Fascism

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This excuse was most clearly articulated for a large audience on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show last week. His guest, Jesse Kelly, ranted that he is "worried" — and by "worried", he means he's threatening — that the "right is going to pick a fascist" because "if we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa/Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right's going to take drastic measures."

Carlson, far from pushing back on this "don't make us hit you" threat, performed his idiotic mouth-open fake serious face, as if this was an intellectual discussion about something happening beyond his control. In reality, his show is a nightly blast of encouragement at his fans to embrace their more fascistic yearnings.

The more "intellectual" version of this argument was rolled out by Glenn Ellmers at the American Mind blog of the Claremont Institute, a fairly prestigious conservative think tank that is oriented around the task of putting an intellectualized gloss on the reactionary impulses of the right. In the piece, Ellmers argues openly that "most people living in the United States today" — by which he clearly and explicitly means Democratic voters — "are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."

Defining most Americans as non-American, of course, is about justifying an all-out assault on their rights and freedoms. As progressive writer John Ganz wrote in his lengthy rebuttal to Ellmers, this is a "radically anti-democratic conceit of delegitimizing the citizenship of the majority of the country." But Ellmers, like Kelly, pretends to say this more in sorrow than anger, claiming that the left has forced this turn towards fascism (though he pretends it isn't fascism) because the liberal majority does "not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people."

Here's the twisted logic Trump supporters are using to defend their open embrace of fascism - Alternet.org