Beyond the Fascism Checklist, Sweetiepie

You’ve seen the checklist. It’s been screenshotted, shared, color-coded, made into TikToks, and dropped into Reddit threads like gospel. “The 14 Signs of Fascism,” courtesy of Umberto Eco—saint of academic antifascists and patron thinker of Canva revolutionaries. And if you believe certain corners of the internet, Donald J. Trump has officially collected them all. Congratulations, America: you’ve unlocked the full Fascist Achievement Tree. Time to panic.

But here’s the twist. This isn’t new. Trump didn’t write the script. He didn’t invent the stage. He just ad-libbed the vulgar version of a role America has been playing with better lighting and smoother diction for generations. You want fascist vibes? Look to the kill lists, the proxy wars, the alphabet soup of surveillance agencies. Look to Wounded Knee. Look to COINTELPRO. Look to “we tortured some folks.” That wasn’t Trump. That was bipartisan.

This essay isn’t a defense of Trump. Far from it. This is a reckoning with the dangerous comfort of aesthetic antifascism—a ritualistic, self-congratulatory performance that mistakes moral panic for moral clarity. That confuses memes with mechanisms. That rebrands old critiques with new fonts and calls it resistance.

Because when every bad actor is “literally fascist,” the word collapses under its own inflation. And worse—we stop recognizing the structural violence that doesn’t wear jackboots or tweet in all caps.

We’re going to talk about Reddit. We’re going to talk about MidasTouch. We’re going to talk about how you can be downvoted to hell for quoting Umberto Eco correctly. We’ll invoke Naomi Wolf, back when she was howling at the moon over Bush-era imperial creep and was ignored for being too early, too loud, too right. We’ll talk about how anti-fascism turned from praxis into pageantry. From hard-won history into hashtag discourse.

We’ll trace the co-opting of cultural resistance—from Morrissey to Springsteen, from U2 to the Breeders—into the soft-liberal, algorithm-approved soundtrack of brunch-era outrage.

And we’ll hold up a mirror—not just to the Trumpist id, but to the institutions that birthed him, enabled him, and will survive him, wearing different suits and better cologne.

So no, sweetiepie, your fascism checklist won’t save you. Not from Trump. Not from Biden. Not from the bureaucratic machinery of empire with a latte in its hand and a drone overhead. If anything, that laminated Eco list might just be your new comfort blanket—warm, moral, and useless against the cold mechanics of power.

You want to fight fascism? You’d better start by understanding what it actually looks like—especially when it smiles back.