Authored by Jenna McCarthy via Jenna's Side,

Many, many years ago—we’re talking decades—I got into a fight with a boy I’d been dating for (thankfully) not very long. I can’t even recall what the argument was about, but I’ll 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. And not because my reaction is “God, you’re so stupid”—although it one hundred percent is—but because they’re obviously just reaching for the nastiest insult in the bag and hoping it sticks. It’s basically the “your mom is so ugly, she made an onion cry” of political attacks.

Trump is arguably bombastic. He is egomaniacal. He can be rude and misogynistic and childish. He fires off 3 A.M. 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 were your uncle, no one would blame you for not inviting him to your wedding.

But a dictator he is not.

Let me prove it: In America, 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’re lucky, you’re sent to a labor camp. If you’re 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 unalived in front of an audience as a gruesome cautionary tale.

But please, Joy Behar, tell me again how you’re 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.

You poor, tortured souls. Please reward yourselves with a matcha latte; your activism must be exhausting.

Here’s 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. And if the most hazardous consequence of your entertainment consumption is Hulu finding out you’re logged into your ex’s account and booting you off the platform, you do not live in an authoritarian state. You live in America, 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 liberal left loves to lament. I know, it feels cool to say. It’s 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 merch mocking it, then maybe “authoritarian hellscape” isn’t the right term. Maybe it’s more like “stable, open society with Wi-Fi and too many microphones.” (Also, if it’s so dystopian, feel free to expatriate yourself. No, really. Flights leave hourly.)

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. And 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 American citizens overseas without trial, the 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 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.

So when the likes of Cher and Jim Carrey and John Legend and Bette Midler and George Clooney and Kathy Griffin and Bruce Springsteen use their public platforms to call out Trump’s fascist takeover of America, their claims collapse under their own weight. Because real authoritarianism doesn’t let you complain about authoritarianism. That’s sort of the whole point.

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.

And it’s not just North Korea. Zooming out even slightly reveals an entire planet of governments behaving in ways that make America’s “fascism” discourse look like a middle-school slam contest. (“Your mom’s so dumb, she studied for her Covid test!”). In China, people are disappeared for practicing the wrong religion, posting the wrong sentence, or attending the wrong protest; an entire ethnic minority has been shoved into “re-education” camps large enough to be visible from space. In Iran, teenagers are executed for chanting slogans, women are beaten for a strand of visible hair, and the government turns off the internet whenever it gets even a faint whiff of protest. In Russia, critics are jailed, poisoned, or randomly “fall out of windows.” In Afghanistan, girls are banned from school and public executions are a weekly event. These are governments that don’t merely dislike dissent—they annihilate it.

We, on the other hand, 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 America 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’re not oppressed—they’re just spelling freedom wrong.

The next time a celebrity relaunches their “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.