I remember it well. Sadly it’s just as relevant today as it was then:
"what digby sez..."
Month: September 2024
Zach Beauchamp at Vox wrote this sometime back:
On November 21, 1922, the New York Times published its very first article about Adolf Hitler. It’s an incredible read — especially its assertion that “Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.” This attitude was, apparently, widespread among Germans at the time; many of them saw Hitler’s anti-Semitism as a ploy for votes among the German masses.
Times correspondent Cyril Brown spends most of the piece documenting the factors behind Hitler’s early rise in Bavaria, Germany, including his oratorical skills. For example: “He exerts an uncanny control over audiences, possessing the remarkable ability to not only rouse his hearers to a fighting pitch of fury, but at will turn right around and reduce the same audience to docile coolness.”
But the really extraordinary part of the article is the three paragraphs on anti-Semitism. Brown acknowledges Hitler’s vicious anti-Semitism as the core of Hitler’s appeal — and notes the terrified Jewish community was fleeing from him — but goes on to dismiss it as a play to satiate the rubes (bolding mine):
He is credibly credited with being actuated by lofty, unselfish patriotism. He probably does not know himself just what he wants to accomplish. The keynote of his propaganda in speaking and writing is violent anti-Semitism. His followers are nicknamed the “Hakenkreuzler.” So violent are Hitler’s fulminations against the Jews that a number of prominent Jewish citizens are reported to have sought safe asylums in the Bavarian highlands, easily reached by fast motor cars, whence they could hurry their women and children when forewarned of an anti-Semitic St. Bartholomew’s night.
But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.
A sophisticated politician credited Hitler with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on anti-Semitism, saying: “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels and ideas like anti-Semitism. It would be politically all wrong to tell them the truth about where you really are leading them.”
Hey, you’ve gotta placate the rubes, amirite?
Except it turned out he meant it.
Why would we think any differently about Trump?
The parents of this child should be ashamed. pic.twitter.com/vGwFHijzUn
— Molly Ploofkins™ (@Mollyploofkins) September 1, 2024
Nicolas Kristof says that we shouldn’t demean people like the parents of this little boy because they are good people who are just suffering from economic inequality. Just so you know, they’re still saying it.
But it’s true. He was never qualified and he didn’t learn anything on the job. He’s even more unfit than he was the first time since he is so filled with bitterness that he’s losing what few marbles he had.
Still, it really is something that
Senator Chris Murphy tweeted this earlier today:
The story of how VP Harris worked to diffuse a transition of power crisis in Guatemala – while Trump undermined the U.S. by supporting the loser of the election – is both incredible and a sign of how ready she is to lead.
Inside the White House Effort to Prevent a Coup in Guatemala Kamala Harris’s team helped deliver an overlooked foreign-policy win.https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/28/guatemala-coup-kamala-harris-biden-administration-arevalo/
Here’s the short story.
Biden gave Harris the job of reducing migration from Central America and by late 2023 her effort was showing remarkable success. Rates had come down 50%.
But a political crisis in Guatemala risked throwing that key country in chaos, potentially erasing many of her gains. President Alejandro Giammattei had just lost the election handily, but supported by Trump surrogates, he signaled he would refuse to give up power.
The inauguration of the winner, Bernardo Arévalo de León, was at risk. A Trump-backed Central American coup was at hand.
Harris did not hesitate. She led an effort to quickly sanction hundreds of Giammattei backers, sending a clear signal that there would be a huge price to pay for anyone who joined the coup attempt.
She sent her top foreign policy advisor to Guatemala to directly engage.
On the eve of Inauguration Day, the situation was still uncertain. Trump’s envoys were there, trying to stop the inauguration.
Along with @PowerUSAID, Harris’s team went back to work. They worked with Colombian President @petrogustavo to rally regional support for Arévalo.
Harris’s intervention worked. Arévalo was sworn in shortly after midnight on January 15.
Yes it’s scary how openly Trump now works to undermine democracy not just in the U.S., but around the world.
But in this case and this November, Kamala Harris is there to stop him.
That sounds like a success to me…
I knew Trump was actively undermining American foreign policy and national security but I didn’t realize that Trump and his henchmen were backing right wing coups all over the world. But it figures. In refusing to accept the 2020 loss, they continued to operate as a shadow government, doing whatever they choose to advance their own causes.
Will we be able to put this genie back in the bottle? I truly wonder. When you have “leaders” like Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio fully bought in, where is the pushback going to come from?
Look at that mess. That’s not some blog post written by me after a few drinks at 2 in the morning. It’s the NY Times! For reasons that are obscure they, and much of the mainstream media, is engaged in insane gymnastics trying to keep from accurately describing Donald Trump’s disintegration. It’s profound and it’s alarming.
