The U.S. is not immune
Rachel Maddow Monday night opened her show by asking why Donald Trump keeps echoing Hitler and Mussolini in his speeches. With the mainstream media finally calling him out for talking like a fascist, he is, as Republicans do, doubling down on it. His speeches, Maddow said, have become a “fascist dictator greatest hits mix tape.”
So why does he do it even after being called out? Because “this stuff works.” It gets applause. His audience eats it up. Because his adversaries hate it. And because the terminally insecure Trump will do anything, anything, to draw attention and adulation.
Maddow suggests stopping it is not rocket science. One thing to do is to refuse to participate in any politics that relies on treating opponents as monsters, a menace to be elimininated. Stand up for any targeted group. Support the legal and political systems that protect us all. Refuse to give in to the notion that we are “different kinds of humans, that we need an “iron fist more than democracy.” It’s not enough to call it out.
Over at Threads *, George Takei re-posted a comment I think all of us are our asking ourselves about now.
Post by @georgehtakeiView on Threads
I’ve featured a post by my friend Dave Neiwert, author of several books on eliminationism, that’s a sad comment on how things went down in Germany. Look again at this extract from “Ash on the Sills” I posted here.
Dean Obeidallah posted this provacative ditty on Threads:
Given Trump repeatedly quoting Hitler even after the backlash and the MAGA crowd cheering those lines, we must now call MAGA a neo-Nazi movement. I’m not being hyperbolic. We are confronted by a fascist, white supremacist movement that can NOT co-exist with a democratic Republic.
Seth Abramson replied:
THIS IS IMPORTANT.
Dean makes an absolutely critical point here.
If Trump is the unquestioned leader of the so-called MAGA “movement,” and he is, and if—years after we first learned from his ex-wife that he kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches by his bedside—he’s started using fully plagiarized, explicitly Hitlerian rhetoric about nonwhite immigrants in his 2024 stump speech, must we not call MAGA a neo-Nazi movement?
And must journalists not report this as a fact?
I say yes. What say you?
Stonekettle (Jim Wright) in a separate comment adds something more than rhetorical pushback:
Remember a couple years ago when “Would you kill baby Hitler?” was the big question on social media? And people agonized over the morals of their answer? Well, unless science invents a time machine and you’re tapped for the mission, you probably don’t have to worry about it.
But you know what you can do? You can prevent the NEXT Hitler and you don’t even have to smother any babies. Just show up and vote. And bring your friends.
Want a better future? Be a better citizen.
This is a battle of values. We have to assert the moral superiority of ours more than simply call out theirs. Here’s Wisconsin Democrats’ state chair Ben Wikler talking about how [timestamp 54:30 to 55:22]: “What you want to do is draw the circle that includes you and your audience around values, things that you all agree on, and then push the other side out of the circle.”
That’s just what Joe Biden did last year with his democracy speech in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Republicans did not like it. And it’s important that they don’t. It draws a contrast people on the fence need to see. It forces adversaries to have your conversation, not theirs.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez caught grief from the left and the right over wearing that “Tax the Rich” dress to a pricey Met gala. But guess what? Photos went viral. For a week, the internet, Fox News, and right-wing pundits were having the conversation AOC wanted to have about taxes. Alienate the right and they just might lend you their multibillion-dollar media empire to spread your message for you.
Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain,” chuckled when I said a key lesson I took from his messaging book came down to this: If you’re not pissing ‘em off, you’re not doing it right.
* It’s like VHS and Betamax all over again. (Remember, kids?) Like many of you watching Elon Musk’s slow, auto-erotic strangulation of the former Twitter, I’m signed up on several of the alternatives waiting to see what shakes out as the default replacement. On Mastodon (open source, federated), Theads (another Zuckerberg product), and Blue Sky. We’ll see.
Happy Hollandaise to all y’all!