This week, radio host and frequent Fox News guest Jesse Kelly wrote on Twitter that America “needs a dictator.” Kelly’s assertion, part of a dialogue that included Covid denialism and warnings about “monstrous communists,” was met with an equally chilling declaration that he quickly agreed with: “Weimar problems eventually lead to Weimar solutions.”
The words “fascism” and “authoritarian,” once relegated to commentary from and on the fringe, have returned to mainstream political discourse. In many cases, according to scholars who study extremism, they are accurate descriptors for many of the most troubling actions on display from the right-wing’s leading figures. It’s not ideal that it’s become a routine occurrence to see media personalities, think tankers, and others whose large platforms give their rhetoric weight, call for a dictatorship in America.
It may come across as a lament, but in their eyes it is still a viable prescription for the supposed “woke mind virus” that has infected the country.
Because while it would be bad enough if Kelly was an isolated incident, aspirational fascism, as The Nation’s Jeet Heer called it on Twitter, has gained a foothold among the American right. Jeer was specifically referring to an entirely different tweet, one from the head of the right-wing outlet The American Reformer, proclaiming that “America is going to need a Protestant Franco.” (It would take another whole essay to discuss the ways that dictator Francisco Franco was also a terrible role model.) And the words of white nationalists like Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes — who agrees with Kelly that “we need a dictatorship” — have overlapped more and more with groups like the New York Young Republicans, whose president recently declared “We want total war.”
Beyond the approving nod to dictatorship in general, the specific dictatorship Kelly seemingly endorsed would in another day and age have been a bright red line that…
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