I posted the first two images yesterday; they’re from Robert Paxton’s book on the rise of fascism.

Now compare them to Sullivan’s rant in the second two images.

America isn’t collapsing into “disorder”; nothing in the past few months has been even marginally as bad as 1967, 1968, or Rodney King. Kenosha was a two-day affair; a few buildings burned down. The real violence was from right-wing vigilantes.

What’s unprecedented about this moment is the presence of a fascist in the White House, and a media class seeded with crypto-authoritarians in his thrall, who are intentionally feeding the idea of social breakdown to justify their own flirtation with racist authoritarianism.

Unsurprisingly, almost all of those crypto-authoritarians come from that exact reactionary class of white men whose cultural prerogatives Trump bills himself as the protector of. Funny, that.