Whether Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican Party or whether the Republican Party is the political arm of Fox News has remained an open question for some time. But while public attention focused on Capitol Hill’s budget battles, the pandemic and its discontents, and missing White women, Fox’s Tucker Carslon has settled the matter: the Republican Party is the political arm of Fox News.
That was not Mehdi Hasan’s thesis in his commentary Tuesday, but that is the conclusion one might draw. Republican politicians are indeed following Carlson’s lead in bringing the Neo-Nazi “great replacement theory” to the masses. Hasan lays out a string of mass killings inspired by the racist campfire tale of scary brown people comin’ ta git ya. Or at least, to replace ya.
Among Republicans the nods and winks are gone. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) are just three Hasan highlights as promoting rhetoric associated with replacement theory.
Hasan explains the threat:
I don’t know if I can overstate this point, but this is a deeply dangerous moment for America. Millions of people every night are watching cable hosts endorse a once-fringe, Neo-Nazi conspiracy about migrants and black and brown people and Jews. Millions of people are voting for politicians who used to be afraid to say the stuff out loud, but are now happily and proudly doing so. We know where this obsession with great replacement theory ends — with people being killed, in synagogues, and mosques, in Walmarts. This is not a story anyone should be telling.
As the nation’s sane fight to end the Covid pandemic, and the nation’s most heavily propagandized do the virus’ bidding, one wonders what happens when Fox News’ political arm takes full control of the government. Should Republican state legislatures further gerrymander state and federal districts, and should they gain control both of the federal House and Senate after 2022, and through manipulation of 2024 election results return Donald Trump to the Oval Office, it might be them comin’ ta git the rest of us.
Constitutional scholars and democracy advocates who gamed out worst-case scenarios ahead of the 2020 election “were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States,” writes the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker. Then Jan. 6th happened. Now they must contemplate what a Trump 2024 run might mean:
One real risk, they say, is that four years after the failed Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump and his supporters emerge in 2024 more sophisticated and successful in their efforts to steal an election.
“For me, the scary part is, in 2020, this was not a particularly sophisticated misinformation or disinformation campaign,” said Matt Masterson, who ran election security at the Department of Homeland Security between 2018 to 2020. Referring to some of the outlandish conspiracy theories of ballot fraud posited in the wake of the 2020 election by Trump’s allies, he added: “We’re talking about bamboo ballots and Italian satellites and dead dictators.”
In the future, Masterson said, these sorts of falsehoods are going to become more advanced and nuanced — exploiting genuine areas of confusion in the electoral system — and thus harder to combat.
A Trump victory, however affected, or a Trump acolyte winning office and backed by a Republican congress might mean ” the new president, intent on strengthening his own position and punishing critics, begins remaking the political and electoral system, using legal means to consolidate power and erode democratic institutions,” Parker writes:
“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a professor at Harvard University and the co-author of “How Democracies Die,” who is working on a successive volume. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”
But that scenario is more academic and less bloody than the one Hasan foreshadows and Carlson actively foments. Carlson’s GOP would remodel the U.S. to resemble Viktor Orbán’s Hungary where the authoritarian leader’s thumb already weighs heavily on the electoral scales.
With the armed revolt threshold breached on Jan. 6, additional violence is not unforseeable. The former president himself employed eliminationist rhetoric against immigrants and asylum seekers.
Two years ago, a scene of a church massacre from Kingsman: The Secret Service was shown at a conference of Trump supporters and doctored to show Trump slaughtering political adversaries. Trump himself has openly suggested whistle-blowers should die:
A federal judge ruled in April 2017 people were injured as a “direct and proximate result” of Trump’s comments. ABC News in August found “at least 36 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.”
Parker concludes:
“These are soft guardrails that have constrained politicians in the past, and what the Trump administration has made clear is that we need to harden those guardrails,” Ziblatt said.
But, he added, he worries that some are still too squeamish to come to terms with the potential threat U.S. democracy faces if Trump attempts to regain power.
“If you look at how democracies get in trouble in other places, it’s how executives once in office abuse their office, and I think people just don’t want to think that Trump could get back into the presidency,” Ziblatt said. “There’s a way in which we’re not trying to think of the worst-case scenario, which is Trump gets reelected, but I think what we’ve learned is you have to prepare for the worst-case scenario.”
Ziblatt, Parker and the Washington press corp remain too squeamish to consider the kind of worst case Hasan imagines. But I remember just where I was when news got out of the Rwandan genocide. Most Republican politicians may themselves be too squeamish to go there, but Fox-inspired armed thugs have proved they are not.
Update: Fixed a date in “Trump 2024 run.”