The Cambridge Union Society is a historic debating and free-speech society in Cambridge, England, identified for placing on spirited debates addressing among the most essential, and sometimes mostcontroversial, problems with the day.
Throughout a debate on the movement “This Home Believes Trump is a twenty first Century Fascist,” on February 6, 2025, Tom Slater, Editor for Spiked, spoke because the second opposition for the movement within the Debating Chamber and offered an epic protection of Trump.
Tom Slater: Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, Il Duce, Der Führer, The Donald, The Roman Salute, The Zekeile, The YMCA Dance. The comparability is so absurd, it virtually debunks itself.
Totalitarian management, messianic dictatorship, a cult of racial superiority, para militaries crushing the left at house, a Darwinian militaristic battle overseas, the worship of conflict and violence, the mechanized try, let’s not neglect, to homicide all of European’s Jews.
If that seems like America in 2025 to you, then I counsel you allow right here and have a pleasant lengthy lie down.
Viewers member: Level of knowledge.
Tom Slater: In a second. Trump….I’m silencing all dissent tonight.
You possibly can completely say that Trump is intolerant, that he’s need to fly off the deal with over phrases that damage him or democratic votes that don’t go his method. However that doesn’t make him a fascist.
If he was within the UK, that may make him a Guardian columnist or possibly a member of the Inexperienced Get together. The purpose that I’m making an attempt to make is that should you stretch the definition of fascism on this respect, it’s not simply grim, it’s not simply wrong-headed, it’s not simply in opposition to the tutorial literature or the dictionary definition.
It quantities to plundering among the darkest moments of human historical past, exploiting the distinctive struggling of those that perished in fuel chambers and on battlefields to be able to rating low-cost political factors.
It additionally reveals an more and more out-of-touch bourgeois left that has develop into so indifferent, so distainful even, of working-class individuals, however that at any time when they get collectively and insurgent in opposition to the institution, it immediately assumes they’ve been whipped up into this by some racist, fascistic demogog.
Even when lots of these voters are black, are Muslim, our Latino, file numbers of whom backed Trump in November final yr.
That’s a wierd white supremacy so far as I’m involved.
If we settle for this movement, we settle for the dilution of fascism and its horrors.
We defang that phrase.
We cut back it to a swear phrase and a smear.
We flip the graveyards of the twentieth century right into a playground through which to have our personal political spats.
That’s an insult to the thousands and thousands who misplaced their lives to fascism, significantly European Jewry, and I hope you’ll reject this movement as a consequence.
Thanks.
Watch:
“Calling Donald Trump a fascist is an insult to democracy and to historical past. You might be turning the graveyards of the twentieth century right into a playground to have out your political spats. Get a grip”
Tom Slater on the Cambridge Union pic.twitter.com/tYxvaBaBHk
— spiked (@spikedonline) February 18, 2025
Watch his full remarks right here:
