Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

If your Trumper uncle starts going on about how terrorists, convicts and insane people are flooding into the country, you might want to tell him to take a look at this.

Trump’s on record saying that he’ll continue to say that immigrants from shithole countries are “poisoning the blood of America” and it’s worth taking a closer look at his specific claims. Not that there’s any truth in that statement whatsoever. But what exactly is he referring to?

The NY Times did a fact check which is characteristically too euphemistic and polite but it does show that Trump’s lies are worse than ever.

WHAT WAS SAID

“I read an article recently in a paper … about a man who runs a mental institution in South America, and by the way they’re coming from all over the world. They’re coming from Africa, from Asia, all over, but this happened to be in South America. And he was sitting, the picture was — sitting, reading a newspaper, sort of leisurely, and they were asking him, what are you doing? He goes, I was very busy all my life. I was very proud. I worked 24 hours a day. I was so busy all the time. But now I’m in this mental institution — where he’s been for years — and I’m in the mental institution and I worked very hard on my patients but now we don’t have any patients. They’ve all been brought to the United States.”
— during a rally in Nevada this month

This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that immigrants crossing the border are coming from “mental institutions” and jails. This particular story would seem to offer specific facts behind that assertion, but there is no evidence that such a report exists.

The New York Times could not find any such news account from the start of Mr. Biden’s tenure in January 2021 to March, when Mr. Trump told the same story at a Texas rally.

The Trump campaign did not respond when repeatedly asked about the source of this claim. But pressed this year by CNN for factual support for the tale, the campaign provided links that did not corroborate it.

Likewise, there is no support for Mr. Trump’s broader claim that countries are “dumping” their prisoners and psychiatric patients in the United States.

“We are unaware of any effort by any country or other jurisdiction to empty its mental-health institutions or its jails and prisons to send people with mental-health issues or criminals to the U.S.,” Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokeswoman for the nonpartisan research organization Migration Policy Institute, said in an email.

The claim evokes elements of a mass exodus that occurred more than 40 years ago in Cuba, Ms. Mittelstadt noted: the Mariel boatlift of 1980. Some 125,000 people fled to the United States, including inmates from jails and patients from mental health institutions freed by the Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

“But there has been no present-day effort by any country, to our knowledge, or any credible reporting by media or others that anything of the like is taking place,” Ms. Mittelstadt said.

Of course he’s referring to the Mariel boat lift. He remembers it like it was yesterday. Just like he remembers that Japan was shipping all its cars to the US back in the 1980. Nothing has changed for Trump in the last 40 years.

There’s more:

WHAT WAS SAID

“They’ve allowed, I believe, 15 million people into the country from all of these different places like jails, mental institutions, and wait till you see what’s going to happen with all those people.”
— during a rally in October in New Hampshire

This lacks evidence. Setting aside the baseless suggestion that all undocumented immigrants entering the country are coming from jails and mental institutions, Mr. Trump’s estimate of 15 million is not supported by the data.

Customs and Border Protection data shows that U.S. officials recorded nearly eight million encounters at its borders from February 2021, the first full month of Mr. Biden’s presidency, to October 2023.

But even then, “encounter does not mean admittance,” Tom Wong, an associate professor of political science and director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email. “In fact, most encounters lead to expulsions.”

For example, C.B.P. data shows that about 2.5 million expulsions occurred under Title 42, a health rule that used the coronavirus as grounds for turning back immigrants illegally crossing the border, from February 2021 until the policy ended in May.

The number of encounters also are based on events, not people, and therefore could include the same person more than once.

The exact number of people who have entered the country without authorization is hard to pin down because there are also “gotaways” — people who crossed into the country illegally and evaded authorities.

But the federal, observational estimates of such people also would not support Mr. Trump’s claim. The secretary of homeland security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, estimated at a recent hearing that there had been more than 600,000 gotaways in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September. That is also the estimate for fiscal year 2022, according to an inspector general report. And there were more than 391,300 in fiscal year 2021, which began in October 2020 under Mr. Trump and ended in September 2021 under Mr. Biden.

