What Is Fascism? A History Lesson the Left Doesn’t Want You to Remember
By Virgil Walker | Sola Veritas
The real fascists burned books, jailed pastors, and ruled by terror. Don’t cheapen their crimes.
“You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
– Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Today, the word fascist is hurled at parents, pastors, and justices—anyone who dares resist the left’s cultural agenda. But this isn’t fascism. And using the word this way isn’t just sloppy—it’s dangerous.
If everyone is a fascist, no one is.
What Fascism Really Meant
The word fascism comes from the Italian fasces—a bundle of rods tied around an axe, an ancient Roman symbol of unity and power through force. Mussolini’s Italy made it a political reality in the 1920s. His Blackshirts—paramilitary thugs—roamed the streets, beating opponents into silence long before he seized official power.
Mussolini defined his movement in The Doctrine of Fascism (1932):
“Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State.”
That’s not “big government.” That’s total government.
In Germany, Hitler took Mussolini’s ideas further. After the Reichstag fire of 1933, parliament passed the Enabling Act, handing him full dictatorial powers. Overnight, dissent became treason.
Hitler was blunt in Mein Kampf:
“The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence.”
And Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propaganda minister, stripped the mask off entirely:
“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”
This is what real fascism looked like: book burnings, banned newspapers, outlawed churches, pastors in prison, and entire populations marked for destruction.
In May 1933, Nazi students piled books into bonfires across Germany, shouting, “Against the un-German spirit!” Those flames didn’t stop with books—they soon consumed people.
This isn’t a Twitter mob who says mean things about you on a post. This isn’t a blog article that you disagree with. This isn’t a law that you protest because you feel it’s unfair to those breaking the law. Real fascism was a regime of terror, not a social media spat.
The Irony of the “Fascist” Label
Here’s the irony: those who casually hurl the word fascist today are blind to the fact that in a truly fascist society, they wouldn’t be able to use that word at all.
In Mussolini’s Italy, opposition parties were outlawed. In Hitler’s Germany, critics vanished into camps. Book burnings paved the road to human burnings. As Heinrich Heine had warned a century earlier: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.”
Think about that. If America were truly under fascism, there would be no parents protesting school boards, no pastors preaching against cultural lies, no justices writing dissents. Fascism doesn’t tolerate critics. It crushes them.
The very freedom to cry “fascist” is proof you’re not living under fascism.
A Modern Example of Irony
For those reading this who think, “Yeah, but what about Jimmy Kimmel? He lost his job for a bit!” Let’s be clear:
First, he still has his job.
Second, it wasn’t conservatives who removed him, and it wasn’t the government. It was his own network—ABC—responding to poor ratings and affiliates reacting to outrage over his false comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Finally, if this were truly a fascist regime, Kimmel wouldn’t have been suspended and then quickly returned to the airwaves. He would have been dragged away by the secret police—the Gestapo in Germany or the OVRA in Mussolini’s Italy—jailed, tortured, and never heard from again.
So there’s that. Further proof this is not fascism. Stop it.
Why Misusing the Word is Dangerous
Words build regimes. Sloppy words build sloppy tyrannies.
If “fascist” simply means “anyone I don’t like,” then it means nothing. But when you call someone a fascist falsely, you hand justification to hostility.
We’ve already seen it: “Punch a fascist” isn’t just a meme—it’s a marching order. Once someone is dehumanized, violence feels justified. That’s exactly how real fascists paved their road to power.
Holocaust survivor Martin Niemöller saw it firsthand:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Or as survivors put it:
“The crematoria, gas chambers … did not begin with bricks, it began with words … they were permitted to proceed to violence because of the absence of words.”
The word fascist is soaked in blood. To use it carelessly is to dishonor the memory of those who suffered under its reality.
Where the Real Threat Lies
Here’s the bitter irony: many of those who cry “fascism” the loudest are practicing its tactics.
Censoring dissent? Check.
Demonizing opponents? Check.
Canceling those who step out of line? Check.
They rail against “authoritarianism” while demanding thought-policing, forced conformity, and state-enforced morality. It’s Isaiah 5:20 in real time: calling evil good and good evil.
