Stop Defining Fascism, Start FIGHTING Fascism!
We don’t need more discussion on what fascism is — we’re getting a briefing on it in real time. Get started on the work of fighting it.
Here’s a little historical anecdote you don’t hear about in all the handwringing over Trump’s rising authoritarianism. Imagine yourself in Rome in 1926. Yes, back in the States, folks were reading The Great Gatsby, listening to jazz bands in speakeasies, and a lot of them were actually marching on strike lines and listening to anarchist and socialist thinkers, but oops! We don’t hear about that last part too much when the glitzy, glamorous Roaring Twenties are revisited in books and depicted in movies. Anyway, where was I. Oh, yes, Rome —
In Rome, you see, Mussolini was tightening his grip. Hardly anyone outside of Germany had heard yet of Hitler — his Beer Hall Putsch made the back pages of American and British newspapers and then been promptly forgotten. No, the standard for thuggery was set at the time by the Duce’s Blackshirts, who are about as subtle as ICE agents today.
And in September 1926, a gang of Blackshirts attacked an American consul on Rome, Earl Brennan, beating the shit out of him and leaving him unconscious on the street.
Ironically, Brennan was on his way to meet with Italy’s dictator. The Blackshirts attacked him because he refused to issue US visas to Italians with criminal records. In other words, the same kind of undesirable migrants whom today’s rabidly xenophobic administrators in the US and Europe claim are “invading” their countries.
Yet not only did the Fascists try to cover up the attack on Brennan, but according to maverick reporter George Seldes, so did American ambassador Henry P. Fletcher. Word got out anyway. Seldes claimed the story “walked right into the Paris office” of the Chicago Tribune where an outraged American legation official briefed the paper’s correspondent Jay Allen. In fact, the Chicago Tribune’s home edition went big with the story, its headlines shouting “FASCISTI CLUB US CONSUL” and “AMERICAN LEFT UNCONSCIOUS IN STREET BY MOB.”
Here’s the kicker: Anyone who picked up the Chicago Tribune’s European edition wouldn’t find the story. “The business department sent in word to kill it,” Seldes recalled in his book, Freedom of the Press, and it “did not want to lose the Italian government’s tourist advertising. In like manner, the business department regulated the news from Spain, Romania, Poland, and other countries to which it had sold page and half-page advertising space.”
In fact, it was standard practice, in the 1920s and right up to the Second World War, for American newspapers to accept bribes from right-wing governments in the form of fat discounts on the telegraph rates, the telegraph being the first Internet.
What is the point of this sordid little story? Several things, and we’ll get to them all. But first, it would be nice if pundits and observers stop recycling the tedious Hitler comparisons and recognize that Italian Fascism — with all its demented violence, its darkly comical economic incompetence, and its rapist, narcissistic dictator — makes a far more apt, and more importantly useful model to dissect Trumpism than the Nazis.
But we don’t even need to go rummaging through the past that often. We have ample examples of fascist conduct today — Iran, Hungary, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia. Why the hell did we need Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning? A book no one bothers to read anymore and sits in remainder bins. As books on this subject go, Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works is well done and quite readable, but apart from making Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and the Indigo book chains all happy, who are such books for?
Do you really need a short political science guide of some 250 pages — fitting length for a series of prolonged toilet breaks — while the genuine, urgent and despicable acts of fascism are unfolding right fucking in front of you? Legal migrants deported to faraway gulags without due process. Universities intimidated and extorted, their professors harassed. Other countries openly threatened with invasion. Individuals threatened for not “appropriately” mourning a racist, sexist creep like Charlie Kirk.
But sure, let’s pause and rehash Hannah Arendt’s dissection of totalitarianism, and while you’re at it, please catalogue all the shades of glowing orange and yellow flame while your house burns down.
The day before I started this column, I caught a post on X with this brief video clip. In the clip, a nice-looking blond guy, presumably in his early twenties, tells us politely, “Fascism is a form of palingenetic ultranationalism.” And then his phrase appears in writing on the screen as if we’re learning a brand-new ingredient for a hair conditioner.
I presume this kid is popular on TikTok (almost everyone’s a kid to me these days), and he blathers on in the four-minute clip about the definition of fascism without giving credit to where he got this silliness from, Roger Griffin, one of those academics who seems to tuck into pointless minutiae.
