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GREENVILLE, N.C. Mark and Nancy Dawson think Muslims should be removed from the United States.

The couple drove an hour and a half from Seaboard, North Carolina, for Wednesdays campaign rally for President Donald Trump. They arrived early, setting up some lawn chairs in the shade of a tree as temperatures climbed toward 100 degrees outside Williams Arena.

I think Muslims should be kicked out of the country because Sharia law is not conducive to the Constitution, period, said Mark, a retiree in a camouflage Trump 2020 baseball cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with the words United States of America: Love It or Leave It.

I dont hate them, Nancy, a retired IBM programmer, said of Muslims. I just think they should go back where they can be together and have their own country and their own religion.

The Dawsons vision of mass deportation didnt feel like much of a fringe position at Wednesdays Keep America Great rally in Greenville. When the president took the stage, he reupped his call for four Democratic congresswomen of color, all four of whom are American, to go back to the countries they came from.

When the president attacked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) who came to this country as a Somali refugee before becoming a citizen thousands of people inside the arena broke into a chant of Send her back!

It was an arresting scene: a predominantly white crowd of thousands, many in red Make America Great Again hats, encouraging a receptive president to illegally deport one of his political opponents, who is a black, Muslim American woman.

\"Send her back\" chant breaks out at the Trump rally when he talks about Omar pic.twitter.com/JFZHc7eaOc

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"Send her back" chant breaks out at the Trump rally when he talks about Omar pic.twitter.com/JFZHc7eaOc
Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) July 17, 2019

To scholars of fascism who have been ringing the alarm bells since Trump began his climb to power in 2015 the rally in Greenville felt like an escalation. Like the U.S. just made another leap toward outright fascism.

I am not easily shocked. But we are facing an emergency, tweeted Jason Stanley , a Yale University philosophy professor and author of the book How Fascism Works.

Journalists must not get away with sugar coating this, Stanley wrote. This is the face of evil.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who is an expert on fascism and propaganda, saw historical parallels in the Greenville rally.

Trump has created a corps of supporters fanatically loyal to him who turn his latest racist messages into group rituals (chants, slogans) and who hate the people he tells them to, Ben-Ghiat told HuffPost.

All of this is consistent with the leader-follower relationship of fascist regimes.