The (mascaraed) Wolves from Little Red Riding Hood

Revisionism at its worst in today's Camino a Ítaca. Thinly veiled genocidal thoughts from those that would happily liquidate those that think differently. The American right takes a scary turn as they praise one of the most bloody dictatorships of the 20th century here in Spain. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish in the HOY, or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The phrase on X (formerly Twitter) was equal parts dangerous and threatening. Its reckless ignorance and skewed revisionism instantly sent chills up the spines of anyone who values freedom and democracy. It instantly evoked violent images of people being lined up against pockmarked walls and being shot or being thrown out of helicopters over the sea.

“Basically, America is going to need a Protestant Franco.”

The world ‘fascist’ gets thrown around a lot these days. Not since the dictator died peacefully in his sleep or his political progeny founded the beginnings of the PP has the word been so in vogue. Its use to label what is going on in the growing far right movements around the world could even, at times, be described as overuse. For some it has become a kneejerk epithet for anyone holding conservative views, thus diluting its real meaning in its overemployment. Well, that is until it isn’t and is used to accurately depict something.

It seems the alt-right in the United States has found a new (for them) symbol. They now extol in the brutal, long-ruling Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco. The man who worked with like-minded fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini to overthrow a democratically elected government and murdered more than a hundred thousand innocent civilians whose only crime was that they ‘thought differently’.

If anyone, here is a man who can accurately be labeled as a fascist and has now become a sort of prototype of the type of government that the far right would like to install in the United States and elsewhere. He has become an avatar of religious authoritarianism and their model for confronting the left in the United States and around the world.

But these elegies are not coming out of the dank, dark corners of the deep internet from nostalgic forty-year-old trolls who still live their parents and have never had a girlfriend. This outright praise for authoritarianism and pure fascism is coming from none other than one of the candidates for vice president of the United States, J.D. Vance.

Trump’s smarmy looking running mate, who has the distinct air of one of those preachers who are caught fellating strangers in truck stops, recently provided a blurb and praise for a book called ‘Unhumans’. It’s a conspiratorial screed that argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. And the man who supports these ideas could be an eighty-year-old heart attack away from being the most powerful man in the world.

The far right here in Spain know that to show such outright support for the caudillo is still, on the majority, politically noxious. They are still at the stage of being wolves in sheep’s clothing even if you can easily see their ears. But support like this from principal figures from the right from the most powerful country on earth could embolden them beyond simply revoking historical memory laws where they used to govern. The question is, can’t everybody see the wolves?