Media critic Margaret Sullivan has a newsletter aptly called American Crisis in which she addresses the problem. She names former Timesman James Risen as one of the journalists she most respects (I agree!) and relays a communication she received from him this week:
“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.
The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.
Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.
“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.
There’s only one reason I disagree with Risen’s reaction. He wrote: “This story is unbelievable.”
I wish.
Yeah, I think most of us were appalled. I know I was.
Sullivan has many thoughts about all this, all of which are worth contemplating.
She rightly observes that the Times is still immensely influential and does a lot of excellent work but it’s politics coverage “often seems broken and cluess — or even blatantly pro-Trump.”
At the same time, when Trump does something even more outrageous than usual, the mainstream press can’t seem to give it the right emphasis. Last week, NPR broke the news that Trump and his campaign staff apparently violated federal law — and every norm of decency — by trying to film a campaign video at Arlington National Cemetery and getting into a scuffle with a dutiful cemetery employee.
Of course, the story got picked up elsewhere and got significant attention. But did it get the huge and sustained treatment that — let’s just say — Hillary Clinton’s email practices did in 2016? Definitely not, as a former Marine, Ben Kesling, wrote in Columbia Journalism Review:
“Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened — and crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.”
It came off, he wrote, “like a bureaucratic mix-up or some tedious violation of protocol,” not a deeply disrespectful moral failure, which it surely was. “The sacred had been profaned.”
And needless, to say, everyone knew that had Kamala Harris pulled a similar stunt it would have been screaming headlines for days. Trump gets a pass because well, he’s Trump. And his fans all love whatever sick, disgusting move he makes so there must be something right about it.
She notes that this has been going on for 10 long years now and has been the subject of endless criticism, to no avail. Nothing has changed.
And what’s more — what’s worse — they don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump. Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, “well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.” Maybe they simply fear being labeled liberal.
If you’re not on social media you don’t see just how defensive the elite media are to any form of criticism. Nobody is more thin-skinned and they don’t hesitate to show it. And it isn’t just the Times.
In the past I have felt most of the malpractice was unfair reporting of the Democratic candidate. And that’s certainly happening now. For instance:
It’s an opinion piece, but the headline and that picture were certainly a choice.
However, what I’m seeing that’s slightly different these days is in the Trump news coverage which has gotten exponentially worse. They are actively covering for him in ways that I haven’t seen them do before. During most of this unfortunate era, they’ve have at least attempted to present him somewhat realistically, even if it added up to “there he goes again.” Now it seems that they’re looking for ways to excuse, downplay, obfuscate what’s going on with him. They have completely capitulated to the normalization of his unfitness and his party’s march toward authoritarianism.
There are excellent reporters at the Times and all the elite media organizations. They need to do some soul searching and start asking some serious questions of their editorial leadership.
Moms for Liberty gets “a bit carried away”
When Donald Trump is not campaigning in a string of sundown towns, he’s rubbing elbows with Moms for Liberty. * The New York Times has the full story:
The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.
How in the world does this get past editors?
— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner.bsky.social) Sep 1, 2024 at 9:56 AM
Don’t get mad and don’t get complacent. It ain’t over until all the votes are counted. Do something!
* Okay, there are so many sundown towns in swing states (and blue states) that it’s almost hard not to end up campaigning in one, but still.
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Vance and AI
“He’s really thought this through and he is an incredibly twisted man,” Sam Seder tweeted in response to the JD Vance clip below.
As if the prospect of this man being one heartbeat away from the presidency isn’t warped enough, our technology-fetishizing overlords want to put the electronic brains behind driverless cars in charge of defining reality for us.
You’ve noticed it too: “Google has rolled out generative AI to users of its search engine on at least four continents, placing AI-written responses above the usual list of links; as many as 1 billion people may encounter this feature by the end of the year.”
I already don’t trust them:
Yet AI chatbots and assistants, no matter how wonderfully they appear to answer even complex queries, are prone to confidently spouting falsehoods—and the problem is likely more pernicious than many people realize. A sizable body of research, alongside conversations I’ve recently had with several experts, suggests that the solicitous, authoritative tone that AI models take—combined with them being legitimately helpful and correct in many cases—could lead people to place too much trust in the technology. That credulity, in turn, could make chatbots a particularly effective tool for anyone seeking to manipulate the public through the subtle spread of misleading or slanted information. No one person, or even government, can tamper with every link displayed by Google or Bing. Engineering a chatbot to present a tweaked version of reality is a different story.
There’s evidence that interactions with AI distributing misleading information can create false memories in about a third of test subjects. Read the whole thing.
I’m struggling to get users of the computer database Democrats use for voter targeting not to take at face value information its algorithms spit out simply because it comes out of a computer. It presents data the way it wants you to see it: through a keyhole that obfuscates the bigger picture.
Darth Vader: Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.