The Buzzmeter: Delusions About "Fascism" and Mission Impossible Hit Cannes

Resistance 2.0 promises to be a Bummer Summer

The Ankler's Cannes report casually refers to the United States now being overtaken by fascism. Resistance 2.0 is back just when you thought it was safe to go back into the movie theater or to an awards show. Fine, you reap what you sow, Hollywood.

But as a WWII obsessive, I do and I feel compelled to explain what fascism is and why they are wrong to casually throw it around without fully understanding its meaning.

Says The Ankler's Gregg Kilday:

Cannes was never intended as a festival designed to feed the Oscars. Actually, it was conceived in the late ’30s to serve as a counterprotest of sorts to the Venice Film Festival, which had fallen under the sway of Hitler and Mussolini. But then World War II interrupted, and the Festival de Cannes did not officially get underway until 1946. But that’s another story.

Well, not quite another story, because on Tuesday night as the curtain went up on the 78th Festival de Cannes, a bit of that original DNA re-asserted itself. With fascist-leaning regimes on the rise throughout the world, including in the U.S. itself, Cannes answered back.

To be fair, that is what most everyone inside the elitist bubble of the Left truly believes. They could never, say, see Trump's tariffs as anything other than an assault against them. The world does revolve around them, of course.

They would never think about the hollowed, abandoned working class who saw their towns wiped out amid decades of free trade, which made the rich richer and cursed us with extreme income inequality, or that Trump might have good intentions to rebuild Hollywood, no. It has to confirm their priors. TRUMP IS A FASCIST because how else could he win a free and fair election, even the popular vote?

It is hard to watch people humiliate themselves like that, and yet, here we still are. There are some signs of life here and there. But the ruling class in this country continues to wall themselves off in their doomsday bunker screaming about the end of the world every time someone shoves a mic in their face.

In case you haven't noticed, we're living through a second Gilded Age with the world's richest and most powerful people signaling their virtue to absolve themselves of their sins of success. To do that, they must elevate marginalized groups and demonize the working class, who are left to fend for themselves with nothing, not even art or culture. Let them eat fentanyl.

The problem for them is just like it was for the ultra-wealthy who built their Gatsby-like mansions on the Gold Coast to display their wealth in the 1800s, the public is getting sick of them, sick of their self-importance, their elitism, their unending whining. Robert De Niro carps about threats to "democracy," when in reality, democracy just kicked their ass six ways from Sunday. Democracy rose up and said ENOUGH. Enough. Ten years of bleating about Hitler and Trump is enough. What have you done for us lately? The answer: NOTHING. ZIP. NADA.

They throw around the word "fascist" like they throw around the word "racist" as a method of control, and a way to draw a line between them and the non-compliant. The Trump administration is far from perfect but there is no doubt he is doing exactly what he was voted in to do. That is not fascism, friends. Not even close.

So let's talk about what fascism is and what it isn't. To find clean reporting, free of the Trump obsession, you have to go back to the pre-Trump era to find unbiased and honest commentary. Here is a decent explainer of the origins of fascism, 11 years ago:

Fascism means all sticks of wood bound together as one: a fascio, as you can see on the left side of the thumbnail above. It predates Mussolini, and even predates Roman times. It means: unity. All bound together as one. The fascist salute, or Roman salute, is a symbol of unity -- all bound together as one.

Dictators like Mussolini or Hitler led the fascist revolutions, but fascism can exist without them as long as the system can punish free thought or speech, etc.

From the video:

Oftentimes, fascism is viewed as a right wing group, but in its purest form, it's neither left or right wing. At the left end of the spectrum, you could imagine communist or socialism...And at the extreme right, you could imagine just complete free market, complete unfettered free market, ultra, ultra small government and fascists and extreme nationalists. They didn't view themselves as either end of the spectrum. They kind of viewed themselves as a separate way where everything was subordinate. The economy itself was subordinate to the state.

But the way we could see our world today is as a globalist view vs. a nationalist view. Nationalism (anti-immigrant) is definitely on the rise all over the world. But that doesn't make it fascism. Incorrect use of the word dilutes its power. They use it on the Left because it gets people's attention in an age of too much content, but it's wrong.

George Orwell wrote 1984 to criticize Communism and Fascism as being two sides of the same coin. Orwell was a Communist and an anti-fascist. Like so many back then (Oppenheimer included), he funded the Communists against the fascists. But Orwell, like Oppenheimer, could see what Communism looked like under Stalin (and today, Xi Jinping). That is what 1984 is really about - disillusionment with a movement that, in practice, looks more like Communism.

