On Wednesday, I published a Field Guide about a leaked memo that told House Republicans to merge three words. Then I went to my own comment section.
I wrote that China is run by a communist party, that North Korea dropped communism from its constitution in 2009 and runs on Juche, and that Russia has not been communist since 1991. Three countries, three answers, one word. I wrote it because a reader had merged all three, and I said that if we ask the other side to name which meaning they mean, we do it too.
One of the readers I had just corrected replied with six words.
“I was lazy and will be better.”
I learned a long time ago to say that sentence out loud, in front of the people you got it wrong in front of. It is not comfortable, and it is not supposed to be. It is how you correct a record and stay accurate.
I have been reading political writing for a long time. I cannot remember the last time I saw a professional writer say that sentence about their own work.
So I went looking. Over the past few days, I pulled and read 76 published pieces on the fascist and communist labels, from Substack and adjacent outlets, across the political spectrum. I did not try to grade whether the writers were right. I was grading one thing: does the piece give you anything you can check?
Primary documents. Named scholarship. Data with a pollster and field dates. Reporting you can follow to its source. Or nothing.
The pattern that came back shocked me, and the party lines have nothing to do with it.
The thread, in one day
Before the writers, the readers. My Wednesday comment section ran the full range of evidentiary behavior in about twelve hours.
One commenter wrote that communism, socialism, Marxism, and fascism are all the same, and that any difference is cosmetic. That is the merge, performed live, in a thread about a memo instructing the merge.
Another commenter disagreed with him and provided definitions, drawing the line between key and all means of production. Then she said the memo was no big deal.
A third commenter, Rick Tilson, tested her definition against 1984 and asked whether Orwell’s state was therefore communist.
A fourth arrived with a careful, qualified historical argument about twentieth-century death tolls, and when I answered it, came back with nine names and the number 100 million.
And a fifth wrote his six words.
Five readers. Merge, correction, stress test, escalation, self-correction. None of us were paid. Nobody had an editor.
Hold that against what follows.
Finding one: the best evidence and the biggest word rarely appear together
Start with the writers whose work I could check.
Judd Legum built a documentary record of who is financing immigration detention: a $450 million revolving credit line from Citizens to GEO Group; a $500 million CoreCivic bond underwriting; an AT&T contract with a dollar figure and a date; and detention population figures from January 2025 forward. Every number traceable. He does not use the word fascism. He does not use the word authoritarian. He builds the record and lets you connect the dots.
Radley Balko quotes the Minnesota Attorney General’s federal complaint, a DHS memo on warrantless home entries, and Judge Jeffrey Bryan’s Fourth Amendment ruling verbatim. The word appears once, as an adjective, buried inside the filings.
Marisa Kabas tracks $1.07 billion in facility purchases, discloses which of her FOIA requests are still pending, and reports a court finding that an environmental assessment was completed in about thirty minutes.
Ken Klippenstein publishes the leaked FBI and DHS bulletin, then fact-checks the document he just leaked, noting that the casualties it references were not who it implies. He mostly avoids the word too.
Joyce Vance is a former United States Attorney. She writes about a nine-to-nothing Supreme Court ruling, a Justice Department indictment, and Kevin Roberts on the record. Across the piece, she uses autocracy and autocrat. She never once writes fascism. A former federal prosecutor choosing the narrower word is not an accident.
Anne Applebaum rejects the label outright on conceptual grounds and offers a replacement: autocratic state capture.
Now the other column.
Will Stancil writes that Trump and Musk are openly breaking dozens of laws. He names none of them. The piece carries no links, no documents, no data.
Lucian Truscott IV states as fact that half a billion dollars from Venezuelan oil was deposited into a Qatari account. That is a specific, checkable, serious claim, and it is offered on his say-so.
Steve Schmidt published a piece whose entire argument is that we must call the thing by its name. The piece does not define the name.
Mike Brock concludes that Stephen Miller is a fascist. He paraphrases Miller throughout. He does not quote him once.
The same failure runs on the right. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn treat the fascism alarm as a recurring elite panic and support the claim with a podcast conversation about a single video. No data, no documents, no historians.
I want to be exact about what I am saying. I am not saying the well-sourced writers are right and the others are wrong. Legum may be too cautious. Stancil may be describing something real. I am saying that one column hands you the means to check it and the other asks you to just take it.
Finding two: four writers who set their own control group
Cross-writer comparisons invite the charge of cherry-picking. These do not, because in each case the control is the writer’s own prior work.
Timothy Snyder. In October 2024, he quotes Robert Paxton’s definition verbatim and cites Zeev Sternhell, Jason Stanley, and Tony Judt. I call that scholarship.
In February 2026, he argues that Trump is failing at fascism because fascism demands a major foreign war. Zero citations. In July 2026 he published a piece titled “What is Fascism?” that cites nobody in the body, listing two books afterward without engaging either. A piece with that title, from that author, that does not engage Paxton, Griffin, Payne, Eco, or Arendt?
