The fact that someone once encouraged today’s so-called journalists to make writing their profession is a shocking example of child abuse.

I am talking about all the scribblers now desperately trying to blame someone—anyone—for Trump’s victorious reelection. Mind you, in my last column (“The Insurmountable Evil of the American Media”), I bravely predicted the media would deliver a Kamala victory. I confess I was influenced in my misjudgment by my long-departed mother. She thought journalists wielded much too much influence. (She also thought they were just a step above child molesters, but then she was old-fashioned.) 

Speaking of lowlifes, a terrific prolix bore by the name of Timothy Snyder wrote a very long and stultifying piece in The New Yorker titled “What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?” Among the ridiculous charges Snyder makes against The Donald is that, “In returning to power, he will seek to change the system so he can remain in power until death.” Never mind that over several pages, Snyder ties himself in rhetorical knots merely trying to define what a fascist is.

The left always lies about fascism and ends up confusing itself. Kamala and her Fourth Estate acolytes insisted a victorious Trump would put his enemies in encampments. In reality, it was FDR who put American citizens into “relocation camps” during World War II, and today’s leftists who have imprisoned the Jan. 6 protestors for years without charges. Without any ideas about how to counter Trump’s popularity, the media reverted to slings and arrows, like spoilt children do when refused a second helping. Calling Trump a fascist made it easy; no brains needed. Most of them don’t even know where the word came from and what it really means.

Long ago, I was at a great big to-do at the Rockefeller Center celebrating the  50th anniversary of the book publisher Random House. A lot of the publisher’s star authors were there and stood overloading the dais that had been erected in the center of the large room. While photographers snapped away, one of the stars, Norman Mailer, suddenly yelled, “Where is Taki? I want Taki up here. We need a fascist in the picture.” 

I duly worked my way through the crowd up to the platform, where I was photographed with Norman hailing me by holding up my arm. Slightly embarrassed by all the attention, I tried to lose myself in the crowd when a rather well-known American sportsman approached me. “Are you really a fascist?” asked Muhammad Ali, the former world heavyweight champion, who had written his autobiography for Random House a couple of years earlier. 

“It’s only an Italian economic system, champ, nothing more,” said yours truly. “Uh-huh,” grunted Ali and walked away, most likely disappointed.

Despite Mailer’s jibe, I was not actually a fascist. As a child in Greece, however, I was a Falangist, a General Franco-inspired movement for Greek youth that ended with the German occupation in 1941.

So, what is a fascist? It was Mussolini who gave his movement the name, promising to overcome national weakness and decline by strengthening the state. Fascism pledged to subordinate the interests of the individual to the community. The irony is that the left accuses Trump of being a fascist when he does the opposite, subordinating community interests to individual ones, such as by upholding the individual right to freedom of speech.

Fascist movements flourished in Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Romania during the 1930s, but there was a split when Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal resisted Hitler’s urging to join his “Pact of Steel” with Mussolini, which became the Axis alliance. 

There are those of us who believe that had Il Duce resisted Hitler’s Circe-like entreaties to join the Nazis, he would have emerged as the greatest man in Europe following the war. Others disagree. He now looks ridiculous with his jutting jaw and scowl, but there are still millions of Italians who worship him.

I’ve always liked Mussolini for personal reasons. My mother’s youngest brother Elias wrote him a letter at 12 years old. Three months later, a diplomat arrived at our house in Athens and delivered an invitation to my uncle to visit Il Duce and stay at his Villa Torlonia in Rome. My young uncle Elias did just that. He only spent about 10 minutes with Mussolini, but he was treated like an honored guest for the whole week. Ironically, Elias would later fight brilliantly against Mussolini’s Italian troops as an 18-year-old in the winter of 1940, along with his brothers and my father, and later died from his battle wounds.

Mussolini, of course, had a less-than-heroic end, but at least his movement still excites all the lefties and media know-nothings. They attach the farcical “fascist” label to all they don’t approve of, which only shows the paucity of leftist thought. Viva Il Duce … in the minds of the left!  ◆