We’ve shown how the Media Research Center freaked out over former Trump chief of staff John Kelly calling out Donald Trump’s affinity for fascism — and it was equally upset when others pointed that tendency. Alex Christy huffed in a Sept. 10 post:
MSNBC’s Joy Reid previewed Tuesday’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris with a wild monologue on Monday’s edition of The ReidOut. For Reid, the “badass” Harris needs to beat the “fascistic” Trump “like he stole something.” Additionally, Reid claimed, without evidence, that the Supreme Court will name Trump the winner of the election even if he loses.
In Reid’s telling of history, 2020 never happened, “And as a backup, he’s counting on his big lie and embedded officials in key states who believe the big lie to simply refuse to certify the election in their states due to claims of so-called fraud by non-white voters. Throwing the election to the Republican-led House of Representatives or to John Roberts and the right-wing Supreme Court majority, both of which would absolutely name Trump as the winner regardless of the popular vote.”
Um, isn’t Reid pointing out that 2020 did, in fact, happen by highlighting the “big lie” about election fraud from Trump and Republicans (and the MRC)? He continued to whine:
Rolling right along, Reid mourned, “Despite how exhausting and deadly the Trump era was, and how it devastated our lives, our psyches, our families, our economy, tens of millions of Americans, our fellow Americans, want to go back to that era. They do not want to move on. They want to go back. It makes no sense to me, and probably not to you either. But that is reality.”
It probably makes no sense to Reid because she never bothered to understand those tens of millions of voters because while ranting about badassery versus fascism may give her audience a cathartic experience, it does not make them more informed.
Clay Waters huffed in a Sept. 23 post:
The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic, the journalistic political roundtable airing every Friday evening on tax-funded PBS, featured Atlantic magazine journalist Caitlin Dickerson accusing Donald Trump of not just racism, but using the rhetoric of “fascist neo-Nazi groups,” for his insistence on enforcing the borders and lowering immigration levels from certain world regions.
This is PBS in fall campaign mode, as in “don’t vote for the neo-Nazi!”
Tim Graham lashed out at Rachel Maddow for invoking the term to describe J.D. Vance in his Oct. 2 column:
On September 30, on the cusp of the vice-presidential debate, Maddow naturally sought to connect Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to a series of antisemitic and fascist revolutionaries who wanted the universities destroyed in the 1930s and 1940s because they spread “communistic” ideas. Viewers were “treated” to nine minutes of this lecture, which began with the founder of Walgreens Drug Stores dragging his niece out of the University of Chicago.
Then came more “unearthed” video of Vance from 2021, before he ran for the Senate. Vance gave a speech titled “The Universities Are The Enemy.” To Maddow, this sounds like the hayseeds are against “book learning.” Or Vance is rebelling against his time at Yale Law School?
Graham then effectively decalred it’s OK for Vance to go fascist at colleges because “you can barely find a conservative professor in our most prestigious institutions of higher education.”
When another former Trump administration official used the word to describe Trump, Brad Wilmouth spent an Oct. 16 post having a spasm of Stelter Derangement Syndrome:
Appearing on CNN News Central on Tuesday morning, CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter talked up former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley calling Donald Trump a “fascist to the core” in a book by Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, and mused over the possibility that Democrat Kamala Harris might try to draw attention to the attack during her interview with Fox News host Bret Baier.
They underlined this on screen: “WOODWARD BOOK: MILLEY CALLED TRUMP ‘FASCIST TO THE CORE.” They loved it.
CNN host Sara Sidner brought up Woodward’s new book, War, as she posed: “You have read Bob Woodward’s new book that is out this morning, and in it, he has this quote where Mark Milley calls Trump a ‘fascist.’ You’ve read the book. Can you put this in some context for us and give us some idea of all that is in the book, named War?“
As much as Wilmouth complained about this, he never proved Milley wrong.
Graham returned for another meltdown in an Oct. 18 post:
The jubilant headline on the front page of Friday’s New York Times was “Democrats Lose Fear of Calling Trump a Fascist.”
Reporter Jonathan Weisman’s first paragraph seemed daft. The F-bomb has “hovered” around Trump since 2015. “But for most top Democrats, it was a provocative term loaded with dread, historical import and potential incitement — best left unsaid.” It was?
Is the Times somehow skipping over Morning Joe and all the other liberals and Democrats who love comparing Trump to Hitler and Mussolini? Then there’s the question of “fact checking.” The “independent fact checkers” aligned with the Democrats never find calling Trump “fascist” or “Hitler” signal this is so accurate it doesn’t need checking.
[…]Weisman quoted the Washington Examiner finding that Democrats have called Republicans “fascist” since Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. “Fascism is anything Democrats don’t like,” they said. That’s true.
Christy went into comedy cop mode for an Oct. 24 post:
Former Trump chief of staff John Kelly has a habit of being the go-to source for those seeking tantalizing anti-Trump stories, even as other former Trump administration officials who have soured on him cast doubt on them. However, for the men of late night comedy on Wednesday, if an anti-Trump story confirms their pre-existing biases, it must be true.
