“Farcical Fascism is still Fascism”
by Charlie Sykes
The most interesting thing I heard this morning… as they discussed how Trump pursued ridiculous conspiracy theories on election fraud, including bizarre ideas that Italian satellites were changing Trump votes to Biden votes.  Laughable of course, but there were people willing to believe, willing to pursue this and willing to be his stooges in our government for the explicit purpose of overturning a free and fair election in order to maintain power, and use violence to do so… this is fascism pure and simple.   My profound fear is the next time a fascist finds his or her way to the top of our government, he or she may be more calculating and competent at manipulation of people and our government, and our democracy will die.

Fascists kill democracies.  Hitler and his Brown Shirts did exactly this in Germany of the 1930’s.  He came to power by taking advantage of runaway inflation, grievances and underlying racist lies.  Listen to Republicans trying to deflect, using inflation in equivalency to the death of democracy!

Hitler used levers of a democratic government to rise to power and then kill the democracy to become a dictator.
More recently, in the last three decades, Putin followed the same play book successfully in Russia.   Because Trump was unsuccessful and cartoonish in his approach, doesn’t make him any less of a fascist.

There is a direct line between Hitler’s Nazi’s and the MAGA crowd. If you still buy into the big lie and support the insurrection, if you still believe Trump will make America Great Again, then you are a fascist… and have no right to the term patriot.

From August 2018:

Will we learn from fascism’s history?

…on its way to a dark place.

There is a radicalization happening in the Republican Party.  Belief in the big lie of a stolen election in 2020 is no longer a fringe belief, but has become mainstream in the GOP.   Conspiracy theories offered by fringe groups such as Critical Race Theory being taught in grade school, has morphed into acception of the Great Replacement Theory within the mainstream.   The idea that Jews and a cabal of elites are bringing non-white, non-european heritage peoples into our country via immigration intentionally to change the voting demographic to disadvantage whites…  A conspiracy theory offered by white supremacists for years, is now repeated by Republican politicians.

I predict this all goes too far, and candidates supported by this newly-mainstream republican radicalization can win in primaries.  They cannot win in a general election and will ultimately fail in elections this coming fall.   The concern this raises, is what will happen next?  Where will these fringe, now-mainstream right-wing ideas evolve to?  Where do they go when they find they cannot get their grievances addressed using the democratic process.  Will they give up?  I fear they won’t and there will be violence.  They will claim the elections are rigged.   A rise of militancy, and marches, and protests, and provocative violence is coming.

Trump and others, including Fox News celebrities have helped to mainstream these ideas, and they will be consumed by them, because you cannot play, as long as they have, with fire without eventually getting burned.   Their house will eventually burn down and will have to rebuild, just as our country had to rebuild after the Civil War…. Ironically after the assassination of the founder of the GOP who rid our country of the stain of slavery… and was thus vilified by the white supremacists of the time.