What is Fascism; Fox's Baier Models Authoritarian Silencing; Videos from Oct. 11 & Oct. 18

We are in a time of transition, politically, when one party in a bipartisan system has exited democracy and is operating in another frame. The GOP has turned the rituals and forms of our election season to authoritarian ends.

A case in point is the “interview” of Fox’s Bret Baier with Vice President Kamala Harris. An election season staple, the major network “sit-down” interview with the candidate is supposed to give the public a sense of that candidate’s personality and platforms.

In keeping with Fox’s status as the de facto propaganda arm of the illiberal GOP, this interview had the opposite aim: to prevent the candidate from showing her competence or speaking about her experience as a prosecutor, senator, and vice president.

Baier’s real goal in this “interview” was to enact an authoritarian silencing of the political opposition, rehearsing the kind of media and political arrangements that would mark a second Donald Trump presidency.

That Harris is the sitting vice president gave her no status with Baier, who repeatedly interrupted her, even putting up his hand to stop her at one point. He made a mockery of an interview understood in democratic terms as eliciting responses from a candidate on their views, including making them speak about things they would perhaps like to conceal.

Here, instead, allowing Harris to speak at all was apparently seen as problematic, lest she be humanized or come off as intelligent or prepared, making Fox and MAGA’s carefully tested propaganda points less effective. The “language barrier” referenced in the caption, which was supposed to make Harris seem “foreign,” is actually an admission that Fox, in its journalistic practices, no longer speaks the language of democracy.

Fox hoped Harris would be led into a trap, diminished by the performance of silencing and flustered by a misleadingly edited video clip of her speaking. Instead, Baier’s duplicity was exposed, forcing him to explain himself and claim that he had aired the wrong clip by accident.

Fox, not Harris, came off as incompetent on this occasion. Yet we should never forget that the ideal of a second Trump presidency is a muted political opposition, where prominent figures of the “Biden regime” appear in prime time as protagonists of “show trials” and other moments of “retribution.” Then Fox can deliver its authoritarian spectacles undisturbed by any fidelity to the truth or adherence to norms of accountability.