President Biden in a speech this year (2022) used the F word when describing the Republican leadership as semi-fascist. There is no such thing as semi-fascism.
If you embody any of the characteristics of fascism, you’re fascist, it’s that simple.
–If you believe in overturning the results of a democratic election, that’s fascism.
–If you embody extreme nationalism and the belief that your country is better than all the others, that’s fascism.
–If you attack the media and declare the media an enemy of the people, that’s fascism.
–If you believe in sexism, if you embody racism, that’s fascism.
The problem is if we just allow one characteristic to go by the wayside, we’re doing exactly what happened in Nazi Germany. We’re doing exactly what happened in fascist Italy in the 1920s. We’re doing exactly what happened in Japan, right before world war II.
Fascism cannot be tolerated in any of its characteristics.
That’s exactly how Donald Trump rose to power because all along the way, too many of us saw one of the characteristics of fascism. And we thought, well, let’s wait and see. But the truth is what Donald Trump was doing was testing the limits of the tolerance of his own supporters.
And what we now know is that there are millions of our fellow Americans who embody white supremacy. They embody the elements of fascism, which means they too are fascist.
So denounce fascism wherever you see it because if it escalates, it only becomes more deadly and more dangerous. There is no such thing as semi-fascism.