In terms of migrants with criminal records, officials encountered nearly 45,000 at ports of entry since the start of fiscal year 2021. Between ports of entry in that period, officials encountered another 40,000 noncitizens with criminal records.

While Mr. Trump in this instance claimed the country had allowed 15 million migrants to enter, he has at other times predicted that would be the total figure by the end of Mr. Biden’s term. That would be larger than the estimated total population of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States — about 10.5 million in 2021, according to the Pew Research Center.

WHAT WAS SAID

“In the past three years, Biden has spent over $1 billion to put up illegal aliens in hotels, some of the most luxurious hotels in the country. Meanwhile, we have 33,000 homeless American veterans. Can you believe it?”
— during a rally in November in New Hampshire

This needs context. Mr. Trump’s figure of homeless veterans refers to a 2022 estimate by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That number includes about 19,500 veterans who were in shelters when the count was conducted. And both the 2022 estimate and a new tally for 2023 — which reported nearly 35,600 homeless veterans — are actually down slightly from when Mr. Trump was in office, continuing an overall downward trend since 2009.

As for migrant housing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracted in 2021 with a nonprofit group to house border arrivals at a handful of hotels in Texas and Arizona, as a 2022 homeland security inspector general report details. The contract totaled more than $130 million and ended in 2022. The Trump administration also turned to hotels in 2020 to hold migrant children and families before expelling them.

The Biden administration has not directly spent $1 billion to place immigrants in hotels. But cities are indeed facing steep costs for sheltering and caring for border arrivals — including through hotels. The Trump campaign did not indicate where Mr. Trump had obtained the $1 billion figure, but it is possible he was referring to a federal initiative that provides funding to local governments and nongovernment groups to help offset those costs.

The program was in fact first authorized through 2019 legislation signed by Mr. Trump. While it allows nonfederal entities to seek grants for housing migrants in hotels and motels, it is not exclusive to that. Congress provided the program $110 million in fiscal year 2021 and $150 million in fiscal year 2022.

Lawmakers recently replaced the initiative with a new shelter and services program. For fiscal year 2023, officials earmarked $425 million for the old program and $363.8 million for the new one.

All told, the federal government has allocated about $1 billion since fiscal year 2021, which includes the last few months under the Trump administration, toward local efforts to feed and shelter migrants around the country — not only hotel expenses.

While FEMA discloses recipients of the funding, it does not say how much each grant is used specifically on hotel costs.

WHAT WAS SAID

“We cannot forget that the same people that attacked Israel are right now pouring in at levels that nobody can believe into our beautiful U.S.A. through our totally open border.”
— during a rally in Iowa in October

This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump offered no evidence that people affiliated with Hamas, the militant group that staged a brutal assault on Israel in early October, are “pouring” into the country at record levels. And experts say they are unaware of data that would support that contention.

If the former president’s statement was meant to convey that terrorists more generally are “pouring in” at the border, he could be referring to the rising number of encounters at the southern border with people on a terrorism watch list. The list includes known and suspected terrorists as well as people affiliated with them.

A total of 169 noncitizens on that list tried to illegally enter the United States at the southern border in fiscal year 2023, which ended in September, up from three in fiscal year 2020, according to C.B.P. statistics.

Still, it is unclear what that says about the terrorism threat, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. There is no record of a terrorist attack being committed on American soil by an immigrant who crossed the southern border illegally. (In 2008, three brothers who had come to the United States illegally years earlier as children, from Yugoslavia, were convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey.)

Apprehended individuals on the list are supposed to remain in government custody as they await removal proceedings, Mr. Nowrasteh said.

You will note that many of these issues were present during his term. The only reason things got substantially better at the border in his last year is because the whole world was locked down with a deadly pandemic.

