True Anti-Authoritarianism Demands Your Absolute and Unquestioning Submission to the State Security Apparatus of the Fatherland

I’ve called the NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an “expert” on authoritarianism, an inversion blender, a narrative-producing machine with an astonishing gift for turning meaning upside-down. Your decision to drive north is ironclad proof that you intend to travel to the south! You’re spraying water on that fire to make it bigger! You gave me a sandwich because you want me to starve to death!

Currently, Ben-Ghiat’s frantic production of anti-authoritarian messaging on Twitter, the preferred platform of true intellectuals, is tightly focused on the dangerous authoritarianism of the megafascist Donald Trump, who is doing what all true authoritarians do: questioning and criticizing the government. Go stroll through Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Twitter posts. It’s like having lunch with Felix Dzerzhinsky. Only the guilty and the fascist elements resist the cleansing power of the state and its gloriously pure-hearted investigative apparatus!

A suggestion up front from the maître d'hotel: What you’re about to consume is the filet mignon of dimwitted propaganda. Chew it slowly. Savor. Let’s start with a light appetizer, a mere retweet, to tease the ironic gustation:

Archie Bunker and Meathead have become one, united by the power of the Trump. If a prosecutor charges you, the case is airtight, full stop. Government never charges innocent people with crimes. To criticize a prosecutor is to oppose the rule of law, which can only be defended by the immediate presumption of guilt. Here, let’s try it out:

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Rick Perry with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case.

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Kyle Rittenhouse with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case.

Prosecutors wouldn’t be charging Tom Robinson with crimes if they didn’t believe they had an airtight case. Atticus Finch is an authoritarian!

This is why criminal defense lawyers are all so infamously right-wing, by the way. Especially public defenders.

And then Ben-Ghiat warns that Trump is trying to undermine and delegitimize “investigative entities,” a move typical of autocrats:

Or take this one:

Again, investigative and prosecutorial bodies are presumptively correct. Authoritarians are people who criticize government. To speak of cleaning house at an investigative agency can only be autocratic delegitimization, which necessarily means that investigative bodies are invariably legitimate and correctly run. Like when the FBI sent a threatening letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. to try to pressure him into committing suicide? That’s legitimate, because they’re an investigative agency. To question the FBI is to promote autocracy, dummy.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is totally right about the other part, too: Authoritarians always attack investigative agencies. Like how Hitler was always trying to shut down the Gestapo, and Stalin loathed secret police and didn’t want to have any. If it’s one thing an authoritarian can’t stand, it’s government agencies that go around investigating citizens.

And finally:

Nothing says progressive anti-authoritarian like the sacralization of national security as a preeminent value. If government says that something has been done in the name of national security, you must accept it and support it without question. Or else you’re an authoritarian, doubting the state security apparatus. Fascists always do that.

There is, of course, a long and deeply established tradition on the American political left of criticism directed at the FBI and DOJ — and at federal law enforcement in general, and at law enforcement in general, and the “carceral state” — as hegemonic instruments. Historians and activists on the left have long viewed the FBI with political suspicion, and with reason.

Until pretty much right this instant, because Trump.