One of the qualities of legacy media figures is that they don’t recognize that fascists don’t care about telling the truth, and that their movements feed off negative mainstream coverage. Congratulations, you just got played by a fascist.

Who thinks that a CNN journalist calling a social media savvy fascist “dumb” does anything but make that fascist *more* appealing to the people he’s trying to recruit, and make him seem more important than he is?

Jake just provided that fascist done of the best recruiting fodder he’s gotten in months. There’s also a high likelihood that this was exactly what the fascist hoped would come of that tweet. Getting dunked on by liberals is their business model.

He and his fans are eating it up, dining out on the attention.

These are people who regard figures like Mussolini, Pinochet, and Joe McCarthy as heroes and martyrs who were persecuted by the media and intellectuals of their day. They take it as a compliment to be called “dumb” by a CNN journalist. They are incapable of being shamed.

If I was someone with Jake's platform I'd either a) ignore this fascist or b) broadcast an hour-long deep dive into him and his movement exposing them for the bigoted, hateful, illiberal and potentially murderous fascists that they are.

Just calling them "dumb" does two bad things. A) It provides them with recruitment material and B) it encourages the general public to minimize the threat such people pose. "Oh, they're just dummies, nothing to worry about."

They are wrong, terribly wrong. But they are not dumb. This was the mistake people made about the Klan in the 20s and American fascist groups in the 30s. The people who helped squash such movement didn't do so with snark, they did it by taking these groups seriously as a threat.