In June 2026, he argues that a proposed military budget increase is a bribe to the officer corps. He cites the Guardian, the Times, another Substack, and four of his own prior posts. He does not cite the budget.
The standard fell as the publishing rate rose. I think that observation is extremely important.
Mike Brock. His August 3 piece on OpenAI quotes named executives directly and links TechCrunch, Fortune, the BBC, Reuters, NPR, and the Guardian. His piece calling a senior White House official a fascist quotes no one. Same writer, same month. He applies a higher evidentiary standard to a technology company than to the presidency.
Robert Reich. His close reading of the FCC-mandated CBS agreement is excellent work: he shows that the agreement never defines bias, never says whose complaints trigger action, never enumerates what other concerns mean. That is a writer reading a document. His piece asking whether Trump is a fascist answers in a word, yes, and cites no scholar of fascism at all.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Her essays carry named decisions, a Senate Finance Committee letter, House Oversight material, and the Solicitor General quoted from argument. Her conversation transcripts assert checkable claims about policy change with nothing behind them. The format changed. The standard changed with it.
Finding three: three things we need to do better
Nobody reads the memo. I audited twenty-four pieces arguing the communism fight. Not one engages the co/efficient document. It is the only artifact in this entire argument with a published sample size, field dates, and a margin of error. The people fighting about it have not opened it. I will keep my eye on it. Is the document a fake? A nothing burger?
Nobody engages the disagreement among scholars. Robert Paxton reversed his position in January 2021 and said the invasion of the Capitol removed his objection to the label. Almost every writer who wants the word cites that reversal. In the same 2024 interview in which he confirmed the definition fits, Paxton also said the word generates more heat than light and that he is not pushing it. Both halves are his. I found no Substack piece carrying the second half. But I could have missed it.
Worse: Roger Griffin defined generic fascism as palingenetic ultranationalism, the most-cited definition in the field, and he refuses to apply it to Trump. He told NPR in October 2024 there is no evidence of a coherent enough ideology, and he argues the danger is worse than fascism precisely because it can sit inside a democracy. Across all 76 pieces I read, I found zero engagement with Griffin. The single strongest objection to the label is absent from the conversation about the label.
Rutger Bregman is the one writer who argues the definition from the literature, citing Paxton’s Anatomy, the 1998 Journal of Modern History article, and Eco’s “Ur-Fascism” by venue. Even he does not carry Paxton’s hesitation.
Nobody answers the strongest version of the other side. Not a single defense piece addresses the atrocity argument on its merits. They answer the label or the motive. The hardest form of the charge goes unanswered.
Finding four: where the number lives now
Here is the finding that sent me back to my own comment section on Facebook.
The figure of 100 million deaths comes from The Black Book of Communism, published in 1997. Across twenty-four right-side pieces making the communism argument, that number appears exactly once, in a single August 2026 post, unqualified. Taibbi does not use it. Andrew Sullivan does not. Garry Kasparov does not. Rod Dreher does not. Christopher Rufo does not.
A commenter on my Wednesday post used it twice in eleven days.
The number has migrated. It left the writers and moved into the comment sections, and the argument about it did not travel along. Two of the book’s own contributing authors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, publicly broke with the editor over that aggregation in Le Monde in November 1997, at publication. Werth wrote the Soviet chapter that supplies most of the deaths. Neither the writers who use the figure nor those who answer it mention that.
This is what happens when a number outruns its sourcing. It arrives in a Facebook thread stripped of every qualification its own authors demanded, and the person repeating it has no way to know.
Finding five: the symmetry is real where you’d least expect, and false where it counts
I have to give ground here, because two writers did the work and their findings complicate what I would have said a week ago.
Chad Maschke audited 122,106 original congressional posts between January 26 and April 26 of this year, using a party-blind classifier with a second human validation pass. Democrats apply totalitarian-regime labels to Republicans at 0.055 per hundred posts. Republicans apply them to Democrats at 0.062. His conclusion, and I am quoting it because it is against my prior: the labeling is a tie. His argued asymmetry sits elsewhere, in eliminationist language rather than epithets.
Lindsey Cormack runs DCinbox, an archive of official congressional e-newsletters. Over roughly fifteen years, Republicans used “fascist” 53 times and Democrats 20. Her finding is that the accusation belongs to neither party. It surfaces when the opposition holds the White House.
So on frequency, the two sides are close to even. Anyone telling you only one side does this is not counting.
The asymmetry lives in three other places, and each one is a document that can be checked.
One side has a written instruction to merge its three words so the alarm transfers. I read it and quoted it on Wednesday. I searched for a counterpart on the other side and did not find one. Absence of a leak is not proof of absence, and the co/efficient memo leaked in four days, which tells you the pipeline works.
