Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

During the election, Speaker Pelosi had railed against Republicans as “domestic enemies” and “enemies of the state.” Now, Pelosi can be seen addressing soldiers outside the U.S. Capitol.

Fascist theater is now as common an occupation for the D.C. elite as upscale cocktail bars.

Pelosi’s fascist state and its crackdown on enemies is here with a militarized occupation of D.C. by 25,000 troops whose politics had to be cleared by the political commissars at the FBI, a ban on protests, and political opponents being silenced, fired, and banned by corporate monopolies.

Scenes that Americans would have once associated with banana republics and fascist dictatorships are now playing out daily as media propaganda broadcasts warn of a grave threat that requires a military occupation of Washington D.C. and the total repression of the opposition.

The wave of censorship that began with Facebook and Twitter banning President Trump has escalated to a takedown of Parler, a conservative alternative, to media campaigns urging crackdowns on a variety of alternative apps and services like Signal, Telegram, MeWe, and Zello, and a push by CNN to have AT&T and Comcast ban conservative cable networks.

There’s even an FCC crackdown on conservatives using ham radios to communicate.

Proposals are percolating through the media and its national security commentariat to transform the FBI from a law enforcement agency to a “domestic spy agency” monitoring Americans.

Last year, Hillary Clinton was warning that fascism was coming to America.

“The idea that it can’t happen here is just old fashioned,” Hillary had insisted while falsely claiming that the 2016 election had been stolen from her. Now her party is rolling out actual fascism while criminalizing any questions and concerns about the 2020 election.

It is happening here.

Hillary’s latest op-ed in the Washington Post, a paper owned by the richest man in the world whose company deplatformed Parler, calls for expelling Republican legislators, passing “new criminal laws”, and government oversight of social media platforms. This is fascism.

All House Democrats voted for a resolution calling for an unconstitutional 25th Amendment coup and when that failed for an impeachment that falsely blames President Trump for the violence because, even though he urged peaceful protests, his speech contained the word, “fight”.

Democrats warn that questioning their election wins is “incendiary”, “incitement”, “shouting fire in a crowded theater”, and “not protected speech”.

The basic norms of political protest and legislative opposition are rapidly being criminalized.

Many Democrats have endorsed an illegal 14th Amendment push to expel Republican Senate members, including Senator Ted Cruz, for merely questioning the election.

Expelling political opponents for questioning your abuses is the behavior of fascists.

Attorney General Karl Racine in D.C., who cheered the Black Lives Matter race rioters, is investigating conservative rally speakers for incitement for questioning the election results.

The only places where questioning election results is illegal is in dictatorships.

We now live in a country with politically vetted soldiers in the streets, political propaganda, and a climate of political terror against the people that Speaker Pelosi called “enemies of the state”.

The same Democrat machine that supported a year of Black Lives Matter riots that killed 8 people, wounded over 700 law enforcement officers, and caused over $2 billion in damage, which included violent attacks on the White House and on federal buildings, exploited a single day of violence on Capitol Hill to declare a national emergency and claim an “insurrection”.

When President Trump and Senator Tom Cotton proposed using the Insurrection Act to stop the year of Black Lives Matter violence, Democrats had accused them of fascism.

“This is Fascism,” The New Republic blared then. Now that fascism has actually arrived, it’s cheering the military occupation and the Democrat purge of the “enemies of the state”.

Exploiting a moment of crisis, real or feigned, to unroll a system of domestic repression from Stalin’s exploitation of Kirov’s murder to launch the Great Purge, to the Reichstag fire being used by the Nazis to eliminate the political opposition, is how totalitarian regimes are born.

A totalitarian fascist regime is being birthed again by the Democrats in Washington D.C.

This is not the first time that Democrats have exploited violence to criminalize and delegitimize the political opposition. After the Kennedy assassination by a socialist traitor who had defected to the USSR, Democrats blamed a climate of “right-wing hate” in Dallas. The false claim of a right-wing conspiracy was invented by the KGB and fed to the Washington Post by Khrushchev.

Democrats and the media spent two generations convincing Americans that “right-wing hate” had killed Kennedy and reviving that smear to attack every new conservative movement.

