This horrifying right-wing demand sent a chilling message to us all

It probably shouldn’t surprise us. After all, intolerance and hate have always been the fuel that drives and sustains right-wing movements around the world and throughout history.

Now the hosts of one of the largest-circulation “conservative” podcasts in the country are calling for a Muslim commentator to be stripped of his citizenship and deported from America.

His sin? He called for the next president to take down the Hitler-style massive banners on the Justice and Labor Department buildings that feature Donald Trump’s face, and the new one on the Education Department with Charlie Kirk’s face. And, of course, he’s a brown-skinned Muslim. As Raw Story is reporting:

“Yeah, he’s just a repulsive creature,” said one of the guys filling in for the late hard-right crusader. “We gave him citizenship for some stupid reason, and he rewards us by dumping on an American icon and an American hero. Yeah, you know what? I’ll give my primary support to whoever says, we’re going to try to find a way to strip this person’s citizenship and send him back to some dump.”

“Yeah, we should, actually, we should,” his buddy agreed. “He’s a foreigner that, to Blake’s point, for some reason, in our stupid immigration system, he was allowed in. Then he’s allowed to come in here and smear the memory of Charlie Kirk, the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”

“And listen, those are the freedoms that have been bestowed upon him by a superior country and culture than his own,” he added. “And yeah, whatever, he’s British or whatever his, you know. But he’s a Muslim.”

“And so, yeah, we have a superior culture than Mehdi Hasan’s, and yet he’s come in here, and he’s been bestowed with the same freedoms that American citizens have long enjoyed.”

Mehdi Hasan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’d absolutely destroy these two snowflakes in a debate. Which is why, of course, they’re not debating him but simply trash-talking him.

This neofascist call to use the power of government to punish a person for their speech is about as un-American as it gets. And it’s also right in line with the reactionary conservative impulse that goes back more than two centuries.

In the Adams/Jefferson election contest of 1800, as Dan Sisson and I point out in our book The American Revolution of 1800: How Jefferson Rescued Democracy from Tyranny and Faction and What This Means Today, partisan newspapers were absolutely relentless in their personal attacks against Thomas Jefferson.

John Adams fared better because, during the previous two years of his presidency, our second president had shut down around 30 anti-Federalist/anti-Adams newspapers and thrown their publishers, editors, and writers in prison for speaking ill of him. One died in jail, another fled the country, and others were financially destroyed. Adams even jailed the town drunk in Newark, New Jersey, for a comment he made to the bartender, making Luther Baldwin one of the most famous alcoholics in American history.

Then-Vice President Jefferson responded to a friend who asked, during Adams’ initial crackdown, how he felt about it all and he responded with a pithy expression of what has been, for most of America’s history, the true American credo:

“I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.

“The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.
“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

When I was 16 years old, I published a little anti-war newspaper called The Jurist that a friend of mine and I distributed in our high school. My father — a fervent Republican activist — printed it on his mimeo machine, even though he totally disagreed with pretty much everything I wrote about the Vietnam War. In one issue I went too far, attacking the school’s principal for “suppressing our free speech”; he kicked me out of school.

It turned out well for me as I’d been on an advanced-track since Sputnik went up when I was in second grade, so I transitioned straight to community college that year, and my Republican father defended me all the way. As he would have defended anybody whose opinions differed from his.

Barry Goldwater would have agreed with my father (we went door-to-door for him in 1964 when I was 13), as would have most Republicans of that era. William F. Buckley welcomed lefties on his Firing Line show that Dad and I watched together every weekend.

But don’t try to tell today’s Republicans about pluralistic democracy or the importance of dissent in a free society. There’s nothing conservative about these right-wingers who embrace hate, violence, and the use of government force to shut up those with whom they disagree; that’s pure neofascist reactionaryism.

They and their Epstein-class billionaire backers will apparently be much happier if Trump can succeed in flipping America into a Putin-style autocracy and use the force of government to crush all the remaining anti-Trump voices.

• Thom Hartmann is a New York Times best-selling author and SiriusXM talk show host. His Substack can be found here.