And yes, I’m sure they’re both well-intentioned, but I still think, Oh, for fuck’s sake. Dude, I don’t give a shit. Talk about not only missing the forest for the trees but driving your trendy e-scooter into a Redwood.
Given the accent, I am guessing he’s American or Canadian because only these two could be so foolishly, absurdly focused on such self-involved-to-the-point-of-masturbatory clever word games while masked goons are landing helicopters on slum buildings and slamming traumatized people into walls at courthouses.
You know what my definition of fascism is? When a reporter comes back to the news bullpen in Yangon, Myanmar in 2005, clearly terrified and relating to everyone present, myself included, how a Tatmadaw general openly threatened her at a news conference, laughing as he did it.
My definition of fascism is a prosecutor in Addis Ababa in 2025 witnessing a suspect nearly beaten to death and having to flee his homeland, while a respected journalist, Geitye Yalew, has to leave Ethiopia and go into exile for merely reporting the truth.
My definition of fascism is a convicted felon and notorious rapist who somehow get elected by idiots to be president telling a room of military officers about the “enemy within.”
The real tragedy of life in the United States right now is that most of its citizens can’t or won’t comprehend that this is by definition, a declaration of war on every one of them — not simply those that right-wing Americans presumably don’t like.
So, no offense, Blond Guy, whoever you are (and I did make a sincere effort to find out your name), but for gawd’s sake, forget regurgitating the poli-sci book you read last week and join us in the real world. The fact that idiots don’t get what fascism is this late in the day means they’ll never get it. And what you’re doing is another sign of denial. In the same way that Bill Maher is completely deluding himself by declaring as late as September 26 that “we are really on the edge of a dictatorship now.”
No, Bill, you’re already fucking there! You and the rest of your citizenry just can’t wrap your heads around the reality because you cling to this laughable belief in “American exceptionalism.” It wasn’t ever true, and it sure as hell ain’t true now. Ask the British how they once conned themselves that they were special… until 1945.
Which brings us back to my anecdote about that beaten-up diplomat and how a newspaper and an ambassador tried to cover it up. Get it through your heads:
Mainstream media is never your friend in terms of protecting your rights. It wasn’t in 1926, and it sure as hell won’t be in 2026.
Mainstream media licks the boots of whoever’s in power or might gain power. This is why it will occasionally, in a panic, pivot and adjust its coverage as if it supports the general public on an issue. It fears any threat to its bottom line. But it’ll snap right back to where the money and power is before you know it.
We’ve all seen how Jeff Bezos was willing to bend the knee to Donald Trump and make the Washington Post into a paper tiger. And now, thanks to the Paramount Skydance merger and the power of CEO David Ellison, CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Morley Safer, Eric Sevareid, Mike Wallace and other luminaries of journalism — will now be headed by Bari Weiss. Weiss is staggeringly unqualified by either experience or temperament to be editor-in-chief. Ellison doesn’t care. Nor does he recognize, let alone care, that her entire career has been about weaponizing partisan sensationalism.
In college, she led a campaign to harass and smear Arab academics, and she parlayed a posture of victimhood after she quit the New York Times into a role as Israel’s PR agent in all but name — and to hell with its genocide of Palestinians. Expect CBS News coverage to get much softer on Trump and to go big in cheering on Israel.
Bur the truth is that whether billionaires own major media outlets or not, American and British journalists — by habit and training — already behave like accomplices for fascists. Watching a report by NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Courtney Kube, one of the regime’s most reliable stenographers, at no point did I hear anything in a story about the latest attack on Venezuelan vessels that seriously questioned Trump’s libel of the victims as drug traffickers. Nor will you find it in the matching online piece. In fact, you have to scroll down really far in a story from Caracas on September 28 before the New York Times shares this bombshell:
“In an interview, one woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the dead men said that her husband was a fisherman with four children who left one day for work and never came back.”
Well, why the hell is this angle buried in the story? And why isn’t there a stampede of reporters racing off to Caracas right now to properly confirm the identities (and the professions) of the victims?
