Chauncey Vega, writing in this morning's Salon, looks at the Republican / New Confederate / Seditionist Party's drift into fascism, made clear by the recent embrace by the Republican National Committee of the January 6 violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 elections and install the Malignant Loser as a fascistic President-for-Life. He sees the mainstream media as complicit and frankly cowardly:
"In terms of the mainstream news media and America's political class, it reveals how deep the capacity for denial goes. Many of the same voices who insisted that the Republicans were not fascists and did not pose an existential threat to democracy also downplayed or outright dismissed the obvious evidence that Donald Trump and his cabal were going to attempt a coup to nullify the 2020 presidential election.
Many of these same gatekeepers and boundary keepers then claimed that the Jan. 6 coup was a one-off, a disorganized and spontaneous 'riot,' and that the long-term existential dangers were exaggerated. Why? Because they were invested in the idea that 'the institutions' had worked, and that Trump's coup was doomed to fail from the beginning, thanks to 'democratic norms' and the 'rule of law.' [snip]
The headlines of the month and central narrative of the year should be grappling with the following damning question: How did one of the country's two main institutional political parties come to embrace fascism and right-wing terrorism? What does this mean for the future of the country? These questions are not being asked in a sustained way. Instead, the media is defaulting to the story of the day: "hot takes," horserace reporting, Beltway gossip and both-sides-ism, amounting to a refusal to take any moral stand on the country's democracy crisis and the Republicans' responsibility for creating it." (our emphasis)
Many in the media are not only invested in the notion that democratic norms and the rule of law will always work, despite the Malignant Loser's ongoing sedition and control of his party; they're wary of crossing their company's advertisers and others with power over them. They must know that the Malignant Loser's cult will never be part of their audience, no matter how much they engage in "both siderism."