This toxic rhetoric is so clearly designed to gin up this issue once again. The right loves it because they are racists and being allowed to spew their hate gives them a major thrill. But everyone else needs to keep their heads and recognize that this long term problem waxes and wanes and start thinking about the future as climate change exacerbates it. Crude xenophobia and rounding up people to put them in camps isn’t going to solve anything.

Climate change is the big enchilada and, in my humble opinion, should be at the top of the agenda for anyone under the age of 40. All the things they care about are going to be subsumed by this issue in any case.

Merry Christmas!

This video from 1987 has been making the rounds. It’s hilarious. And it’s so him:

Quite the exchange on Crossfire with Donald Trump in 1987 when asked what books he reads. pic.twitter.com/90lJ2FOIbD

— Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) August 28, 2020

Liars gonna lie:

He’s always got some excuse.

It’s really looking like a soft landing:

I still automate this graphic but took it out of active circulation, but it is worth sharing. We focus on 3-, 6-, and 12- month changes for good reasons, the monthly data is noisy.

But look at the sharp drop-off in monthly this year. It's a giant cliff, and it's just wild. /2 pic.twitter.com/Nr8xmgxCwL

— Mike Konczal (@mtkonczal) December 22, 2023

There were two stories for how to get disinflation:
– a reopening supply-side story like the late 1940s and early 1950s
– an inertial 1970s and early 1980s one.

We can look at what we just went through and see how we matched up. It looks *shockingly* like 1948 and 1952. /4 pic.twitter.com/CbVRVhxEte

— Mike Konczal (@mtkonczal) December 22, 2023

To see the inflation vibes shift, contrast now to predictions a year ago. Furman:

"Soft landing, at best a 10% chance [..] most likely [2023] scenario is we have a mild recession, it brings inflation down, but it brings it down to something like 3.5%." /6 https://t.co/8ozaXVvM6m

— Mike Konczal (@mtkonczal) December 22, 2023

I understand why everyone is nervous, even I am. But the reality is that the inflation picture has shifted dramatically, exactly as a 'soft landing' and the experience of reopenings predicted.

It's time for the Fed to balance its mandates now, lest it blow this historic win. 8/8

— Mike Konczal (@mtkonczal) December 22, 2023

George III wrote love letters

Heather Cox Richardson remembered Saturday as the date in 1783 when General George Washington stood before the Confederation Congress, meeting in the senate chamber of the Maryland State House, and resigned his wartime commission. “Negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War on September 3, 1783.” The defeated British had pulled their final troops from New York City.

Most likely Richardson relied on fake news accounts. Important details are missing.

It was in fact “the largest audience to ever witness a general’s address, period, both in person and around the globe,” a Washington aide later insisted.

But lefty historians transcribed mainstream media accounts of the speech:

“The great events on which my resignation depended having at length taken place; I have now the honor of offering my sincere Congratulations to Congress and of presenting myself before them to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the Service of my Country,” he told the members of Congress.

Fake News! Washington never resigned. He claimed that the Treaty of Paris was a fraud. In fact, he’d beaten the British Army so soundly that he’d accepted their unconditional surrender at Appomattox and performed a traditional sword dance in celebration.

“Nobody knows more about defeating the British Empire,” Washington bellowed. “Not since Alexander….”

“Happy in the confirmation of our Independence and Sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States of becoming a respectable Nation, I resign with satisfaction the Appointment I accepted with diffidence.”

Do your research! Only a shithole Nation would ask him to step aside, Washington actually said. “Annoint me or you won’t have a country anymore.”

A yooge crowd of Make America George Again groupies and Sovereign Citizens outside the State House chanted, “Stop the Steal!” and clashed with Annapolis police.

“Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.”

Propaganda! Many people say Washington never took orders, he gave them. Not directly, of course. He spoke in a kind of code. His closest aides — big, strong men — knew the code and accepted Dear Leader’s direction eagerly with tears in their eyes.

