As most of you know, every so often I’ve asked a formulaic question ever since Trump was elected: Is it acceptable in polite society to call Trump “fascist” yet? Even now, the answer isn’t a resounding YES, but a full-page opinion on page B3 of the WP’s Sunday edition is getting awfully close. The big problem with this guy’s method is that it can’t answer in the affirmative until it’s too late. For example, Trump only gets 2 out of 4 for “glorification of violence and readiness to use it in politics” because he hasn’t gone on a genocidal rampage yet (talk about defining deviance downward, sheesh…). But that’s a basic flaw of the cult of “data”: by focusing on the past to predict the future, it skirts basic moral questions about the present. And that leads directly to the second problem with this guy’s method, which is another basic flaw of the cult of data: beneath all the technocratic hand-waving, relying on “models” is a classicizing gesture — like saying the Renaissance was “really” Antiquity. So, in his scheme, the 180k dead from C-19 get filed under “theatricality” and “chaotic administration,” which hardly captures what it was: the deliberate, explicit use of a biological agent as a weapon of mass destruction against civilians for partisan aims.