Col­umn: Laugh­ing at Bri­an Stel­ter’s MAGA-Fas­cist Fic­tion

Is The New Repub­lic still an opin­ion jour­nal, or has it turned into a sci­ence-fic­tion mag­a­zine? For their June issue, the mag­a­zine put Don­ald Trump on the cov­er with a Hitler mous­tache over the head­line “Amer­i­can Fas­cism: What It Would Look Like.” They pub­lished eight fever-brained visions of Trumpian fas­cism in a sec­ond term.
For­mer CNN host Bri­an Stel­ter penned a fic­tion­al arti­cle titled “Revenge and Free­dom From Fact: On the media in a fas­cist Amer­i­ca.” It’s unin­ten­tion­al­ly fun­ny to decry “free­dom from fact,” and then write an entire arti­cle based on noth­ing but your own twit­ter­pat­ed pot­boil­er instincts.
Stel­ter offered a few real-world niblets – like ugly trolling tweets he received — in the soup of his MAGA-fas­cist fic­tion. He asked read­ers to “imag­ine” a sec­ond Trump inau­gu­ra­tion w …