True facts: King George III was so impressed with the size of the Continental Army and with Washington’s manliness that he’d dispatched a series of love letters after the war calling him, among other things, “Your Excellency,” and recommending he lead the new country in perpetuity. No way did Washington retire to Marth-a-Lago.

More librul indoctrination, I’m telling ya.

“Utterly bizarre”

Is this a joke?

Clarence Thomas: The Best and Most Incorruptible Supreme Court Justice in U.S. History

This Friday encomium to Clarence Thomas, is it Steven Calabresi’s or The Volokh Conspiracy’s idea of a joke?

Justice Thomas’s brilliance, and commitment to originalism shine through in all of his opinions. He is more consistent, steady, and reliable than any other justice on the Supreme Court. He almost never follows precedent, but he always follows the original public meaning of the text of the Constitution. He is the very best justice out of 116 to have ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court better even than my old boss Justice Antonin Scalia. Justice Thomas not only talks about the importance of being an originalist; he practices originalism in every majority opinion, concurrence, or dissent that he writes.

That’s some bad-ass weed.

“This is utterly bizarre.” — Popehat

Left wing bias, and a disinclination to read Justice Thomas’s opinions, has so skewed our public perception of him that no-one realizes what former Second Circuit Chief Judge Ralph Winter once told me is true: “Clarence Thomas is quite simply a genius.”  Moreover, Justice Thomas has such a clear body of rules, which he consistently follows in case after case over 32 years on the bench that it is as obvious as the day is long that he is incorruptible in every sense of that word.  Justice Thomas would never “bend” the law to please Justice Scalia, his closest friend; his wife Ginni Thomas, who is active as she has every right to be in politics, or his good and close friend; the Koch brothers; Texas billionaire Harlan Crow; or anyone else.   Clarence Thomas cannot be “bought.”  He is completely and utterly incorruptible as anyone who takes the time to read the opinions, which he produces prolifically can plainly see. 

Why shouldn’t Clarence Thomas accept (and not declare) expensive gifts and luxury vacations from billionaires?

If Congress had adjusted for inflation the salary that Supreme Court justices made in 1969 at the end of the Warren Court, Justice Thomas would be being paid $500,000 a year, and he would not need to rely as much as he has on gifts from wealthy friends.

When was the last time Reason argued for cost-of-living adjustments? No matter. Thomas the Destitute is due what’s his.

“I thought the quotes from here were sarcastic paraphrases but here is one of the most important figures in the conservative legal movement articulating its fundamental principle: the rules do not apply to us because we are special” — Adam Serwer

Clarence Thomas grew up dirt poor as is made clear in his superb autobiography My Grandfather’s Son.  He has devoted his entire professional life as a lawyer to serving in government jobs in which he has been grossly underpaid.  Under these circumstances, Thomas, who again is incorruptible, as his 32 years of judicial opinions all show, has every right to accept gifts from wealthy friends.

It’s his friggin’ right, dammit! Like women’s right to bodily autonomy … except not.

So was this post by Calabresi (8/10/2023) a joke too?

Trump Is Disqualified from Being on Any Election Ballots

Don’t bother looking. A month later Professor Calabresi (Northwestern University) made “an extraordinary about-face” (New York Times, 9/18/2023):

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he said he had been persuaded by an opinion article in that newspaper that the provision — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — did not apply to Mr. Trump.

That would be the “Trump is not an officer of the United States” (and the presidency not an office under the Constitution) argument soundly rejected by the Colorado Supreme Court last week.

“Let me be clear,” Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale, said [in September] on his podcast. “This is a genuinely stupid argument.”

But self-serving, so what of it? (There’s more than rum in that eggnog, ya think?)

“the crudeness of that column was something else. it’s not even really an argument so much as an assertion that clarence thomas deserves to have whatever he wants because he’s clarence thomas, which is a weird thing for a libertarian magazine to publish.”  —GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Oh, what goodies will Justice Thomas and the the Federalist Society find under their trees tomorrow morning? A little coke … I mean Koch?

