I AM NOT a fascist. I know that because I don’t eat cupcakes. It’s as simple as that. A Mr Whyman in the Guardian (“Beware of cupcake fascism”) confirms it.

Until I read Mr Whyman’s article I’d had no idea that cupcakes were such horrid fascistic things. Eating a cupcake is how “the passive-​aggressive vi­ol­ence of the in­fant­il­ized twee fas­cist mani­fests it­self” as it lumbers across the world, according to him. It’s a frightening revelation.

A cupcake is “neat, pre­cise, and uni­form”, he says; just like a poppet from the Hitlerjugend, presumably, all pigtails and smiles on the inside and seething with desire for world domination on the inside? Unlike a poppet from the Komsomol, all pigtails and smiles on the outside and seething with desire for world domination on the inside — but I don’t think Mr Whyman had that equivalence in mind.

Cupcakes turn you into a sticky-fingered child, which is an “understandable urge given how terrifying and confusing the the world is at present.” I have to say I don’t find the world confusing, since most of what happens is ploddingly predictable (the Guardian included) although I do experience occasional moments of terror – usually when out driving.

Anyway, if your own reaction to confusion and terror is to reach for something sweet and sticky, you’d better pay attention, you crypto-fascists, before you turn the country into a swamp of extremism.

Cupcakes gentrify whole swathes of the country. They drown the suburbs with niceness.

Cupcakes gentrify whole swathes of the country. They drown the suburbs with niceness. They tempt you with a “sense of wholesomeness and nostalgia” for a past that never existed, and we can’t have you looking anywhere but to the future.

They encourage you to “stay calm and carry on” in a crisis. They urge you to pick up a broom and sweep up the broken glass and debris of your shop after it’s been smashed by rioters – a thoroughly reactionary response according to Mr Whyman. Instead you should consider a more “radical” response. I don’t know what he means by that. Perhaps he means you should join the rioters and looters, and burn down your shop and the rest of the street. Then we’d have a socialist utopia without shops and homes.

Whatever you do, though, you must stop eating cupcakes. But how do you quell your fascistic impulse towards gentrification, niceness and nostalgia? Never fear, Mr Whyman has a plan to combat the infantilization underlying it (you just knew he had a plan, didn’t you?) You simply act more like a child. Confused? I’ll let him explain:

If we see the paradig­matic mech­an­isms of so­cial op­pres­sion op­er­ative today in the form of a cup­cake, then the clue to the over­throwing of these mech­an­isms ex­ists also in cake, al­beit of an en­tirely dif­ferent kind. It is pre­cisely in the truly cake-​like, the spongy and the moist and the ex­cessive and the un­healthy. Against the aus­terity of the cupcake-​form, we need to re­cap­ture, in our so­cial reality, a sort of joy: the joy of being open to genu­inely al­tern­ative possibilities.

Right. The answer is cake. More cake, just as long as it’s not cupcake.

I feel enlightened by this. Not only am I not a fascist (not even a twee, vintagey one), but I can also eat more other-cake knowing that I am contributing to the radical, anti-neoliberal revolution that will overthrow all social oppression. I could be a right-on, non-infantilized child. I could be a sticky-fingered, cake-eating comrade.

So could you. Why not join me in cake liberation?

– Michael Blackburn.