I hate how popular discourse just digests and distorts history until it just neatly slots into whatever bullshit people are arguing about today.
The idea that "fascism" starts by liquidating the most vulnerable minority is absurd revisionism. First, you have the problem that the label of fascism is an amorphous one, and the only state ever to self-identify as fascist was Mussolini's Italy. You can talk about the other ultranationalist states that were inspired by fascist politics, like Shōwa era Japan, Francoist Spain, or the Estado Novo in Portugal, but we all know that online idiots really only mean Nazis. No one is talking about Falangists stealing babies from republicans or the Japanese enslaving Koreans when they talk about fascist oppression. So the idea that fascism always proceeds by targeting minorities really only applies to Nazi Germany, it is not a "hallmark" of all fascist or ultranationalist regimes. Hell, the Bulgarians were an Axis power, passed racial purity laws, but actively resisted deporting their Jewish populations during the final solution, and Japan never adopted any anti-Semitic policies.
Second, there's the question of the "fringe" that they keep bringing up. It's basically impossible for Americans to understand the position Jews occupied in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Germany. The more or less complete assimilation of Jewish people into the mainstream in America, and the falling away of religion as a major social cleavage in general, clouds people's understanding of history. The presence of the Jews as a small and isolated but ubiquitous element in major urban centers, oftentimes occupying a midtier mercantile existence, really was a different social dynamic. Add to that a long history of pogroms and the strong influence of Aryanism and racial eugenics as a prominent ideology across the west at the time and you have a recipe for the Holocaust. Black Germans were a much more fringe group in Nazi Germany, and were subject to the Nuremberg Laws, but there was never an organized extermination campaign the way there was with the Jews or the Romani. And even with the Romani, the weirdness of German racial classification system and its relations to the discovery of the Indo-Aryan (including the Romani languages) linguistic connection to Europe meant that some Romani groups were declared as racially pure in their own right, and there was a big question of whether they should go into some sort of reservation system to preserve them separately. Like with the Armenians, the Tutsi, the Bosniaks, the Rohingya, the Uighurs, or even the Tigrinya in Ethiopia just recently, the reason the Jews got targeted is specifically because they weren't a "fringe" minority. It doesn't make the targeting right, but it occurred specifically because they were relevant to questions of political power. The ubiquity or regional dominance of targeted groups is part of the reason that they can be useful scapegoats for the state.
If the extermination of problematic groups is something you want to argue as a "hallmark" of fascism, it certainly isn't the case that they target the most uwu helpless downtrodden people. That is a view that comes from modern identity politics and the oppression hierarchy, which these idiots marry to their misunderstanding of history. The entire argument that this is the narrow tip of the spear, that people need to "learn from history", is all stupid ahistorical bullshit. If anything, this is going to make the next time a group is actually targeted for extermination that much harder to bring attention to, since accusations of genocide will have all their strength removed from overuse.
