Earlier this month, I attended the Unite the Right 2 rally in Washington, DC -- a gathering of white nationalists to mark the anniversary of last year's horrific violence in Charlottesville. Afterward, as a dense blue string of thunderstorms rolled in from the south, drenching everything, I found myself thinking about a quote by the late David Foster Wallace: "How do you promote democracy when you know that a majority of people will, if given the chance, vote for an end to democratic voting?"

It was from Wallace's " Borges on the Couch ," an essay about, among other things, Argentinian politics under Juan Perón, 20th-century populism, and the beguiling fragility of open societies.

This is America in 2018. The United States is being led by someone who openly defends white supremacists. Who calls the free press " the enemy of the people ." Who abuses the power of his office to attack and silence his critics. Already, his campaign machinery for the next presidential election is kicking into gear. We're about to come face-to-face with Wallace's complication: To support Trump and similar politicians could very well amount to casting a ballot in favor of dismantling the core electoral safeguards that allow such votes to be cast in the first place.

The rally itself turned out to be a flop. In retrospect, the biggest controversy to emerge from the weekend of protests and counterprotests had to do with an event that took place two days before the rally was scheduled to begin.

For nearly seven minutes, Kessler answered questions in a halting tone. "I'm trying to explain it to you and you're not listening," he replied when King called him out for claiming that his First Amendment rights had been suppressed ( not a new tactic ).

From there he grew less coherent. "You don't even know anything about my rally," he said. "You're going based on left-wing rumor mills."

To which King responded: "I'm citing the National Park Service, sir."

Eventually, Kessler fell into a rant on the biologic superiority of white men and women, arguing that it was "just a matter of science" that "Hispanic people and black people" ranked lower in intelligence. In conclusion, he lamented, "There's really no place where it's OK for me to speak."

Almost immediately, across social media and in traditional venues , both NPR and King came under heavy criticism and sharp questioning for conducting and airing the interview in the first place. What might they have done to provide more context? How should the independent press responsibly report on individuals like Kessler without supplying equal weight to their racist, hate-filled perspectives?

Any individuals who advocate for white supremacy in the mainstream media – seeking, in the process, to pervert our longstanding, if flawed, presumption of a shared objective reality into a blatantly false equivalency – are openly and knowingly participating in the destruction of democracy itself.

NPR said in a statement that interviewing people "does not mean NPR is endorsing one view over another." On Twitter, King explained , "I'm a biracial woman... Morning Edition is a notably diverse team who thought long and hard before airing this."

To be sure, these accusations and responses deserve attention. But considering our current political climate, in which outrage occludes so much else, it's also important to refocus the discussion back on Kessler for an entirely different reason: what his fascism portends for the rest of us.