In my Oct. 2 article for The Federalist, I detailed a chilling 2,500 percent spike in indexed internet content pairing “Trump” with “fascist” over the past 10 years, with the biggest surge happening since mid-2024. This spike in dangerous rhetoric is evidence of a left-wing effort to dehumanize conservatives as existential threats.
From Hillary Clinton likening Trump’s rallies to Nazi gatherings to Kamala Harris branding him a “fascist” threat to democracy, the language has poisoned discourse and, as we’ve seen, inspired real-world harm — including assassination attempts on Trump and the recent murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk by a radical immersed in anti-Trump echo chambers.
This toxic playbook has now played out in microcosm in Austin, Texas, where a Reddit mob’s incendiary pressure campaign against a local farm not only forced an event cancellation for a conservative group, but allegedly escalated to death threats against the owners and their employees.
It’s a stark reminder: Words like “fascist” aren’t just insults; they’re weapons.
The saga began on Oct. 15, 2025, when a Reddit user in the r/Austin subreddit posted a thread titled “Yikes. Boggy Creek Farms is hosting Texas Public Policy Foundation.” The post lambasted the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), my employer, as a “fascist” front for Christian nationalism, Project 2025, and billionaire oil interests, urging users to shame the farm into canceling a family-friendly event on regenerative agriculture and “Make America Healthy Again” for the TPPF-affiliated Liberty Leadership Council, a 40-and-under professional organization.
The event, which went on as scheduled at TPPF’s offices, featured Texas Republican state Rep. Helen Kerwin (mother of the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins), the author of a bill to keep PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl) chemicals out of sewage-based fertilizer — a cause that one would presume would see support across the political spectrum.
Commenters quickly piled on, calling for boycotts, supplier drops, and even fake RSVPs to sabotage the gathering. One user equated hosting TPPF to platforming the Klan or Nazis, framing the venue’s desired “neutrality” as complicity with “oppressors.” The thread, which garnered hundreds of upvotes and comments, has since been deleted by the original poster, but its impact was immediate and devastating.
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