'Horrifying': Trump's 'fascist' rhetoric leaves CNN guest reeling
Former President Donald Trump's Veterans Day vow to "root out" the "radical left thugs who live as vermin" is "fascist" rhetoric that should put American voters on high alert, argued ex-CNN host Brian Stelter Monday.
This came in the middle of a discussion with "CNN This Morning" anchors about Stelter's new book, "Network of Lies," detailing behind-the-scenes tradeoffs that Fox News' leaders and personalities made to push Trump's election disinformation in an effort to keep ratings up — despite it being against some of their better judgment.
"What's so disconcerting, to some degree, is ... is the perverse incentives that create, you know, Fox's internal conundrum of, our viewers want this, even though it's not true, we have to give it to them because of stock prices, because of ratings, because of all of those things," said anchor Phil Mattingly. "What changes that?"
"What changes that is one-by-one, day-by-day, person-to-person conversations," said Stelter. "The awkward conversations some of us are going to have at Thanksgiving next week ... they're the ones we have to talk about, listen to, and learn from. There are examples of that happening. I write about that towards the end of the book. I wanted to write an optimistic story. I had to write it, because there were so many e-mails and texts that came out. And they were so revealing about how it worked inside Fox."
"But also, how it's working to this day," Stelter continued. "All of these big lies about the 2020 election, they're the predicate for Trump's re-election campaign. And I'm glad you just played that clip of him describing his opponents as 'vermin.' That's a horrifying clip, that's a fascist clip. Oftentimes, fascism is perceived as an expansionist, war-like idea from the 1930s, from Hitler's Germany, but Trump is this kind of isolationist fascist in terms of his rhetoric over the weekend. He goes to give a Veterans Day speech and talks about 'rooting out' 'vermin' from the left."
"That is shocking, and it's not the kind of thing we can ever get numb to," he added.
Watch the video below or at the link here.
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