The latest Kelly story includes allegations Trump praised Adolf Hitler, longs for American generals to be more like Hitler’s, and that Trump himself is a fascist. For CBS’s host of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert, Kelly’s claims were not that surprising, “He also falls into the specific definition of a fascist. So this is less of an ‘October surprise’ and more of an ‘Early autumn no [bleep].’”
[…]On NBC’s Late Night, host Seth Meyers also claimed not to be surprised by the news, “It’s amazing to hear an exasperated general go through the dictionary definition of fascism and tick off every box for Trump. ‘Is he a fascist?’ ‘Well, he calls his opponents vermin, scum, and the enemy within. Says he wants to round up his critics, and conduct a mass deportation. He talks like a fascist, he acts like a fascist, he’s friends with fascists, he compliments fascists. And the worst thing, he just got a pin that says, ‘I’m a fascist.’”
Fellow NBC host Jimmy Fallon reacted to the news on The Tonight Show by also breaking out his Trump impression, “Some political news, well, guys, the big story today is that Trump’s former White House chief of staff went on record to detail how Trump often said, quote, ‘Hitler did some good things.’ Trump made it worse today when he said, ‘Oops, mein bad.’”
[…]Over at Comedy Central and The Daily Show, host of the week Michael Kosta also claimed it is obvious that Kelly is correct, “Fascism is a nationalist political movement that builds a cult around an all-powerful leader who vows to protect his loyal subjects from racially inferior “others” and the enemy within. Now that you know that, upon hearing John Kelly calling Trump a fascist, you’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, durrr.’”
Christy served up more grumbling in a Oct. 26 post:
After days of declaring that Donald Trump admires Adolf Hitler and dismissing evidence that his scoop that Trump cursed in a racist manner at the cost of a military funeral was false, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, took his place in the anchor’s chair of PBS’s Washington Week with The Atlantic and declared it is only “allegedly extreme” for Kamala Harris to label Trump a fascist.
Goldberg first needed a definition, and for that he turned to fellow Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum, “So, you’re a scholar, among other things, of Soviet communism and authoritarianism generally. What is fascism?”
[…]If dividing the nations into traitors and non-traitors is a sign of fascism, then a lot of people who went all in on the Russia Collusion narrative have some explaining to do. Another sign of fascism is the belief in an all-powerful state, but that’ll be hard for Trump to enact while also promising to pursue a policy of deregulation and tax cuts.
Waters came back to huff some more in an Oct. 28 post: “Given that members of the Democratic Party or their media colleagues have tarred every Republican presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater a ‘fascist’ at some point, isn’t it a bit late for journalists to be finicky about how voters choose to apply the term?” Of course, the MRC and their fellow right-wingers have tarred every Democratic presidential candidate over the past half-century as a communist, so he’s being a bit hypocritical here.
Waters whined again in an Oct. 30 post:
Despite its alleged concern for the decline of civility in politics, the New York Times is actually all in on political slander and name-calling lately — when it’s in the service of defeating Donald Trump. For the second time in under two weeks, the paper reveled in the party’s new tactic of throwing the dirty word “fascist” at Trump to see if it would stick (not that they didn’t do so before but now they’ve turned it up to 11).
The Times thinks the plan is working for Kamala Harris – or at least, the Times now considers it politically expedient to claim it’s working for Harris, under the headline “Harris Aides Hopeful That Casting Trump as a Fascist Could Shift Election.”
This is all wildly hypocritical, of course — the MRC didn’t think “fascist” was “dirty” when it was tagging its political enemies with the word. MRC chief Brent Bozell used the word against George Soros in a May 16 post by Luis Cornelio:
Leftist billionaire George Soros is “behind an all-out effort to shut down” free speech in the United States, MRC President Brent Bozell declared on Thursday.
Bozell’s scorching remarks came in response to an MRC report that exposed Soros as one of the financiers of an anti-free speech cartel beseeching Big Tech platforms to censor Americans ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
“I think Americans really need to be worried about this man,” Bozell said during an interview on Fox Business’s Varney & Co. “I think he’s the greatest threat to democracy — not just in this country, but worldwide — and the things he’s doing are frightening.”
At the center of Bozell’s warning is a media group’s letter pressuring social media platforms to censor content under the auspice of “implement[ing] election-integrity policies to protect democracy worldwide.”
The letter, which Bozell lambasted for its “really fascistic attitude toward democracy,” was signed by over 200 groups and was led by the Soros-funded media group Free Press (not to be confused with journalist Bari Weiss’s The Free Press).
Bozell is peddling the old, bogus MRC lie that correcting lies and misinformation in the media is “censorship.” He doesn’t explain how, exactly, that is “fascist.”
Christian Baldwin spent a June 7 post ranting about the purported “legal assault that the Biden administration is waging against Elon Musk. The headline? “Free Speech Advocate Takes Aim at This Fascist Move by Biden Admin.” Baldwin provided no specific evidence that any of the regulatory actions against Musk and his companies is in any way “fascist” — even though the MRC-led war against NewsGuard for purely political reasons fits under that same definition of fascism.