Some Republican Secretaries of State, Mike Pence, military leaders, conservatives in the Justice Department, and similar not-real-inspiring-politically people were some of the most important ones who put the brakes on Trump’s previous attempt at a for-real fascist takeover. Without them, I think there is an excellent chance that it would have worked, and we’d be currently living in a society which doesn’t have functioning elections or protections for political speech in media or on the internet.

I do understand that our elections and our media right now are not fully free. But that doesn’t mean every point on that spectrum is the same. People on the left sometimes like to say Reagan or Bush or Trump 1 or Obama or Biden are so oppressive that it all might as well be fascism, but people who lived through real totalitarian rule further down on the spectrum would tell you that no, no it is certainly not.