One common theme seen when people discuss fascism is trying to box it into an airtight definition. The issue with this is that it is also widely seen as the 'Third Way', separate from Communism and Capitalism, both with extremely wide definitions which intermingle at points. Take Capitalism, which bridges all the way from State Capitalism to Social Liberalism, and Communism, which bridges all the way from Social Liberalism to Anarchism. When you attempt to box Fascism into a small definition, it comes off as attempting to make sure that none of the real world fascist countries can get defined by that label which the west was an enemy of... until the cold war began, of course. Take Francoist Spain, a nation described in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, by the United Nations, as 'fascist regime patterned on, and established largely as a result of aid received from, Hitler's Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Fascist Italy'. They called on members to revoke all ambassadors and isolate the country, and later flipflopped in 1949 calling for the exact opposite resolution, and in 1953 sent them $1.4 BILLION dollars to spend on their military, flipping their position on them as a proponent of the war against communism. Thus illustrates my central point, Fascism is only Fascism when the world unanimously wants it to be, so when you call a movement which calls for a return to greatness, ultranationalism, purges civil servants and replaces them with loyalists, abuses a national guard paramilitary organization to silence political dissonance, praises political violence, and shows contempt for international law and clear irridentism, it is clearly fascist... Until you point out that what you have just described is the United States under Donald J. Trump. DOGE and Schedule F removed civil servants from important federal positions and placed MAGA loyalists in those vacant positions, the National Guard has been deployed to Washington D.C and Los Angeles without proper legal process, ICE has had its funding doubled and is operating without warrant and masked, and Praising the January 6 mob, endorsing torture, publicly musing about punching, body-slamming, or shooting protesters and journalists. This is Fascism. John F. Kelly, Trump's own former chief of staff called him 'certainly' a fascist in a New York Times interview. Al Gore directly compared Trump to Hitler in an April 2025 speech. Robert Paxton (author of Anatomy of Fascism), called him a Fascist after his inciting of the January 6th riots. Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley, all Yale researchers, have gone so far as to flee the country because of his 'descent into Fascism'. When the primary people saying that it isn't fascist, people like Stanley Payne, are the people who support him, then your argument that he isn't what is recognized to be one of the most evil ideologies to ever exist... has no legitimacy.

I have never called everything I disagree with inherently fascist. I disagree with a lot of things I consider to be democratic, as I consider myself a radical socialist. Yet I do not hate whatever happens, whenever it happens. Take Joe Biden, for example. The man pardoned his son. I don't call that fascist. He went too hard on immigrants, but that's not fascist. What is fascist is having unmarked, masked men shoot you in the middle of the street and get away without any persecution, because they worked for ICE. That much is true for Alex Pretti, that much is true for Renee Good.

Well, I've already said that I haven't called everything fascist, and gone so far as to provide examples. So if you refuse to concede ground, then we're at a standstill.