(He’s not a horse…)

I wrote about this the other day but it’s nice that the NY Times is putting this information into wider circulation. I hope they don’t just leave it at that. It’s evidence of Trump’s naturally fascistic personality and more people should know about it. It informs all his recent Nazi rhetoric:

In 2020, President Donald J. Trump gave a campaign speech in Minnesota railing against refugees and criticizing protests for racial justice. Toward the end, he wrapped up with standard lines from his stump speech and praise for the state’s pioneer lineage.

Then, Mr. Trump stopped to address his crowd of Minnesota supporters with an aside seeming to invoke a theory of genetic superiority.

“You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?” Mr. Trump told the audience. “The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Mr. Trump’s mention of the racehorse theory — the idea adapted from horse breeding that good bloodlines produce superior offspring — reflected a focus on bloodlines and genetics that Mr. Trump has had for decades, and one that has received renewed attention and scrutiny in his third bid for president.

In recent months, Mr. Trump has drawn widespread criticism for asserting that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” a phrase that he said first in a right-wing media interview and has in the last week repeated on the campaign trail.

As with the speech in 2020, Mr. Trump’s remarks have been criticized by historians, Jewish groups and liberals, who said his language recalled the ideology of eugenics promulgated by Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in America.

In a radio interview on Friday, Mr. Trump again defended his use of the phrase “poisoning the blood.” He dismissed criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not a student of Hitler” and that his statement used “blood” in crucially different ways, though he did not elaborate.

But much as news articles, biographers and books about his presidency have documented Mr. Trump’s long interest in Adolf Hitler, they have also shown that Mr. Trump has frequently turned to the language of genetics as he discusses the superiority of himself and others.

Mr. Trump was talking publicly about his belief that genetics determined a person’s success in life as early as 1988, when he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune.

He would connect those views to the racehorse theory in a CNN interview with Larry King in 2007.

“You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better,” Mr. Trump told Mr. King. “But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.”

Three years later, he would tell CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse” and likening his “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.

Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a biography of Mr. Trump in 2015, has credited this view to Mr. Trump’s father. Mr. D’Antonio told PBS’s “Frontline” in a 2017 documentary that members of the Trump family believed that “there are superior people, and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring.”

In 2019, Mr. D’Antonio told The New York Times that Mr. Trump had said that a person’s genes at birth were a determining factor in their future, more so than anything they learned later.

The former president has not just promoted his own “good genes,” but has repeatedly lauded those of British business leaders, Christian evangelical leaders, a top campaign adviser and the American industrialist Henry Ford.

[…]

In Friday’s radio interview, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump to explain his use of the phrase, pressing him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”

The former president said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.”

Mr. Trump has long had a documented interest in Hitler. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.

He once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “totally loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser.

On another occasion, he told the same aide that “well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.

The former president has denied making both comments. On Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase — “poisoning the blood” — differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.

“They say that he said something about blood,” Mr. Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.” He did not explain the distinction.

As Sam Seder quipped yesterday on Majority Report (in Trump’s voice) “I didn’t copy Hitler, he copied me!”

Trump is an admirer of Hitler. of course he is. He admires all tyrants and dictators.All the way back in the 1980s he said this about the fall of the Soviet Union:

“What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with [former Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”

Tiananmen Square:

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak…as being spit on by the rest of the world.”

You think the guy who takes pride in his “good German blood” doesn’t admire Hitler? Please.

Happy Hollandaise, folks. If things go right, we may be rid of this monster in our political lives in less than a year.

How much longer are we going to have to put up with these infantile temper tantrums?

They’re children:

Three Republican lawmakers from battleground states are trying to kick President Biden off their states’ ballots to “showcase the absurdity” of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the state’s ballot.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled this week that former President Donald Trump engaged in “insurrection” and is ineligible to appear on the state ballot. 