The danger is not in the opponents they slander but in the slander itself.
Why This Must Stop
Misusing fascist cheapens the memory of those who suffered under Mussolini and Hitler. It poisons public dialogue. And it drags us closer to the very authoritarianism it pretends to resist.
Scripture reminds us: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). To twist the word fascist is not only a failure of history, it is a failure of truth.
Christians must be people of truth. That means refusing the propaganda of labels, rejecting lazy slander, and insisting on honest definitions.
Conclusion: Clarity Over Confusion
Inigo Montoya had it right: words mean things. If we keep bending them, they will break.
The next time someone calls you—or anyone else—a fascist, pause and remember: the real thing was brutal, violent, and unforgiving. The freedom to use the word loosely is itself proof that we’re not there.
But sloppy speech is never harmless. Lies pave the road to tyranny.
So resist slander. Insist on truth. And refuse to let propaganda define reality.
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Thank you for your summary. I concur completely. I would add one thought to your words. We frequently hear that fascists are far right; however, remember that the Nazis were called the National Socialist party. Thus, whether communist, socialist, fascist, democratic socialist, etc., they all are cut from the same cloth - leftists. All who label the right “fascist” are gaslighting.
I encountered a site that claimed to take Goebbels words from a speech and insert America, Trump, Ashli Babbitt, etc as proof of the fascism of the current regime. You can read it here.
https://factkeepers.com/goebbels-big-lie-1932-and-today/
I’m not going to lie, to uninformed people it could look like a very legitimate argument for the right as facts.
The irony is, you can also insert the opposite (Biden, Trump as stealing the election, etc) and it would ring just as true to those on the right, but the miseducated cannot use critical thinking to distinguish between authoritarianism and enforcing current laws. (PS this article was the second result on a Brave search for “goebbels change meaning of words,” which tells me that all of the search engines lean toward the left).
It is authoritarian to require a harmful, barely tested medical product to keep your job, or insist you must cover up your face to be part of society, but it was painted as loving your neighbor, so it wasn’t authoritarian, it was loving. See how easy it is to change the words now?
It is easy to change the meaning of words when people are not following biblical principles and their basis of decision-making is by popular thought alone.
“At the same time, viewpoints in any way threatening to Nazi beliefs or to the regime were censored or eliminated from all media, especially the public press. “
When you present this idea to those claiming enforcing current laws (like immigration) is fascist, and that conservative views have been censored for more than a decade, they simply ignore the argument, or point out Kimmel as their example. The problem is, he has never been censored and has lied many times on air, and continues to be rewarded for his own lies. When faced with accountability for his lies, it became fascism.
This “culture war” will not be won when leftists control k-12 education (since I was student in the 70s), most journalism, most TV productions (look at what Netflix is churning out for children with trans propaganda), Hollywood, higher education, the education of teachers, the music industry, and maybe 50% of all churches.
They knew 75 years ago that if they seize the influence of the children, the next generation will be right and proper Marxists. They’ve known this since the early 1910s when the Marxist party started to infiltrate the Democrat party because their ideas were very unlikable.
While parents, like my own, were convinced that work and “success” were the most important thing in life, we became the latch key kid generation practically raising ourselves. My mom was never around, she worked 50 hours a week “proving herself as a woman.” Yay feminism.
Then my generation became the indulgent generation, disconnected from Jesus, searching for meaning in the wrong places, and believing the established models and norms on which our parents relied were not only the best for our own children, but culturally required for the upbringing of children.
Truly, the only way to change culture is to change the family, and most don’t want to fight that fight, to remove children from Caesar’s schools, to remove them from “the world” of horrible television, social media and worldly friends, because it makes you “weird” in the eyes of culture.
Parents have to teach the proper meaning of fascism, but many have to learn it first themselves. How do we change several generations raised on twisted definitions of words, who were taught learning only happens in a “school”?
I’m not even sure where to end this comment. My hope is in Jesus. As for our own culture, historically republics only last 200 years, and we are way past our expiration date. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that we are headed toward an authoritarian regime, just not the one the authoritarians are intentionally promoting as the problem, to keep looking in one direction while they install the regime in the other direction.
Lord Jesus, come soon.