F is for Fascist.

If it looks like a fascist and talks like a fascist...

*Illustration by Victor Juhasz.

Once upon a time, back in the simpler, gentler, saner olden days of the the twenty-teens, when the Pumpkin-painted-pendeja known as Donald Trump would lead the crowds of crazies at one of his hate rallies in “Lock her up chants”, politicos and pundits would invariably say to alarmists like me, “Stop using the f-word. You’re flinging around the word fascist facilely and without historical reference.”

“This is not great, but it’s not THAT word.” They would say.

And it used to burn my ass to be honest. Because these were the self-styled “experts” in this sort of thing. The scholars, lecturers, opinion writers, and journalists who has spent their careers in the study of such matters and would surely know better than anyone, after all, they had spent many an evening in their wood-paneled, crackling-fire studies sipping sherry and smoking cigars while bloviating with their erudite & affected peers on the secret “soft-side of Benito Mussolini.”

Even former elected officials, Republicans and Democrats would brush it off as being “silly” and they would feel compelled to tell people to “calm down”. They knew “better” than the rest of us. Better than the “civilians” who kept saying, over and over and over again to each other: “Does this sound like something Hitler would say to you, cuz it sure does sound kinda Hitler-esqe to me. Are we crazy?”

[If I had a dollar for every time someone told me to “calm down” or “relax” when it came to Trump and the dangers he presented to our country, I’d be able to buy Taylor Swift by now — not the album… the person, but I digress.]

In 2015, then candidate Trump called for “… a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States…” he said that he wanted to “shutdown mosques” because they were encouraging “a great hatred” for America.

And shockingly, given the abject cowardice we’ve seen from Republicans over the course of the last many years, he was actually condemned for those incendiary words by Republican State Chairs and by Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and others.

They didn’t use the f-word, but they knew enough to call it out. They’ve since sold their craven souls to the madman they once condemned but that was so long ago and such a departure from their current look-the-other-way-lickspittling, that it might as well be a work of fiction.

But even that somehow, or so the talking heads told us, didn’t warrant an f-bomb. Nope. It was ‘bad, very bad… but hush now kids… we don’t just throw that big bad word around. It MEANS something. It has “historical context.”’

And we are all like, “But didn’t Hitler do the same thing to the…” and they were all, “Shhh, let’s help you find ANOTHER word, shall we. Let’s try for instance — irresponsible or reckless? Don’t they feel better than that [whispers] f-word?”

And this went on and on, for months. “Don’t say the f-word.” While Honeydew Hitler’s rally rhetoric (over 300 rallies before he was elected in fact) were used by him to heighten white identity and increase the perceived threat facing white Americans. To drill into the cult’s minds this idea that their whiteness, the thing which made them truly special, and superior was under attack. That “they, them, those people” were coming to take it from them. Over and over and over.

And the so-called smart people were nitpicking over what we should call it. They vacillated between “this isn’t fascism” and “there is not a clear definition of that word, so you can’t say this is it.”

But they still wouldn’t say it. And frankly, it’s been driving me insane. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

There’s a sketch in one of my all-time favorite tv shows Kids in the Hall, in which Dave Foley can’t remember the name of the movie he watched the night before. “You know, the one with Orson Wells? The movie was about, uh… a newspaper tycoon? You know the one — it's definitely NOT Citizen Kane…” to which Kevin McDonald repeatedly answers “It’s Citizen Kane”, each time growing more agitated knowing he’s right but has to listen to Dave Foley say “No, that’s not it.” Until it drives him to the point of insanity.

And every time the rest of us would hear Trump say something even more “irresponsible and reckless” than the last thing, like the time he said to a rally crowd that “the Second Amendment people” might stop Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court appointments, and we were like “Ok, now can we say it?”