What I meme to say about Trump is...
What kind of vermin calls people "vermin"?
“If it quacks like a duck odds are it’s a duck. If it goose steps like a Nazi odds are it’s not a silly goose. It’s a Goddam Nazi.”
-Me
Back when Trump ran and was elected in 2016 and way back when the Republican Party in Arizona fell under the control of the anti-Semitic Christian Nationalists wingnuts and the Pro-Life Evangelical Fanatics and cleansed itself of any and all moderates, AKA the RINOS, my colleagues in the newsroom thought I was an alarmist when I pointed out the parallels to the rise of the Nazis in Munich in the thirties. Mass genocide aside.
When Trump’s Proud Boys behaved like a private army of Brown Shirt thugs and when Trump defended the anti-Semitic Charlottesville Nazis chanting “You will not Replace us” and I pointed out the parallels between the rise of these cockroaches to the rise of the Nazi in Munich in the thirties I was dismissed as unhinged. A loony alarmist.
When various Republican leaders like Arizona’s State Senator Wendy Rogers, Kari Lake or Congressman Paul Gosar began publicly associating with white supremacist Christian Nationalist neo-Nazis and reposting their hate speech I noted the parallels with the you-know-whos in Munich in the thirties colleagues just rolled their eyes and winced.
When book bans and the marginalization of queer Americans and immigrants became commonplace and I connected the dots to Germany in the thirties I was ridiculed as hysterical.
When Evangelical Americans sold their dime store souls to achieve the political power they could never achieve by any other means than worshipping the Orange Calf in Mar-a-lago it calls to mind images from the thirties of worshipful Germans weeping in the streets at the sight of their Fuhrer, their savior as his motorcade passed by.
Even as he talks of mass deportations, firing disloyal civil servants, concentration camps and immigrants “poisoning the blood of America”, too many American Christians kneel at his feet, wash away his sins and sing adoration.
And Hitler did actually promise to make Germany great again.
When the Capitol was beset by devout insurrectionist thugs clearly serving the will of Trump and I noted it was akin to Germany’s bold Reichstag fire moment America yawned.
Like the Nazis in ‘30 the GOP is creating chaos and using scapegoats to win in 2024. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this tried and true formula out.
When I point out Trump quotes Hitler, and his deplorable amoral movement, cloaked in smug morality, persists just as the Nazis persisted in democratic election after democratic election until they won I am accused of being overwrought.
When propaganda mills like Fox serve their Hitlerian Big Lie campaigns more effectively than Goebbels and I mention this to fellow mentioners I am a hand-wringer.
If you read anything this political season I commend to you Rachel Maddow’s fine book “Prequel”, a well-documented history of America’s profoundly symbiotic relationship with Germany’s nascent Nazi movement in the thirties.
Fun facts abound. America’s favorite automobile industrialist, the great titan Henry Ford was, hands down, the world’s most prominent author of Jew hating propaganda and boy, oh, boy, did his writings inspire and warm the heart of rising candidate Adolph Hitler.
And Ford gleefully reprinted the vile “Protocols of the Elders”, the tract of lies that detailed the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. The American inventor of the Ford Model T may as well have fired up the ovens at Auschwitz.
American radio star and Catholic bigot Father Coughlin, the Sean Hannity of his day, spewed his Jew hatred to thirty million listeners in the thirties.
By D-Day that pig’s repugnant grunting was forgotten by history.
In the thirties millions of German Americans and Nazi apologists belonged to fifth column bunds in the good old USA, pro-Nazi glee clubs with firing ranges. lots of marching, swastika armbands for the kids and “Sieg Heil” festivals. Check out this video of a gathering in Madison Square Garden.
The popular American hero Charles Lindbergh was a pro-Hitler sap, arguing we should stay out of Europe and Hitler’ isn’t really all that bad just as old Adolph secured his grip on Germany and amassed his evil war machine.
My favorite link twixt us and them? Hitler found a roadmap for implementing the racial purity laws that would lead to the Holocaust right here in the good old USA.
In the thirties as the Nazis were rising to power Hitler sent Nazi lawyers to the southern United States to study America’s legal maze of racist loopholes that allowed segregation, pervasive discrimination and lynching to flourish in our alleged “democratic nation”. Conniving Hitler sought to do the same regarding Jews in his own “democratic” nation’s “legal” system.
In the Good Old Ante Bellum South white supremacy was Gospel in the Christian southern churches. Amen. Slavery was blessed by their white God and our master race theology, “Segregation now, segregation forever.” became America’s toxic racist ideology that would a century later dovetail neatly with the old world’s Teutonic blue-eyed master race mythology that Hitler used as a cornerstone for his movement.
Hitler really admired America. He even had a portrait of Henry Ford in his Munich office and reprinted his repugnant anti-Semitic brochures.
What was equally surprising and inspiring in Maddow’s book “Prequel” was just as much as Nazism is as American as apple pie, or streudel, as the case may be, so is our mongrel-born faith in diversity and messy democracy that at every turn moved ordinary Americans to reject Nazi efforts and espionage to poison our nation in the thirties.
Lest you forget, the mighty arsenal of democracy and an army of White-Italian-Irish-Latino-Japanese-Black-Native American-Yankee Doodle mongrels liberated the world from the evil grip of Hitler’s white master race and ground it into rubble grinding across Europe in little more than a year.
A thought Maddow shared in her book lingered in my mind long after reading her stunning treatise. She notes at one point that authoritarian Fascists celebrate and inspire cruelty. And yet they are profoundly sensitive to criticism, terrified of it, in fact. Ah, cruelty. I think of the sweeping cruelty of Muslim bans and separating children from their parents at the border. The cruelty of right-wing heroes like Alex Jones, the late Rush Limbaugh, or the defenders of automatic combat weapons at the expense of countless dead children. The dismissive cruelty Republican Governors adopted towards the needless thousands and thosuands of Covid dead. The cruelty of strict abortion laws or the scapegoating of trans kids. Good God, we can be a cruel people.
My old friends and colleagues were right.
I was a alarmist.
I still am a frantic old fool. As sure as Revere rode into the pitch-black midnight across Massachusetts hoping to awaken the sleeping citizenry of Lexington and Concord I will shout my conviction.
The fascists aren’t coming. The fascists aren’t coming. They’re here.
Trump has tapped a cruel, racist, anti-Semitic cancer deep in the American soul, in our neighbors and fellow citizens, that we must confront. Together, in the coming year, we must excise this contagion from our midst once and for all. Or lose the world’s last beacon of liberty, diversity and true democracy that cost our forebears, our patriots, our veterans so much blood.
In the Spring of 2016 an 8th grade student in my English class showed me a Venn diagram she’d made ON HER OWN showing the intersection of not-yet-45 and Hitler. A 13 year old could see it even then! How so many refuse to see it constantly baffles me!
Ha! I know, brother. I hesitated but then I thought what would Santa do?