Your point being?

I don’t care much for Meloni but how exactly is she fascist or anything like that, compared to most other conservative politicians (who I don’t care much for either..)?

I’m not talking about parties like AfD or others funded by (objectively) fascist regime in Russia.

My original comment doesn't claim these parties are exactly fascist or nazi, but that it's reasonable to call them fascist and nazi. Given we have the hindsight of WWII, flirting with fascism or nazism is bad enough. One doesn't need to tick every box and grow a Chaplin mustache.

If a bunch of fools join a party with roots in, and affection for, fascism, then decent people ought just to call them 'fascists'. There are only so many hours in a day. If an Italian, post '45, still has any doubt that fascism was a disaster, then he or she is a dangerous idiot: not worth splitting hairs over.

If others want to wade in a metaphorical lake of vomit and entertain excuses like 'only some of them are nazis' or 'the roman salute might have been ironic' or 'they just said that to trigger the woke leftists' then fine, that's their business.

I'm too old to bother. I'm not going to weep myself remorsefully to sleep over calling cretins 'fascists' or 'nazis'

One might as well argue over whether it's acceptable to call a lady who occasionally kills kittens, a 'cat killer'; with the opposing view being "but she's not a career cat killer"

This seems like an extremely high bar, that doesn’t seem to be practical in real world conditions (in the context of people like Meloni, not people who openly call themselves fascist/nazis and/or embrace their ideological beliefs).

Why don’t we apply the same standards to British Conservative politicians?

Why aren’t they expected to unequivocally denounce Churchill and most other major British politicians that preceded him (I’m not directly equating him personally with Mussolini but he and many other British prime ministers before him were brutal imperialists whose actions regularly directly or indirectly resulted in millions of deaths). I don’t see how British Imperialism was somehow fundamentally inherently less evil than Italian Fascism (it might have been to some extent but where do we draw the line?). Yet we accept or tolerate all sorts of symbolism from that period with little controversy.

British Empire might not be on the same level as Nazi Germany, the USSR, Mao’s China but I don’t see how it (or British Imperialism as an ideology) was particularly less evil than Fascist Italy.

On one hand it didn’t ally itself with an even more evil and genocidal regime (largely due to strategic reasons and not ideological affinity, these were still rival ideologies after all), was a limited democracy and occasionally allowed some freedom of speech on the other hand it did directly cause much more deaths and suffering over its existence). I think the main difference is that Britain (unlike Italy) was actually actually good at subjugating and exploiting other countries (with an occasional “lite” genocide mixed in), therefore it was in a position to shape the historical narrative and we have collectively decided that their positive contributions more or less outweigh all of the other stuff..

What I said might sound pretty distasteful, maybe even disgusting but I don’t see how is it particularly worse than selective [hypocritical] moral indignation).

Meloni isn’t anymore fascist than Boris Johnson is someone who wants to re-subjugate Ireland and reestablish the British empire.

And what other options are there? If we demonize people like her we’ll just end up with someone who might actually publicly embrace fascist values and ideas and would actually openly support fascist states like Russia (unless there is some way to suddenly convert 20-30% or of the electorate in Italy and other European countries to social-liberalism…).