I can think of only two reasons: sheer laziness and corporate orders. Sometimes, the two work together. There will no doubt be those who want to keep their jobs, indeed need their jobs, as Bari Weiss transforms a news network into a mouthpiece for right-wing propaganda. And they’ll just… go along.
Up in Canada, you didn’t even need a corporate takeover for the pathetically underfunded CTV News network — the shop where reporters don’t even go to foreign locales most of the time but merely “narrate” updates from the studio — to lie to its viewers and misrepresent what was being done to Palestinians.
This makes it urgent for all of us to get past the “What is fascism?” café chatter and move on to actually fighting fascism in a substantial way.
Because even if you’re not an American, the nightmare of Trump threatens us all. It creates constant economic chaos. It destabilizes innocent nations thanks to his loudmouthed threats of invasion. It provides support for other fascist regimes. Which brings us to another truth that needs bold text:
Other so-called democracies will always, always sell you out and side with the dictator. They’re doing it now.
Britain’s Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were both happy to let Mussolini and Hitler get away with murder while France’s despicable Pierre Laval worked out slimy little deals with Mussolini behind his allies’ backs. It was called appeasement, and today, appeasement is back in style.
The pundits and commentators like to mention how Trump is chummy with Putin and Kim Jong Un, but France’s Emmanuel Macron can call him up when stuck in New York traffic. Canada’s Mark Carney rolled over and signed Canada up for Trump’s cartoonish “golden dome” which makes no sense military, even less so economically. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his latest Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood are about to cut more of Britons’ rights in the name of shielding Israel from more public condemnation — a policy perfectly in line with the Trump White House’s agenda.
The rationale, of course, is both absurd and obscene. The same idiotic excuse that was used to prevent demonstrations on US college campuses was invoked in Britain’s case, that Jews allegedly could “feel unsafe, intimidated and scared to leave their homes” — even though Jews in Britain, Canada, the US and yes, Israel itself regularly take part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Nope, sorry, free speech has got to go.
“I think just because you have a freedom doesn’t mean to say you have to use it at every moment of every day,” said Mahmoud. The neck can only handle so much wrenching speed for a double-take and a what the fuck?
The British authorities seem to take the unique view that protest must fit with the convenience of the oppressor.
And they’ll probably get away with this because so far, the opposition to fascism in the US and Britain is pitifully, painfully incompetent.
The marches, even with impressive numbers, the placards, the boycotts, that day when you “heroically” got yourself taken off to a cell (in the hopes you’ll be exonerated in a court case a year from now) simply won’t cut it anymore.
You think you hurt Elon Musk by refusing to buy a Tesla? Are you kidding? The mainstream media went into a salivating pant recently just to report the news that now he’s close to being a trillionaire.
Mobilizing for the next presidential election? Are you high? What makes you think there will be one?
Credit where credit is due: some can make these points more eloquently and politely than I can, and in the aftermath of the Jimmy Kimmel cancellation and his return to television, Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote a courageous opinion piece for that most dubious, maddening of forums, the New York Times. “When I look at the consumer response to Disney censoring Kimmel, I don’t see an allegory for America’s salvation. I see a threat — that we will see ourselves as the authoritarians see us, users whose only power is in our pocketbook.
“We can’t just reject the threat. We have to reject the idea that our only, best power is our pocketbooks. That’s a desecration of civics, as corrosive as the idea that debate is the pinnacle of civil discourse. It cheapens our actions by degrading what we believe is possible. Our power isn’t in making one of the choices that are presented to us. Our power is in shaping the choices available to us.”
My one disappointment in this column is that Cottom doesn’t go into any specifics, but perhaps that asked too much of a wonderful piece and likely would have gone too far for the Times editorial department.
So, I’ll offer some specifics.
Get Smarter in Your Tactics
First off, Americans and Brits better finally get into their heads that protest is not performance art.
At last weekend’s Trafalgar Square protest, the London Met arrested close to 500 people for infractions, like merely holding up signs supporting Palestine Action, but I would argue their individual sacrifices have achieved little, except to provoke the Home Office into more repressive action.
Why hasn’t someone developed a massive campaign to say “Palestine Action” without saying it? In other words, to really cripple the government’s case by demonstrating how ridiculous it is. With a campaign of mockery and euphemism, it would drive home the point again and again that the Starmer government is blundering about, trying to police words and thoughts, not deeds. Get creative.