I can see parallels to 1984 in the utopia we built on the Left, which is, I think, the closest thing I've ever seen to fascism the US has ever seen (except the post-war America when it was the Conservatives who had the culture and pushed the American utopia to feret out would-be Communists, with the Red Scare, etc).

Power does strange things to people. We didn't have much of it on the Left for decades. But with the rise of Silicon Valley, iPhones, and social media, we suddenly did. It allowed us to build a utopia mostly online. As civilization migrated online, we amassed unprecedented levels of power. We had Hollywood, universities, all culture, institutions, the internet, Big Tech, Silicon Valley, and Google.

By 2008, under Barack Obama's leadership, we could push one idea—one leader, one state, one people. Sure, we barely noticed. It was utopia, after all. We didn't realize we'd left much of this country—real life—out of it—not until 2016. When utopias are threatened, they must, by design, become more authoritarian to preserve their purity.

As with Orwell's 1984, to preserve that utopian ideal, there had to be ways to rid utopia of the "bad" people. In the Soviet-Union, and in Nazi Germany, not to mention the South after the Civil War, there were methods to purge non-conformists, outsiders, undesirables. In 1984, we see something that looks a lot like what the Left has become today. You WILL believe 2+2=5, or else. You WILL love Big Brother, you must. You must give yourself over completely, even at the cost of freedom of the mind.

Their only way out, they felt, was Trump. The Left gave many of us no other choice. We could not and did not want to live like that anymore. What good is freedom of speech if you can't use it?

So many are already too afraid to speak up and express their opinions. They are afraid because when bubble-headed celebrities use the word, it means that if you speak up, you'll be aligning yourself with one of those bad things, which only digs us in deeper.

Note how one story in the Hollywood Reporter that I was now a "MAGA darling" meant studios pulled their advertising. There were hundreds of examples of public punishments that scared everyone into compliance. Mine was late in the game, but it was nonetheless chilling, or would have been for the Old Left.

The consequences were severe, as far as it goes. I wasn't starved or shot to death. But the Academy rescinded its Oscar ticket to me, which I've enjoyed for the past ten years (thank you for that; it was fun while it lasted). And the Women's Media Center declined to hire me as a freelancer to write their annual report on women in the Oscars. To most on the Left, these are necessary consequences for bad actions. And that is the very definition of CONFORM OR ELSE, aka fascism.

That's not the Trump side. It never was. There is no unity on the Right—no sticks of wood bound together as one. There is plenty of healthy dissent. There is not one idea, one person, one movement. It is pure chaos, but they won because the Left had become unbearable for a growing number of Americans. Only inside the bubble do they not see this reality.

Their Trump obsession works like the way Goldstein was used in 1984 to fill people with rage but also offer an example of what will happen to any of them should they ever step out of line.

Now, you might say that Trump's fascism means we're mass deporting people, and that looks like Hitler - did it look like Hitler when Obama did it?

Or you might say forcing us to accept that there are only two genders, or preventing biological males from competing in sports because trans women are women, or ending "gender affirming care" is fascism. But not supporting the new ideology we've all been mandated to accept is not fascism. Let me know when the state is locking them up or shooting them on the spot.

It is depressing that these celebrities lack the self-awareness to think about anyone other than themselves. It reminds me of New York's high society in the Gilded Age. Read Edith Wharton's masterful Age of Innocence and watch the great film by Martin Scorsese, which drives home the point of how these chosen people had everything except the one thing we need more than money: freedom—freedom of the mind, most especially.

Tom Cruise and Mission: Impossible hit Cannes

As a counter example to the mass hysteria among the rich and powerful in Cannes, Tom Cruise offers an alternative approach. By avoiding the subject of politics entirely, he invites everyone in. Mission Impossible: the Final Reckoning will screen in Cannes, though it has already been seen by making. Oonly one review shows up on Rotten Tomatoes from The Spool and it says:

Mission: Impossible sticks its landing.

Here is a nice tease:

Here is the photo call:

And here is some well deserved praise for Tom Cruise:

Christopher McQuarrie praises a blushing Tom Cruise uninterrupted for nearly 6 minutes#MissionImpossible#CannesFilmFestival pic.twitter.com/DXXqC8PdCB

— James (@mcclearly_james) May 14, 2025

Here are some tweets:

We here at AwardsDaily are grateful to Tom Cruise for remembering that movies should be for everyone, not just those who agree with one side of the political spectrum.