The word "fascism" is thrown around so much, it risks becoming an empty label. It has been used to describe students at Yale who demand a safe space as well as self-declared anti-fascists. So should we just give up on this word?

Happy 114th birthday to Theodor Adorno, the influential founder of the Frankfurt School. His writings on culture, capitalism, and fascism are as timely as when they were written.

Journalist Graeme Wood recently interviewed Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the alt-right and a noted fascist. Spencer draws inspiration from philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Carl Schmitt. But is his interpretation of those philosophers fair?

On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, Richard Spencer, a polemic thought leader in the racist “alt-right,” was punched in the face by a masked protestor. The moment was caught on video, and the punch quickly went viral on Twitter (sometimes set to music like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”).

This essay is a lot more personal than any of my previous postings on this blog—or, indeed, any my writing anywhere else. It’s personal because it concerns a topic that is so important to me that I cannot bear to shroud it in a pretense of academic detachment and so overwhelmingly significant that the thought of writing about anything else seems grotesque.