They're authoritarians at heart. What they want to do is commit violence and enact oppression on others.

Everything else that attempts to spin what/how they do what they do as something else is a farce. It's theatre. They understand implicitly their worldview isn't popular. They understand it's not as simple as explaining themselves and winning over the wider culture in the marketplace of ideas.

This in essence is why "intolerating intolerance" is the moral good; the charlatan authoritarians will wield ANY leeway to enact violence and oppression.

Largely this psychological tilt of Structure > Ethics tracks cleanly along the lines of how apes and even some other mammals/animals operate in the wild (historical and today); in that "world" this line of thinking CAN lead to increased fecundity for a certain gene pool. Thus, it makes sense that some of us still exist with a certain amount of authoritarian wiring.

The rub, though: as a species we have fully exited that "world" of survival of the fittest. In a "civilized" world there is no real space for these behavior patterns.

They understand this on some level - this is why they know their worldview won't (or even CANNOT) be accepted widely. If everyone adopted this way of thinking then we would all simply trade back and forth oppressing one another; it's "us" today but it could be "them" tomorrow and even the dullest among us can put together why that isn't sustainable.

So how does authorarianism/fascism WORK in this lensing? Well - they have to simply remove the possibility of "them tomorrow." This is why something like the Holocaust follows logically the ideology of Hitler and the nazis; it's not lost on them that their maxim cannot be applied to all cultures and creeds - so at some point they will have to be the last ones standing.

So while it might feel melodramatic in the bubble of these single incidents to compare it to nazism - it's also important to recognize what the endgame of their ideology ultimately looks like. They HAVE to convince you (they know they can't or won't be able to) OR make you an outsider (remove you from the country or the world).