The other side’s own research shops have told it repeatedly to stop. Its 2024 general-election modeling ranked the fascism message far below its Medicare message on moving voters. Its 2025 research called authoritarianism messaging unconvincing. Its party committee’s late-2025 strategy memo went economic. Reporting from NOTUS in September 2025 shows Republicans making Democratic use of the word into the issue itself.
And then the third thing, which is not about rhetoric at all.
The word with a task force
The label currently attached to federal machinery is not fascist. It is anti-fascist.
Calling a president a fascist carries no consequence from the government. Being identified as anti-fascist can now put you inside a counterterrorism apparatus.
I am not the first to say this, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center made the point on October 9, 2025, with the designation order and NSPM-7 quoted directly, and her formulation is better than mine: the antifascist label can be attached to almost anyone, and the flexibility is the point. Forrest Brown named the irony in November.
The record since: NSPM-7 names anti-capitalism among its indicators and tasks the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, Justice, Treasury, and the IRS. The 2026 counterterrorism strategy names anti-fascists as one of three major threat categories, and does not mention right-wing or white supremacist extremism at all. A July State Department report names the Democratic Socialists of America and the National Lawyers Guild.
I am flagging that last section as mine. The memo I wrote about on Wednesday says nothing about enforcement. The connection is my analysis, and you should weigh it as analysis.
What the reader did
Which brings me back to six words.
He read a correction addressed to the whole thread, recognized himself in it, and wrote that he was lazy and would be better. He did not argue. He did not reframe. He did not explain that he had meant something more defensible. He did not go quiet and reappear two days later with a hypothetical.
I have now read 76 pieces by people who write about this for a living, several of them with audiences a hundred times the size of mine. I did not find that sentence once.
The invitation
This is the part where a piece like this usually ends by feeling superior. I would rather it end by being useful, so I am going to ask instead.
To the writers named above. Send the receipts. Not a retraction and not an apology. A link. If there is a source for the claim that fascism requires a foreign war, send it, and I will run it. If there is documentation for the five hundred million dollars in a Qatari account, send it and I will run it. If Stephen Miller said the thing, send the quote and I will run it. Corrections and sources get published in full, at the top of the next Binding, under your own name, without commentary from me.
I am asking in good faith because I think most of this is a genre problem rather than a character problem. Snyder in 2024 met the standard. Reich meets it. Ben-Ghiat meets it in her essays. The standard is achievable by every writer on this list, because every writer on this list has already met it. What changed is cadence, and cadence is a choice. (I recognize my own limitations here.)
To my own readers, including the ones who disagreed with me on Wednesday. Apply this to me. I told you the memo was real and gave you its dates, its sample, and its margin of error. I told you which section was my analysis rather than the document’s. Hold Friday to the same rule you hold Wednesday.
And to everyone. The next time a piece tells you something is fascism or communism, ask it three questions. Which meaning? By what criteria? What would change the writer’s mind? If a piece cannot answer all three, it is asking for your alarm and offering you nothing concrete.
Ask for the page.
Ninety days from now you will be handed a ballot with names on it, not ideologies. The only way to know what you are voting for is to make the people asking for your vote say which meaning they mean, and then to check. Read every race. Read every proposition. vote411.org
A note on method. I read 76 pieces across three sweeps: writers applying the fascist label, writers rejecting it, and writers arguing the communist and socialist labels. I graded each on whether a reader could check it. Substack’s own search is closed to automated tools, so everything here came through general web search, which means there is certainly good work on both sides that I did not surface. If yours is in that gap, send it. I would rather be corrected than uninformed.
Sources cited above, in order of appearance: Popular Information · The Watch · The Handbasket · Ken Klippenstein · Civil Discourse · Open Letters · Stancil Culture · Lucian Truscott Newsletter · The Warning · Notes from the Circus, “The Tyrant in the White House” and “How to Launder a Break-In” · Racket News · Timothy Snyder, 2024, Fascist Failure, What is Fascism?, military budget · Robert Reich, FCC agreement and Is Trump a fascist? · Lucid · Rutger Bregman · Paxton, Newsweek, January 11, 2021 · Paxton, NYT Magazine, October 23, 2024 · MN-06 Watch · DCinbox Insights · NOTUS · Brennan Center · Sticky Weather · Cronkite News
Additional sourcing, uncited above but read for this Binding: Musa al-Gharbi · Julian Waller · Ben Burgis · Damon Linker · Shadi Hamid · John Ganz · Andrew Sullivan on Rauch · Tyler Cowen · John Gruber · Victor Davis Hanson · Jason Stanley · Ben-Ghiat, “Is Trump a Fascist?”
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., served 23 years in the Marine Corps. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier and teaches at UC Irvine Division of Continuing Education. He writes What Time Binds, an independent newsletter on language, institutions, and democratic accountability.