“The absurdity of radical Democrat judges removing Donald Trump from the ballot in Colorado will be a stain on the American political system for decades,” state Reps. Aaron Bernstine of Pennsylvania, Charlice Byrd of Georgia and Cory McGarr of Arizona said in a press release. “By their very own interpretation of the law Joe Biden is 100% not eligible to run for political office.”

“Democrats’ insane justification to remove Trump can just as easily be applied to Joe Biden for ‘insurrection’ at the southern border and has alleged corrupt family business dealings with China,” they said.

No. Children, listen up. There is a specific definition of “insurrection” and those examples do not fit. That’s very stupid. You can attempt to impeach Joe Biden for those things, but that’s not an insurrection, which is what’s required in order to deny a candidate a place on the ballot. You are big cry babies and you should be embarrassed.

Maybe they need a time out. Or better yet, give them a bottle and put them to bed. Let them cry it out.

Happy Hollandaise!

Laura Ingraham has a new theory. She thinks “the left” is torturing Dear leader with all this nasty “accountability” in order to get his followers so darned mad that they start to riot, giving “us” the excuse to declare martial law and crack down on them.

I’m serious:

“Given what we are seeing in the courts, at the DOJ, and even in state AG offices, and given Democrats’ ‘Trump is Hitler’ rhetoric—is it not logical, at least to consider, maybe even to assume, that some on the left are hoping to spark some type of civil unrest here?” Ingraham said.

“Which would be followed, of course, by a mass crackdown on civil liberties, or the declaration of maybe a nationwide emergency?

This isn’t a novel idea, of course. It’s exactly what Trump wanted to do during the George Floyd protests and what they planned to do if their fake elector scheme worked and the supporters of people who actually won the election took to the streets.

Basically, Ingraham is saying, “nice little country you have here, be a shame if anything happened to it.” If people stop demanding accountability for their leader’s multiple crimes, the trashing of the country doesn’t have to happen. Remember that.

Happy Hollandaise.

Donald Trump told Hugh Hewitt that he would observe the peaceful transfer of power next time. Just as he did before.

“Of course,” Trump responded to Hewitt when asked if he would hand over power peacefully if reelected. “And I did that this time. And I’ll tell you what. The election was rigged, and we have plenty of evidence of it. But I did it anyway.”

Uhm, no he didn’t. Just look at that video above.

I happened upon a piece in Just Security from February 2021 about the fascist parallels with Trump’s coup and the fascist themes in that film they showed at the ellipse to gin up the crowd. It seems newly …. relevant:

Fascist thought

Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s first and most famous book, is entitled “Years of Study and Suffering in Vienna.” In it, he documents what he describes as his gradual realization that behind the various institutions of power were the Jews. His enlightenment supposedly begins with the entertainment industry, where he remarks that “[t]he fact that nine tenths of all literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical idiocy can be set to the account of a people, constituting hardly one hundredth of all the country’s inhabitants, could simply not be talked away; it was plain truth.” But it was, Hitler writes, when he “recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy” that “the scales fell from [his] eyes.” Hitler describes a growing sense, foundational to the ideology the book delineates, the ideology of Nazism, that Jews were controlling the apparatus of the state, both as important party politicians in the Social Democratic Party, and as operators behind the scenes of the press and other institutions.

In Nazi ideology, Jews are represented by an unholy alliance between Jewish capitalists and Jewish communists. The goal of the Jewish plot is to destroy national states, replacing them by a world government run by Jews. This diabolical Jewish plot involves destroying the character of individual nations, by flooding them with immigrants, and empowering minority populations. Hitler describes the German loss in World War I as part of this plan, a “stab in the back” of the German people by Jewish traitors seeking the ruin of the nation. In Nazi ideology, liberal democracy is represented as a corruption, a mask for this takeover by a global elite. Hitler reveals his true attitude toward liberalism in Mein Kampf, when he writes (in the characteristically sexist terms of Nazi ideology):

Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an identifiable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner…

Fascism is a patriarchal cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by a treacherous and power-hungry global elite, who have encouraged minorities to destabilize the social order as part of their plan to dominate the “true nation,” and fold them into a global world government. The fascist leader is the father of his nation, in a very real sense like the father in a traditional patriarchal family. He mobilizes the masses by reminding them of what they supposedly have lost, and who it is that is responsible for that loss – the figures who control democracy itself, the elite; Nazi ideology is a species of fascism in which this global elite are Jews.

