I have to say the quality of the posters who are now entering my mentions to defend Tom Nichols’ perspective is not changing my opinion of Tom Nichols, nor are the arguments they are making.

At the very basic level that even a school child can understand, the history’s lesson of fascism is not that fascism is abetted by too many people warning too early about it, but by silence, complacency, and ignorance. The lesson is to speak up early, not late.

There’s even a little poem about it.

The left wasn’t calling everybody a fascist, we were calling Republicans fascist, and sure enough and Boy Howdy Republicans have proven themselves fascist. Conservatives meanwhile spent the same decades calling the left fascist and Nazi, if you want to talk about boys crying wolf.

The party that has never done anything but seek the center continues to insist that they need to stop catering to the extreme left—something they have never ever done—and continue doing what they have always done, which is continue to seek a center that will always track us further into a nightmare.

The thing about the center is, it isn’t anywhere in particular. It’s just the point between two other points. if your purpose is only to find the center, then you stand for nothing and you have no vision. It’s a total loser; not even a moral victory, because it’s a fundamentally amoral perspective.