Hi, I'm Alyssa Milano is the last week that you'll have to deal with just me. Alyssa will be back shortly. Back in the first Trump regime, many people on the left called Trump a fascist. I wasn't one of them, not because I believed he didn't demonstrate fascistic tendencies, but because I found the word to be rhetorically

ineffective. Once one of us said fascist, the other side stopped listening. Suffice it to say,

I no longer believe that, mainly because so many of Trump's followers are so deep into the bizarre

Trump cult that they can no longer accept objective reality.

And in fact, they are using words interchangeably like communist, fascist, Antifa, socialist,

and even liberal or democratic, even though these are words with specific meanings that are

not even a little bit the same thing.

With that in mind, I want to make sure that those of us on the left are not doing the same

thing using words like fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian, Republican, or the like.

So today, we're going to look at one of the best definitions of fascism, and then using the

words and policies of Trump and his regime demonstrate how Trump and Trumpism is a form of

fascism.

So buckle up, Buttercups, Professor Ben's class is in session.

Umberto Echo was, among other things, an Italian novelist and philosopher.

He wrote a novel called In The Name of the Rose, which was later made into a movie starring

Sean Connery and Christian Slater, kind of a smarter Da Vinci Code before there was a Da Vinci Code.

You should check it out. I bet you'll like it.

Echo also in 1991 wrote an essay titled Erfascism, in which he laid out 14 defining

shared characteristics of fascist organizations and countries. While this is not

the only definition of fascism, and there are many good ones, it is a thorough definition and expands

on those other definition more than it differs from them. In this episode, we'll go through the first

seven. We'll finish up in a later episode.

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