It seems that radio host Charlamagne Tha God and his recent guest Kamala Harris are in agreement that “Trump’s campaign is about fascism.” Since Donald Trump also likens his opponents to fascists (as well as Communists), a tic that he might have picked up from listening too often to Mark Levin’s diatribes, there seems to be bipartisan consensus that fascists in both parties are taking over our country and perhaps even snatching our minds.

I’ve no clear idea, however, what this supposed “fascism” consists of. Although I’ve done considerable research and writing on this much vexed subject, the current usage may leave us wondering what politicians have in mind when they call each other fascists. At the very least, it may mean that we shouldn’t vote for the other side, which is somehow implicated in the crimes of the Third Reich or, at the very least, would have cheered on the stemwinders given by Il Duce if they had been at Rome’s Palazzo Venezia around 1925.

For the left, fascism is a synecdoche for absolute evil, which signifies everything that stands in opposition to leftist “reforms.” Supposedly by resisting whatever the left is for, such as providing pocket money for illegals or billing taxpayers for their transgendered surgeries, I’m opening the door to a spiral of wicked, insensitive acts that could possibly culminate in a repetition of Nazi atrocities. Although there is a sort of slippery slope argument here, what is being claimed is so ridiculous that to designate it as an argument assumes a degree of rationality or plausibility that is totally absent.

In 1943, the English socialist George Orwell complained that the term “fascism” had come to mean just about anything the speaker didn’t approve of. But that statement was made a very long time ago, during World War II, when England was fighting Nazi Germany and its ally fascist Italy. What Orwell could not have imagined is that more than 80 years later, “fascist” is an epithet that political hacks and media half-wits  still throw around with utter abandon.

Presumably what Kamala and her black victimologist interviewer meant when they characterized Trump’s campaign as “fascist” is that the Republican presidential candidate has not yet embraced the idea of reparations for blacks. Or perhaps he and all other Republicans are “Nazis,” as claimed by the feminist-antiwhite activist Sarah Rao in Matt Walsh’s satirical documentary Am I A Racist?, because they balk at the idea of renaming the Washington Monument for George Floyd, thereby commemorating a black martyr rather than white slaveowner. Perhaps those reactionaries who failed to demonstrate for this martyr or who, unlike Kamala Harris, failed to support the riots occasioned by his death, showed themselves to be “fascists.”

I’ve also noticed that progressive historians, like Robert Paxton and Tim Snyder, have given their unqualified support to the charge that Trump is a raging “fascist.” Aside from the pandering to the multicultural left involved in this gesture, what these onetime scholars are letting us know is that anyone who opposes our self-described antifascist ruling class, presumably from the right, must be a fascist.

 What else can these miscreants be, since those elites who attack them are still fighting the shades of long-dead “fascist” baddies? Jason Stanley, another antifascist wokester and a Yale professor with an endowed chair in philosophy, makes it exceedingly easy to determine who bears the “F” letter. It’s anybody who questions the latest feminist agenda, since fascism, Stanley insists, has always been about sexism.

Although both the Democrats and Republicans abuse the “F” word, Republicans seem just as happy doing the same to the “C” word (as in “Communist”). That’s because, unlike the left, they quite properly abhor what the Communists did while in power, for example, kill lots and lots of people in the name of building a more egalitarian and emphatically atheist society. Unlike Kamala and her fellow Democrats, many Republicans, to their credit, were enraged by Communist atrocities and therefore continue to use “Communist” in a derogatory way.

Unfortunately, as with the left’s addiction to the “F” word, the Republicans have a habit of calling their opponents Communists, which may be equally outdated. I still can’t get my head around the weird situation that what Republicans consider to be their Marxist opposition is being kept afloat by filthy rich capitalists. Americans in the top five percent income bracket lavish obscene donations on woke leftist politicians. That behavior suggests that professional “antifascists” and socialist revolutionaries are most definitely not the same. One needn’t fancy either group to discover that’s the case. No matter what we choose to call wealthy antifascist careerists like Kamala, Jason Stanley, and MSNBC anchors like Joy Reid, “Marxist revolutionaries” does not strike me as quite the right description.