The future promised by the fascist leader is one in which there are plentiful blue collar jobs, reflecting the manly ideals of hard work and strength. In Nazi propaganda, many white collar jobs, the domain of Jews – running department stores, banking – were for the idle. And the fascist nation’s heart and soul is the military – as Hitler writes, “[w]hat the German people owes to the army can be briefly summed up in a single word, to wit: everything.” The fascist future is a kind of restoration of a glorious past, but a modern version – replete with awesome technology that glorifies the nation to the world. The German V-2 rocket was a characteristic representation of Nazi might. The fascist future is, in the famous description of Jeffrey Herf, a kind of reactionary modernism.

Fascist propaganda

Fascism uses propaganda as a way of mobilizing a population behind the leader. Fascist propaganda creates an awesome sense of loss, and a desire for revenge against those who are responsible. In the face of the supposed betrayal of the nation during World War I by Jewish “vipers,” Hitler describes the proper response to have been to place the “leaders of the whole movement…behind bars.” Hitler writes, “[a]ll the implements of military power should have been ruthlessly used for the extermination of this pestilence. The parties should have been dissolved, the Reichstag brought to its senses, with bayonets if necessary, but, best of all, dissolved at once.” The goal of fascist propaganda is to mobilize a population to violently overthrew multi-party democracy and replace it with the leader…

II. The Movie Shown at the Ellipse

 This history, both European and American, illuminates the dangers we face today, laid bare in the video. In it, Trump is repeatedly represented as the nation’s father figure. It is laced through with images of masculinity, and mournful loss at the hands of traitors, clearly justifying a violent restoration of recent glory.

The video begins with Trump’s eyes in the shadow, and its second frame focuses the audience on the Capitol building – America’s Reichstag, where the decisions being denounced by the rally’s organizers were being made that day. The third frame of the video is the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. This image immediately directs the attention of an audience attuned to an American fascist ideology to the supposedly elite class of Jews who, according to this ideology, control Hollywood. The appearance of the Hollywood sign makes no other sense in the context of a short video about an election. The next two images, of the UN General Assembly and the EU Parliament floor, connect supposed Jewish control of Hollywood to the goal of world government. As we have seen, according to Nazi ideology, Jews seek to use their control of the press and the entertainment industry to destroy individual nations. The beginning of the video focuses our attention on this supposedly “globalist,” but really Jewish, threat.

The next clip lingers on Joe Biden, with a vacant stare in his eyes and the video footage slowed, while Trump’s inauguration speech plays, “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost.” It is clear from the image of Biden that he is not making the decisions. The video shifts to an image of Senator Charles Schumer, reminding the viewer of prominent Jewish leaders of the Democratic party. Schumer is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine white rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish Congressman, Representatives Nadler and Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews.

Who, then, are this “small group in our nation’s capital”? The video suggests it is a group that controls Hollywood and the Democratic Party, and seeks to use Black liberation movements to undermine the nation, and bring about world government. In Nazi ideology, as well as its US counterpart, this group is the Jews. And what are the costs? As the inauguration speech continues, “The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of this our country;” gunshots are fired and we are shown images of these citizens betrayed by a duplicitous establishment – mournful pictures of coffins of veterans, homeless encampments, and a series of slides varying between nostalgic images of white American families over dinner with rural destitution – a worn down home flying a large American flag with an old pickup truck in front. At the end of these grim scenes of the results of elite betrayal, Trump declares, “This all ends right here, right now.”

