This piece was originally published in Rolling Stone on September 20, 2025. Back in 1940, Charlie Chaplin made a movie called The Great Dictator, a comedy about fascism. In it, he plays a Hitler-like character named Adenoid Hynkel, the authoritarian leader of an imaginary country called Tomainia. As parodies go, this one was relatively direct: There was a Goebbels character, a Göring character, and even a Mussolini figure named Benzino Napaloni, the “Diggaditchie of Bacteria.” The movie...
