A fascist propaganda film at the January 6 Trump rally just before the Capitol riot?

Jason Stanley uses the f-word (fascism) in analyzing a film that was part of the Trump rally on January 6 that directly insight the storming of the US Capitol building. (Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda Just Security 01/04/2021).

The article gives a blow-by-blow analysis of a film that strikes authoritarian themes common on the radical right and also in the Republican Party, although it may be redundant at this point to talk about the Republican Party as something distinct from the radical right. (The film is embedded in the article, though I'm not embedding it here.)

He explains that we can safely assume that the message of the video was one that the pro-coup-attempt Trump White House produced, whatever Trump's actual direct role may have been in making it:

Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported. [my emphasis]

It's important to remember that the Big Lie of the "stolen election" of 2020 is currently a shared framework within the Republican Party generally, including the two main groups that Timothy Snyder recently labeled the Gamers and the Breakers. (Think of the Gamers as the Liz Cheney faction, the Breakers as the Josh Hawley/Marjorie Taylor Greene/"Gym" Jordan faction.)

Stanley takes a shot at the vexed question of defining fascism:

Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the “true nation,” and fold them into a global world government. The fascist leader is the father of his nation, in a very real sense like the father in a traditional patriarchal family. He mobilizes the masses by reminding them of what they supposedly have lost, and who it is that is responsible for that loss – the figures who control democracy itself, the elite; Nazi ideology is a species of fascism in which this global elite are Jews.

But he specifies what he means by it in the American context this way:

Fascism is not an ideology consigned to Europe. Black American intellectuals from W.E.B. Du Bois to Toni Morrison have spoken of American fascism. America has a long history of anti-Semitism similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, central to the ideology not just of the Ku Klux Klan, but to Henry Ford’s “The International Jew.” In its American version, communist Jews supposedly use Black liberation movements, control of Hollywood, and labor unions to destroy the nation in the service of a global elite. We should not be surprised at all by the rise of a fascist movement in the United States. And if it does arise, it would be no surprise if it did so in the party that keeps alive the “lost cause” myths of the American South. [my emphasis]

His concluding paragraph is a caution to avoid simplistic historical analogies while recognizing real processes that appear in different places and times:

Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated. [my emphasis]

I'm sure that Stanley is not suggesting that not being overtly genocidal is a sufficient bar to clear for a movement to be democratic or even non-fascist! On the contrary.