Tucker recently had an alternative historian on his show (Darryl Cooper, who runs the Martyr Made podcast) to expound on his view of the genesis of WWII, namely that Winston Churchill was a villainous figure. His twitter thread made after the show does a decent job of summarizing that point.
Obviously any suggestion that Hitler was not 100% Satan incensed the boomer right, provoking febrile emotional reactions like this one from Billboard Chris. The likes of Seth Dillon are also making their favorite call for "moral clarity," which I just read as "die for Israel" these days.
At the same time, a couple people made some decent counterpoints, namely that Hitler invaded a lot of countries at the time he was supposedly suing for peace. This is the problem with calling Churchill "the chief villain," which Cooper walked back into "a chief villain" on X.
Overall, the controversy is a good thing for the right. Tucker is softening up the ironclad boomer mythology of WWII - when you delve deeper into the motivations of the belligerents, you eventually delve into the question of, "so where did the Nazis get all this animus against Jews?" and "why is the Holocaust the greatest tragedy when 14 million Asians were killed by Japan and 20 million Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor?" Also, blue laser eyes/red tint profile pics are gay.
That might be debatable, and I think it depends on the particular communist, and the particular location. Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia, didn't seem to be better under National Socialism than Communism. If you're going to be trapped under Communism, Tito's probably a better bet if Gorbachev isn't available.
Meanwhile, Poland is less murdered, but only after Stalin is dead, same with Ukraine. So long-term Poland is better off under Communism maybe? Just don't be born in the wrong decade? Ukraine starts off worse with the Holodomor, doesn't get better under the Holocaust, but DOES get better under Kruschev, then stops getting better, and gets irradiated with Chernobyl. Offsetting penalties I guess, but we can see why Azov has appeal. Czechoslovakia is kind of a mirror version of this where neither Germany nor the USSR were particularly bloodthirsty in Czechoslovakia. Certainly nobody seemed to want to go back to the days when the NatSocs were in charge, when the option of a liberal democracy was available.
I suppose the fact that nobody really went back to explore Fascism or National Socialism after the fall of the USSR is kinda telling what people thought of it. You'll probably have more fans of Monarchism than Fascism in Eastern Europe.
I don't see fascism as too far off what's happening in Russia now. You have national pride. You have strongman. You have repression of political dissent. The word got dirtied, for sure. But the kernel of truth to the leftists calling everyone fascist is that the ideas constituting fascism never left. They could never leave.
Fascism is nothing like what's happening in Russia, dirty or not.
Fascism is explicitly about Italian Civic National State Syndicalism. If we at least remove the explicitly Italian part out of that, the Russian Federation is simply not a Civic National State Syndicalist government.
What you're referring to is basically a leftist, over-broad, strawman definition, which never fit Fascism, because the Left didn't want to admit that Fascism is a fundamentally left-wing ideology.
It's true that Fascism didn't fully leave, but that is because Fascism, even more than National Socialism, is the only practical application of Socialism that can exist. The more practically feedable a Socialist policy becomes, the more it actually resembles a Fascist state/organization. Fascism is the necessary endpoint of a practical application of Leftism.