This is clear: Much of America has voted for a fascist.

If that short, blunt opening offends your delicate sensibilities, then you, dear reader, best dispense finally with the saccharine-drenched myths about a divided, discordant nation that has elected a fascist as president – again.

This remains unclear: America’s fate.

An urgent task faces enlightened Americans who have made plain their admirable opposition to and rejection of every obscene aspect of a grinning strongman who will exact the comeuppance that has festered in his soul and mind like a seething cauldron.

Long before his once closest aides and cabinet ministers took, belatedly, to The New York Times or CNN to “warn” Americans that the crude demagogue they had served with such cloying deference was a bona fide fascist, silly columnists like me were raising alarm after alarm about Donald Trump’s defining autocratic character in column after column since 2016.

But we and, much more importantly, our blatant, billboard-sized injunctions were dismissed by the ever-so-polite cognoscenti as the hyperbolic musings of clickbait-seeking polemicists who had little understanding of the true nature of fascism.

So, predictably and irresponsibly, the polite cognoscenti remained wedded........

© Al Jazeera