazi wardrobe and performing Nazi salutes will bring them power. They might as well jump straight to worshipping H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu, which would at least have the virtue of being performance art.

The twentieth century saw rival totalitarian movements repeatedly at war. Nazis murdered many millions; Communists murdered many more millions.

In America (excluding Hollywood) it was generally understood that Nazis and Communists were equally diabolical; yet socialism and fascism managed to gain political footholds in domestic policies. Those footholds have gotten worse in the post 9/11 21st Century as an Espionage-Post-Industrial Complex that leverages all major education, communication, and entertainment media, and have turned them into engines of mass brainwashing.

Donald J. Trump is not a libertarian, nor is he an ideologue of any sort. He’s not an alien invader like Hitler; but neither does Trump exist on any conventional political spectrum. Donald Trump is not a great demented planner like Lenin, Mao, or Hitler; he’s a billionaire capitalist who learned how dysfunctional government is from direct experience and decided to make America less self-destructive. His slogan overreaches: Donald Trump wants to Make America Work Again.

But one thing Donald Trump is good at is recognizing how the Major Media is operated as a cabal that echos throughout thousands of channels only a narrow spectrum of permitted opinion, with socialism at its left boundary and fascism at its right boundary — variants only of totalitarian social control.

How the illusion of marketplace competition has constructed a propaganda engine worthy of any totalitarian regime — suppressing any actual media organs regularly voicing radical anti-control dissent — is beyond the scope of this article. (When it’s written it won’t be by me but by Brad Linaweaver.)

When across what is portrayed as a supposed political spectrum the President is universally criticized for being evenhanded in his condemnation of all evil thugs — as if an open-eyed American view of anti-individualist thugs is a crime — we have all the proof anyone needs that once again — like the Hitler-Stalin Pact 68 years ago — socialists collude with fascists in unified opposition to individual rights and liberties.

Soviet Communist Dictator Stalin and Nazi German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop shaking hands after the signing of the pact on August 23, 1939

Let me be clear. I do not consider Robert E. Lee, general for a confederacy that maintained race-based plantation slavery, to be a hero. Robert E. Lee fought for villainy.

But if people who pay their taxes want Robert E. Lee’s statue in a tax-supported park, that’s no more a crime than favoring a statue of Union war-criminal Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

General Sherman Memorial, Washington DC

The thing about Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists is that neither is a movement that has political reality in 21st Century America.

Real totalitarians, by a magician’s trick divided into right and left, do have political reality; and they control the media owning the stage and targeting the mirrors.

Socialism is every bit as evil as fascism; the words themselves — “socialism” and “fascism” — may make a distinction without any real difference.

Those who denounce insufficient condemnation for dead evils — Nazis, KKK, White Supremacy — yet turn a blind eye to the living horrors of socialism as we see today in North Korea, Venezuela, and on American college campuses — are the enemies of liberty and I will not rest until they are so recognized.

NOTE: Per my previous article I’m still behind on current utility bills. Contributions using the “Like It — Reward It” link on this page, that keep the lights on while my agent seeks a sale of one of my screenplays or books, is greatly appreciated. — Neil [NOTE to the NOTE: instead of that “Like It—Reward It” link on the original—not reproduced here, instead click on the “Was that worth reading? Then why not: Pay J. Neil Schulman” link down after this article. Don’t just sit there, do it before you forget!—Editor]