Trump diehards are ready to embrace fascism -- and blame antifa for making them do it: conservative author

Diehard supporters of former President Donald Trump are increasingly willing to admit that they are ready to abandon democracy, and they're blaming antifa and Hunter Biden for supposedly leaving them with no other option.

Conservative author Matt Lewis writes in The Daily Beast that he's noticed an uptick in calls on the right to abandon democracy in favor of authoritarian rule, and he's found that they're already trotting out excuses about the left supposedly forcing them to embrace fascism.

Fox News contributor Jesse Kelly, for instance, told host Tucker Carlson that it's all but assured that conservatives will rally behind fascism in the coming years given the extremism of the left.

"The right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20… years because they're not going to be the only ones on the outs," Kelly said. "There's 60, 70 million of us. We're not a tiny minority, and if we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right's going to take drastic measures."

Lewis also points to a recent essay from Claremont Institute fellow Glenn Ellmers, who said that America now needs a "counter-revolution" because "most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term."

Lewis believes it's risible to think that American democracy is doomed because Republicans lost one election, but he thinks that Kelly and Ellmers are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy by telling their audience that fascism may be the only way to retake power.

"The real danger is the assumption that American democracy is doomed, and the nascent normalization on the right of the inevitability of a fascist leader emerging," he concludes. "This normalization feels like a harbinger of things to come."