The narrative of “right-wing extremism” began before the Kennedy assassination in the same way that it always does as a pretext for suppressing political opposition to a new Democrat administration. Kennedy’s death helped solidify what would become a well-worn template.

The Clinton administration built its domestic program around fighting “right-wing extremism”. Democrats and the media focused on “anti-government extremists” while ignoring the growing threat of Islamic terrorism from Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda that would lead to 9/11.

While Biden cracks down on the conservative political opposition, history is likely to repeat itself with the rise of Islamic terrorists and a growing new threat to America.

But cracking down on conservative populism was key to Clinton’s agenda while 9/11 wasn’t.

When Obama came into office, Bill Clinton revived the smear that the Oklahoma City bombing had been caused by “right-wing, radio talk-show hosts” and that history was repeating itself. The Obama administration jettisoned the fight against Islamic terrorism and instead focused on fighting conservative populism while ISIS built a terror empire and beheaded Americans.

When the Obama administration didn’t have enough material from genuine extremists, Democrats and the media falsely blamed a shooting by a mentally ill man that killed a Republican judge and wounded former Rep. Gabby Giffords on Sarah Palin and the GOP.

No amount of time or contradictory events has managed to part Democrats from this lie.

And so the New York Times responded to the violence on Capitol Hill by rolling out an op-ed connecting the Giffords shooting with the events there. Other media outlets linked it to the Kennedy assassination and other equally discredited narratives about “right-wing hate”.

The Biden regime is following the familiar pattern of suppressing a conservative populist movement rising against its radical agenda by criminalizing it as a dangerous threat. But no previous Democrat suppression campaign, not even after the murder of a president, ever involved the scope, ruthlessness, and brutality of the one we are witnessing right now.

In the generations and decades since, the Left has gained a great deal of control over some of the biggest companies in America. Previous Democrat administrations had repressed their political opponents by abusing the IRS, the FCC, and the FBI. These forms of political repression were ugly, but fell far short of fascism. But the new partnership between the government and the monopolies has spawned a crackdown more closely resembling fascism.

The integration of governmental, cultural, and economic power within a single agenda while using it to conduct a full-spectrum campaign of criminalization, deplatforming, and banning against the political opposition has created an all-encompassing totalitarian fascist machine.

Fascism is rooted in the ancient symbol of the ‘Fasces’: the bundle of bound rods that have come to embody the centralization of power. And power has never been as centralized in America as it is today with political, cultural, and economic power in a handful of hands.

But that’s just the beginning.

The Democrats don’t want unity or healing. What they want is to bring about a one-party state just as they have in California where massive election fraud, ballot harvesting, ghost districts of illegal aliens, and the concentration of economic power in Big Tech gave Senator Kamala Harris a national political career when she won her Senate seat by running against another Democrat.

D.C. isn’t under military guard to protect our government, but a partisan political agenda.

The Democrats didn’t want troops in D.C. when their own were rioting during President Trump’s inauguration or violently attacking the White House. They don’t need 25,000 troops to stop a few hundred protesters. They need them as a show of force to suppress political opposition.

Biden and the Democrats are using a military deployment for a show of political force, using a manufactured crisis to rally support behind their radical agenda, while suppressing dissent.

That agenda is deeply unpopular among Americans. It entails eliminating election safeguards against voter fraud, opening the borders to illegal aliens, passing illegal alien amnesty, transforming D.C. and Puerto Rico into states, and packing the Supreme Court to prevent the judiciary from stopping its abuses. All of this is meant to create a one-party state.

The Democrats are marshalling all their political, economic, and cultural forces to distract attention from their agenda and to suppress the rising opposition to its plot against America.

That’s why anyone listening to 15 seconds of CNN would imagine that we are at war when the only war is the one that the Democrats and their media allies have declared on Americans.

America is not a banana republic. There is no place for military theater, lists of enemies, or declaring political opponents to be enemies of the state. The Democrats have already embraced fascism before even formally taking power. Fascists always claim to be seizing power in reaction to an emergency. The manufactured emergency is here. The power grab comes next.