Protesters have to get it through their thick skulls, as I have written in articles before, that protest is not the end in itself, it needs to have realistic and practical goals in concert with other tactics. The goal is never to make yourself feel oh-so relevant and heroic, it’s to get the legislation repealed, to get people freed from migrant gulags. Get creative.
Meanwhile in the States, a buzzing circle of phone-cammers surrounded the ICE Hooligan who shoved a woman around in a New York courthouse. Well, if you’re that committed, why don’t you find a group of volunteers to track down the identities and backgrounds of masked ICE agents?
I am not suggesting you publish home addresses that put people at risk. But it is certainly reasonable and justified to publish the names of these thugs and have photos of their real faces when they wears masks on the job while each has a badge. It is not doxxing, it is public service reporting.
In fact, this should be one of the jobs of the mainstream media, not just the left-leaning indie news sites. But to their eternal shame, the big networks and the papers like the Washington Post have all but abdicated their responsibilities. So, it is left to ordinary people to step up and become activists.
So, no, I am definitely not advocating violence, I am promoting shame. I am arguing that these creeps may get off on their macho tactics while in a roving pack, but out them to their communities, and — with luck — locals will shun them. Refuse them service in corner grocery stores, gas stations, everywhere, to send the message home: we don’t like Gestapo, get it? I am saying that the Nazi is a pack animal who doesn’t always fare well when he has to be all macho by himself.
Americans definitely have to get smarter because the coverage of the debacle this past weekend in Chicago, with one female protester shot, only shows what can go wrong when you don’t do things right. With predictable obtuseness, the media reflexively went with Homeland Security’s narrative, i.e. that US Border Patrol agents were “rammed by 10 cars” and “boxed in,” that agents fired “defensive shot” at their victim.
Now if ramming the agents’ cars or at least “boxing them in” was a tactic, then someone should have had the balls as a spokesperson to say it was a tactic. At the very least, the maneuver would have been then recognized as a protest gesture, albeit a stupidly reckless one. Instead, Trump’s goons got to make themselves look like they were under siege.
What are naïve protesters in Portland and other cities going to do when National Guard thugs open fire on them Kent State-style?
Americans stubbornly ignore how the tactics of dissent are being workshopped elsewhere. In parts of the Middle East and Asia, protesters don’t hit the streets like it’s a Sunday romp. They know they’re risking their lives. And they frequently go about it with a plan and with smarts.
An AFP story from two years ago shows how Iranians are protesting on a level far more sophisticated than the average American or Brit. “In a game of cat and mouse, drivers have honked horns in support of the protesters and blocked roads with cars to slow the security forces, footage has shown. Streets have also been obstructed by toppled and burning dumpster bins, and in some cases overturned police cars… Officers riding pillion are often seen firing on demonstrators with birdshot, teargas, or even paintballs to mark and eventually track them down. Youths have in turn taken to wearing masks, switching their phones to “airplane mode” to avoid being located and packing extra clothes to replace those splattered with paint.”
In other words, the Iranians are being tactically smart. If they block a road, it’s not directly confrontational but to slow their enemy down. It’s pro-democracy activism, guerrilla-style. Which is what the United States will sorely need in a year or two.
The Wall Street Journal reported that same year that when in doubt, it didn’t hurt to go old school: “In places such as Tehran and Ahvaz in Southwestern Iran, demonstrators are passing out paper leaflets with details of planned protests and antigovernment statements, according to social-media footage. Others are spraying graffiti on the walls, with slogans like ‘Woman, life, freedom,’ which is one of the trademark chants of the demonstrators.”
They get it. It’s the message and trying to reach the goal that counts, not you coming out on a weekend and showing what a noble person you are. Get creative.
The time is over for defining what the enemy is and what he does. We all know that. We’re getting a briefing in real time. The job is clear. Quit the clever talk, get out of the café, and get your ass to a planning meeting to fight fascism.
Because so far, the enemy loves, just loves hearing all of you bloviate, fussing over the right terminology. That way, no one hears the jet taxiing down the runway, shipping away more innocents like cargo, and no one hears the wet thud of the night sticks in the dark alleys.
GET STARTED ON THE REAL WORK.
