The similarities between the Obama administration and Italian fascism have been pointed out many times. Over a dozen articles about this are on this site alone (1, 2, 3, 4). It is usually said that fascism is a strain of socialism in which the means of production are beneficially owned by private persons but controlled by the government.
Both the Obama administration and Mussolini used a financial crisis to take over banks and industry. Mussolini openly assumed complete control of them, even though partial private ownership was allowed to remain. The U.S. government bailed out banks and the auto industry in 2008, before Obama was inaugurated. It did not own the banks, but the bailout created public sentiment in favor of government control of the banks and more regulation of all businesses. Obama used this sentiment to its full extent. Elizabeth Warren led the creation of the partisan Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which wielded unprecedented powers and was unaccountable to Congress. By 2016, the corporate world was already subverted and controlled by the Democrat administration. For example, all banks refused to deal with Donald Trump in 2016. The democrat-controlled media misrepresented the cause of this discrimination. Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau effectively allowed the ruling administration to strangle its opposition financially.
Citizens United v. FEC, decided by the Supreme Court in January 2010, very likely radicalized Democrats even further into total fascism. The Supreme Court confirmed that private corporations have the First Amendment right to use their money to support political candidates; Democrats concluded that they would have to control corporations to win elections.
Starting in 2010, the Obama administration viciously targeted any effective opposition, including the Tea Party movement, which was obliterated. The IRS was most notorious for targeting Tea Party organizations, but the DOJ (Eric Holder) and the FBI (Robert Mueller) also participated. What do we call regimes that destroy non-violent opposition movements?
A few months before the 2012 elections, Obama’s DOJ sued Gallup for hinting that the government had manipulated unemployment numbers. Additionally, Obama’s DOJ sued Standard & Poor’s for $5 billion for downgrading the federal debt, Treasurys. As a result, nobody challenges the false current inflation numbers, and the credit rating agencies do not dare downgrade the Treasurys below their current AA+/AAA rating.
The Obama administration also waged and eventually won the war on Fox News. It also chilled media criticism of Obama and the administration’s agenda. The DOJ and FBI (Robert Mueller and James Comey) criminally prosecuted and imprisoned filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza and lied about the initiation and predication of that investigation. (D’Souza had produced a film criticizing and mocking Obama.)
Similarly, climate scientists who opposed the administration's climate dogma were defunded and silenced. Then, the Obama administration intimidated businesses into not donating to nonprofits linked to climate dissent, essentially stifling corporate donations to almost all right-of-center think tanks.
Much of this information was not known during the Obama administration, and most of the public missed it. How could this happen? Where was the media—the self-appointed guard dog of democracy? In the beginning, the mainstream media was enamored with Obama. By the time it realized the severity of Obama’s abuses of power, it was no longer able to mount any opposition.
How did this happen? The Obama administration started by hand-picking tech corporations, who then quickly and consequently became what we now call “Big Tech.” Combined with other measures, this effectively gave the administration control over the flow of information, including the news.
As newspapers, journals, and magazines transitioned to the Internet, Google and Microsoft took authors’ copyrighted content without compensation and offered access to it through their search engines. Improvements in Google’s search engine meant exploiting other people’s work more efficiently.
The Obama administration failed to enforce copyright laws on written works, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution which reads:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]
By 2009, the news media was able to connect its financial difficulties to Google. Rupert Murdoch attempted to work out a compromise with Big Tech, but the administration waged war on him.
Instead of enforcing copyright laws, the Democrats arranged for Big Tech, specifically Google, to pay only selected outlets, such as The New York Times. This resulted in the media becoming entirely dependent on the Big Tech corporations Obama chose. The administration also signed special agreements with these Big Tech corporations and patronized them with thousands of government accounts, effectively eliminating all other competitors.
Democrats also disregarded the second part of the above clause regarding Inventors and Discoveries. The seemingly bipartisan “America Invents Act”, passed under intense lobbying by Big Tech, made most patents unenforceable retroactively. Although there was a legitimate controversy about software patents, the leading cause for this reform was that the tech companies picked by the Obama administration were young and entirely based on inventions made by others. For example, Facebook was founded in 2004, after inventions that led to the creation of the interactive web had already been made. So, for Big Tech to not pay royalties or give credit to the original inventors, the government re-distributed wealth from the pioneers of the Internet to the multi-billion dollar corporations of its choice.
Obamanet was another major strike against freedom, forcing all publishers and authors to go through Google and other internet gatekeepers.
Thus, the opposition press was muzzled and driven almost to extinction without the public noticing. The Big Tech winners, cherry-picked by the Obama administration, became the administration’s most enthusiastic supporters. In addition to its monopoly of information, Big Tech also provided Democrats troves of private data and the capacity for mass surveillance and economic marginalization of dissenters. By 2013, Twitter was suspending accounts criticizing Obamacare.
Trump’s victory in 2016 came as a shock for Democrats who thought they had a firm grip on both the corporations and the media. It was as if Mussolini decided to allow sham elections and suddenly lost them. While Obama expected to quit after his two terms, the corporations who had developed this symbiotic relationship with the ruling Democrat party needed it to remain in power. Together with young and hungry Democrat operatives, they launched the resistance.
In 2016, the Democrat government apparatus, which had destroyed the Tea Party, jailed Dinesh D’Souza, hounded dissenting voices from Fox News to the Associated Press (some articles), and had now set its sights on Donald Trump. In hindsight, this was predictable.
In 2021, Biden confirmed what many had suspected — Democrats wanted the Republican party as a controlled opposition. In January 2021, Biden was telling the public what the Republican party should be. By March 2021, Biden was already saying that he is not sure whether there will be a Republican party in 2024.
Obamaism and Italian fascism have more in common than ideological similarities. Before WWI, Mussolini was a non-fascist socialist; socialists were anti-war. What turned Mussolini against anti-war socialism was Marx’s observation that wars are followed by revolutions. If wars cause revolutions, let’s join the war! Notice how easy this switch was?