" Fascism twists and distorts democracy while retaining its imperative to seek a mass basis. It mobilizes and organizes the popular support it needs, and it seeks to render the lines between consent and imposition blurry. Fake news is its stock in trade, and corollary charges of fake news against evidence-based claims become its premium stock. It thus depends on mobilizing intensive mass energies to sustain itself as it weakens the media, controls intelligence, curtails the autonomy of plural associations, and either eliminates or constricts the integrity of electoral politics. "

― William E. Connolly , Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism