Republicanism is now fully a fascist movement. The hoax claims that our current elections have been “rigged” against Republicans—claims that continue to be provably false—continue to be used to stoke the convenient fear and outrage of a base that now increasingly believes the party is justified in taking control of the government through the erasure of future election results or, as happened on Jan. 6, through violence. The party is not just anti-democracy: It is demanding adherence to a lie that has already resulted in deaths and will result in more, and purging anyone unwilling to go along.

This is the behavior of a cult. It is also the behavior of fascist movements throughout history, movements in which false propaganda is used to rally support for the violent “remaking” of nations.

That is the context in which this CNN report on Republican candidates’ near-universal adoption of the Big Lie should be considered. CNN does well enough in identifying the absolute falseness of the Republican claims, and a Republican pollster provides the grotesque context: If a Republican candidate openly admits that Donald Trump was beaten not by fraud, but legitimately, “the consequences are probably that you are going to lose” your Republican primary.

“This is a deeply held value by Republicans,” the pollster says. And “logic just doesn’t work” here.

That, of course, is a product of the hoax. It is self-fulfilling. If at any point Republican officeholders pushed aside their cowardice and told the base that Trump was lying to them, the lie would have evaporated. Donald Trump himself is a delusional, decompensating narcissist who has claimed “fraud” every single time one of his schemes hasn’t worked out throughout his business, entertainment, and political “careers.” It is his go-to excuse for his own failures; he not only openly broadcast that he would be using it again in the months before the election, there are plenty of quotes from the bumbling oaf over the decades to show that the gutless preener responds to countless defeats by claiming his plans only didn’t work out because everyone else was working against him. It is what he does.

At any point during Trump’s new delusional claims, Republicans could have taken the decent, noncrooked, patriotic path of cutting him loose to wallow in his failed authoritarian dreams by himself. Instead, the party went with him. From raised-fist Josh Hawley to the co-conspiring Lindsey Graham’s efforts to throw Georgia, the party decided to boost Trump’s delusions as a new party platform, seek to overturn the election results based on provable fictions, and assist in—or at least overlook—an attempted coup.

That is the context CNN is missing. It is very interesting, to be sure, to tick down the list of Republican candidates for state and national office and see that nearly to a person, all of them are either loudly promoting the Big Lie that led to an insurrection or are attempting to toe the line of neither overtly endorsing the hoax nor objecting to it. But it is not a campaign question. It is an ongoing act of sedition.

The Republican Party goaded their base into so believing false conspiracies about why Republicans lost a handful of races that they would have preferred to win, during a year in which American voters were presented with an incompetent, bumbling, buffoonish response to national emergency and death, that they were able to rally a crowd to violently attempt to erase the next government outright.

If they are still pursuing the same hoax, almost to a person, then it is intended as sedition. Stoking violence, seeding contempt for democratic elections, urging the base to reject those elections and replace them with new versions the party can be more sure of winning—these are the acts of traitors. The Republican candidates, from Josh Mandel to J.D. Vance to Dean Heller, are keeping the seeds of violent insurrection in their back pockets. Not to use, necessarily, but to keep the base occupied. And paranoid. And ready to accept other lies, if the future requires it.

The only reason to demand fealty to an abject hoax even after it has been proven, proven for all the world to see, that the hoax has resulted in violence and an attempted coup is because you believe the same violence and sedition may prove useful in the future. It would have cost the party not a damn thing to reject Trump’s criminal farce after violent insurrection proved the party could not serve both his whims and their country, but they did not. Across the country, they repeat it. They endorse it. They look to use it in their own campaigns.

This is a party that has chosen itself over democracy, over America, and over reality itself. These are candidates willing to betray their country—candidates who are betraying their country every time they whimper out their cowardly excuses. That is the context CNN is missing here. That this is not an effort to soothe one wealthy but gutless man’s ego. That man attempted violence. That man sat in the White House after rallying a crowd to assault lawmakers rather than abide by our democracy, sat and waited to see what effect it might have, sat and ignored even allies calling for help while he waited to see if his gambit would win.

The candidates who back him now back him over their own country. They stand in silent—or not so silent—alliance with the first attempt to overthrow American democracy since the Civil War. It is an act of ongoing sedition. They are lying about our elections explicitly so to make it easier to nullify them, and are saying that out loud, and are writing the state laws to do it.

That is the context. A fascist coup. It is not a coup “in slow motion”—it is being carried out with the same speed that past versions were. A first attempt, an evaluation of what didn’t work, a purge of those unwilling to go along, new laws passed wherever the coup supporters have enough power to do it, in order to dismantle the specific roadblocks that held things up, an absolutely rabid demonization campaign against whichever public officials foiled the attempt, and an unrelenting campaign to drill the same pro-coup hoaxes even deeper into the public brain. This is how it’s done.

These candidates are promoting a proven hoax, even after it led to violence, even after members of their party specifically used it to incite violence. There is no innocuous explanation. They are using a hoax intended to discredit democracy and replace it with something else. This is propagandism. It is specifically crafted to deceive.

Call these candidates what they are: anti-American. Enemies of our Constitution. Cowards. Corrupt.

There is no excuse for promoting, defending, or even staying silent on a hoax of this magnitude. The only reason to do it is a belief that your own political career is of more value than the peaceful transfers of power that America once held sacrosanct. Not a goddamn one of those people has any business in a position of power, and there is no version of journalism that should present spreading a dangerous anti-democratic hoax intended to mislead an entire nation as anything but the acts of corrupt, dangerous thugs.