The subject line to the promo email for Tuesday’s Amanpour & Co. on PBS marked the one riot the left didn’t get behind: “Fascism Expert Jason Stanley on the 5th Anniversary of Jan. 6 Capitol Attack.”
Stanley is a favored guest on PBS, NPR and the left-wing MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) -- which gives an unsubtle hint where PBS lies on the ideological spectrum -- and Bianna Golodryga, filling in for regular host Christiane Amanpour, and reporter Hari Sreenivasan treated his left-wing paranoia with reverence regarding the so-called "insurrection," a decidedly loaded term.
HOST BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, a lot can change in five years and many people watching the January 6th insurrection on this day and 2021 might not have predicted Donald Trump's re-election. When he returned to office last January, Trump pardoned groups of supporters who stormed the Capitol after he lost the 2020 election. While the president has made no official mention of the anniversary today, some protesters marched to the U.S. Capitol to commemorate Ashli Babbitt and four others who died in the rioting. Pardoning the insurrectionists is just one of many actions Trump has taken since returning to office that critics call an attempt to reduce January 6th to an afterthought in American history....
"Fascism expert" Stanley talked to correspondent Hari Sreenivasan.
HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: ….You are joining us on January 6th. It's the fifth anniversary and -- of the January 6th insurrection. You served on -- as an expert advisor to the January 6th Committee. And about a year after, you wrote that America was entering, quote, a legal phase of fascism, mourning that the insurrection was being followed by legal and legislative mechanisms, like rewriting election laws and restricting voting rights. Here we are now, five years later, has your opinion changed?
JASON STANLEY, PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO: No. And I think the Supreme Court ruling that has given the president essentially carte -- well, carte blanche over so-called official acts makes the situation we face even more dire as we've seen in this past year.
CBS's chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford called that anti-Supreme Court narrative “over-reported,” “patently false,” “profoundly irresponsible,” and “dangerous” for the country in a report late last year.
SREENIVASAN: I want to get to the legality of the Supreme Court in a second, but let's talk about Venezuela. Right now, does the -- you know, does the end justify the means? Because there are people that are rejoicing in Venezuela and outside who even the Nobel Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado, she celebrated this operation…
Stanley responded defensively, that Trump and Maduro are quite similar authoritarians:
STANLEY: Well, what would you think if another country kidnapped President Trump saying that he has done all these illegal things? He's not very popular. He's despotic. Obviously, that would be a violation of international law....
Prodded by his sympathetic interviewer, Stanley expressed his warped view of America, from his supposed safe space in Toronto.
STANLEY: ….When I go to the United States now, what I see is this very crazy situation being normalized. And people are like, see, you could have stayed. And I think I could have stayed without a doubt at this point. But, you know, this situation where you constantly have, you're like, wow, legally, they could target this huge swath of people. And that might include me or definitely could include me because I'm definitely calling the Trump administration fascists….
Sreenivasan asked about the “dismantling of certain agencies” and the renaming of the Kennedy Center as suggesting “we might be at a point of no return.”
STANLEY: I don't -- we are at a point of no return. There is no return from -- and right, the merging of state and corporate interests is, of course, a signature sign of fascism. But we are at a point of no return….
Naturally, Stanley is a fan of New York City’s new hard-left mayor Zohran Mamdani and suggested Mamdani or someone else could "sketch a new vision for America and really some kind of new country."
Or so says the transplant Canadian….