As the music surges, what follows is a series of photos taken during Trump’s first term. This phase of the video begins with images of enormous naval ships on the ocean, and moves to images of Trump striding in front of a military guard at a football game, the iconic sport of American masculinity (hence the very particular danger of the Black quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s challenge to white supremacy). It is followed by rally after rally with adoring masses cheering Trump. The images of women overcome with emotion at the sight of the nation’s father figure, and violent anger at his political enemies, are interspersed with heavy machinery in factories, churning out huge new pick-up trucks, fighter jets streaking across the sky, and Trump striding across the screen framed by the powerful American imagery of the Lincoln Memorial. A Black man and a white man are shown in brotherhood at a Trump rally. Trump is shown observing powerful rockets launch, images evocative, for those schooled in history, of the Nazi’s own obsession with this particular technology.

After these scenes of Trump’s glorious leadership, the restoration of American rocket technology dominance, the mood shifts, as we are shown former Attorney General Bill Barr swearing in at what appears to be a deposition, followed by a smirking Joe Biden. Treachery has entered in, stage left.

What follows is scene after scene of immense loss. Empty streets of great American cities, a forlorn white woman peering out of a window, trapped at home. Scrabble pieces spelling “FEAR” appear and disappear within less than a second, empty chairs at a school, a sign reading “closed.” We see an image of the Supreme Court, followed by what appears to be a Black Lives Matter rally on a street emblazoned with “DEFUND THE POLICE.” Joe Biden appears in a forlorn photo in a gym, speaking to a lone man in a chair – Biden is here a petitioner, not a commander. The video switches back to a representation of glorious Trump years – a rising stock market, more fighter planes, a Black man and a white man with a “Jesus Saves” shirt embracing in brotherhood – a reference to the power of a shared Christian identity to bond Americans across racial lines. It ends with the screen filling with a powerful image of Trump’s face, showing steely resolve.

The message of the video is clear. America’s glory has been betrayed by treachery and division sown by politicians seeking to undermine and destroy the nation. To save the nation, one must restore Trump’s rule.

Each of us can decide what moral responsibility Trump personally has for a video to rouse his supporters at the rally. How much of a role the White House or Trump himself may have played in deciding to show the video and sequencing it immediately after Giuliani’s speech, we don’t know. But it is worth noting that the New York Times recently reported that by early January, “the rally would now effectively become a White House production” and, with his eye ever on media production, Trump micromanaged the details. “The president discussed the speaking lineup, as well as the music to be played, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversations. For Mr. Trump, the rally was to be the percussion line in the symphony of subversion he was composing from the Oval Office,” the Times reported.

Worldwide, there have been many fascist movements. Not all fascist movements focus on a global Jewish conspiracy as the enemy, and not all of them were genocidal. Early on, Italian fascism was not anti-Semitic in its core, though it later turned that way. British fascism was not genocidal (though it also was never given the opportunity to be). The most influential fascist movement that takes a shadowy Jewish conspiracy as its central target is German fascism, Nazism. Nazism did not start out in genocide. It began with militias and violent troops disrupting democracy. In its early years in power, in the 1930s, it was socialists and communists who were targeted for the Concentration Camps, torture, and murder. But it must never be forgotten where Nazism culminated.

I know a lot of people want to ignore this stuff and pretend it doesn’t matter because Trump is such a clown. Well, people thought Hitler was a clown too. It turns out that there are a lot of people who are hungry for a fascist clown to lead them.

Happy Hollandaise everyone…

People love to denigrate Joe Biden as being senile and incoherent. Here’s Joe Rogan doing just that. Only he makes a little mistake:

Yes, it was Donald Trump who said it. And he is is far more incoherent and weird than Biden has ever been. Here’s my favorite:

But really … tell me that this man is all there:

I wish I understood why he is given a pass while Biden is harassed for his rather normal verbal stumbles. Maybe it’s the make-up and hairspray obscuring how old Trump really is.

Happy Hollandaise!