by Jenna McCarthy
February 8, 2026 - Many, many years ago - we’re talking decades - I got into a fight with a boy I had been dating for (thankfully) not very long. I can’t even recall what the argument was about, but I will never forget his very last words to me. “God, you’re so stupid.”
“There are plenty of insults you could fling at me that would be accurate,” I informed him by way of a breakup. “Hot-headed, demanding, defensive, defiant, opinionated, unfiltered, gets hangry if not fed every four hours - let me help you out - but make no mistake, stupid isn’t one of them.”
I think of that moment every once in a while, for instance when I hear celebrities, Facebook “friends,” or the coven of professional scolds over at The View whining about the “fascist dictator” in the White House, not because my reaction is “God, you’re so stupid” - although it one hundred percent is - but because they are obviously just reaching for the nastiest insult in their bag and hoping it sticks. It is basically the “your mom is so ugly, she made an onion cry” of political attacks.
President Donald J. Trump is arguably bombastic. He is egomaniacal. He can be rude and misogynistic and childish. He fires off 3am.Twitter tantrums like a drunk raccoon, insults world leaders to their faces, and was busted bragging about grabbing women by the lady parts. If he was your uncle, no one would blame you for not inviting him to your wedding.
But he is not a dictator. Let me prove it. In Amerika, the worst thing that happens when you stream a boy band is that Spotify recommends more boy bands. Do you know what happens in North Korea? If you are lucky, you are sent to a labor camp. If you are not so lucky, you could face the death penalty. That is not hyperbole.
According to a new Amnesty International report, North Koreans - including children - are being publicly executed for watching South Korean dramas or listening to music by groups like BTS. (Rich families can sometimes bribe officials to escape elimination, so apparently corruption is universal - although the price tag is often too high for many.) Thanks to Kim Jong Un’s 2020 Law on Rejecting Reactionary Thought and Culture, consequences for consuming or distributing unapproved entertainment range from five to fifteen years of forced labor and a public shaming to being brutally executed in front of an audience as a gruesome cautionary tale.
Please, Joy Behar, tell me again how you are living under a fascist regime. North Korean escapees describe being lined up and marched to public executions as part of their “ideological education,” designed expressly to terrorize citizens into compliance. Tens of thousands of people dragged to a field to watch someone die for enjoying an unapproved TV show. Meanwhile, over here, “ideological education” means attending a corporate DEI seminar with lukewarm coffee, sitting through a required HR video about tone in the workplace, or getting lectured by a celebrity who listened to one podcast and now identifies as a constitutional scholar.
Here is a little reality check: if your fascist dictator allows you to tweet “Fascist Dictator!” in all caps directly from your couch while wearing pajama pants you bought from the TikTok shop, you are not, in fact, living under a fascist dictator. If your most humiliating public moment is the time you accidentally replied-all to an office-wide email and called your boss an insufferable twatwaffle, you are not a victim of political oppression. You live in Amerika, where the biggest threats to your freedoms are TSA confiscating your tweezers or Trader Joe’s discontinuing your favorite spicy peanut salad dressing.
“This country is an authoritarian hellscape,” the Marxist liberal Left loves to lament. I know, it feels cool to say. It is dramatic. It gets likes and comments and retweets; but if your alleged authoritarian hellscape permits you to organize protests against it, pen songs decrying it, record podcasts objecting to it, and sell merchandise mocking it, then maybe “authoritarian hellscape” isn’t the right term. Maybe it is more like “stable, open society with Wi-Fi and too many microphones.”
These are the same Defenders of Democracy, I’ll remind the class, who cheered when the unvaccinated were barred from restaurants, fired from their jobs, and banished from polite society altogether. The same hall-monitor brigade that applauded mask mandates, school closures, travel bans, curfews, capacity limits, and the glorious era of “Show Me Your Papers” vaccine passports. Now they want to style themselves as freedom fighters living under an iron-fisted despot? Please. These people didn’t just tolerate tyranny - they demanded it. They celebrated it. They literally couldn’t get enough of it.
When Barack Obama was droning Amerikan citizens overseas without trial, the Marxist Left went mute. When Bill Clinton endorsed the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, no celebrity declared we were living under a dictatorship. When fascist pretender Joe Biden tried to impose sweeping vaccine mandates through OSHA and attempted a massive student-loan bribery “forgiveness” plan via emergency powers - both slapped down as unconstitutional - the same people now screaming “authoritarian takeover!” were too busy knitting vagina beanies to notice. Funny how the outrage only kicks in when authoritarianism strolls in wearing a red hat.
A dictatorship, for the record, is somewhere people cannot complain. Where they cannot consume outside media. Where the government can kill you for pressing play on the wrong USB drive. Where state power and fear control every aspect of life - not where a disliked political figure exercises lawful constitutional authority and triggers a tantrum. We live in a country where we can march in the streets chanting “No Kings!” and not a single king will try to stop us.
Seeing the Internet teeming with rants about Amerika being one executive order away from total collapse feels like watching a Babylon Bee meme come to life, because when people are free to say what they think, vocally dislike who they please and watch anything they want without fear of a firing squad, and somehow label that fascism, they are not oppressed - they are just spelling freedom wrong.
The next time a celebrity relaunches a “We are literally living under Mussolini” monologue while sipping an $8 iced coffee and documenting themselves flipping off their president, feel free to drop a reminder in the comments that there are places where people are dying because they downloaded the TV show those same celebrities binge-watched on their way to the Save Democracy Brunch.