We’ve always known Trump was a great admirer of Adolf Hitler and his rhetoric. Today, the Trump administration released a “campaign ad” that could have been directly lifted from Nazi propaganda:
Of course, we also have homegrown KKK propaganda that may have served as this administration’s model:
Too many member of the Trump White House have expressed sympathies for the Klan and its ideas (starting with Trump himself), for us not to make the connection. The “campaign video” follows the form and thrust of Nazi propaganda against Jewish persons, which sought to highlight crimes by Jews and denigrate foreigners:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what President Trump has said he’s going to do: keep a list of, quote, “immigrant crimes”?
ANDREA PITZER: Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he—I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called “Letter Box,” and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like “The Criminal Jew,” and they would show photos of “Jewish-looking,” as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews. — www.democracynow.org/...
The Nazis wanted to eradicate from their surroundings people of other races, religions and beliefs. This is why they targeted Jews, Roma, LGBTQ, the mentally infirm, leftists, communists and anyone who opposed their fascist ideology. It is not difficult to see the parallels today.
The campaign video is directly lifted from a Tucker Carlson segment that aired on Thursday. Carlson is the favorite news-host of white nationalists because he targets all immigrants and unlike most other Fox News hosts, hasn’t been undermined by a sex scandal.
His program was an updated version of Nazi or Klan propaganda from the early 20th century. The segment was titled “Diversity isn’t our strength, unity is”. By unity, Carlson means ethnically cleansing the land of brown people.
The climate on the right had been sharpening for a few days. On Thursday evening, on Fox News, Tucker Carlson had assumed a look of urgent concern while his guest, the hard-right radio host Mark Steyn (an “actual thinker,” Carlson had noted in his introduction), warned against the “cultural transformation” that immigration would bring. “A majority of grade-school children in Arizona are now Hispanic,” Steyn warned. “The border has moved north,” he said, but the real line he was etching was an ethnic one, between Americans—Hispanics on one side, the rest on the other.
Ideas like this have circulated on the right for a long time. On Friday, the clip of the exchange between a racist radio host and his Fox News enabler circulated on the left. For liberals, much of the escalating menace of the past two years has followed the same line—the President’s insistence that America is less an idea than a specific heritage, that a judge of “Mexican” heritage is less than equal, that Haitian-Americans and African-Americans came from “shithole nations,” and that more Norwegian-Americans would be preferable. — www.newyorker.com/...
For the past two years, the Trump campaign and administration has been laser focused on painting black, muslim, brown and immigrant communities as crime ridden “shit-holes”. Their propaganda aims to paint brown/black/immigrant/muslim communities as inherently dangerous and un-American.
Trump and his enablers have targeted immigrants with particular attention, knowing they are the most vulnerable. They know if they can break support for immigrants, they can simply move on to the next group, and the next group, and the next group, till they have the ethnically cleansed country they dream of.
It is in this context that we must evaluate the rhetoric coming out of the White House, including the statement by legislative affairs director, Marc Short:
“The White House position, though, remains the same that we will not negotiate the status of 690,000 unlawful immigrants while hundreds of millions of taxpaying Americans, including hundreds of thousands of our troops in uniform and border agents protecting our country, are held hostage by senate Democrats,” Short said, accusing Democrats of a “two-year-old temper tantrum” to please their base. — www.politico.com/...
Firstly, this is, of course, a bold-faced lie. It is the Trump administration that sought to take DACA recipients hostage over ten months ago. Short is also lying when he calls DACA recipients “unlawful immigrants”. They arrived here as children and do not bear responsibility for any “unlawful immigration”.
But the most important thing to remember is this. The Trump administration, like the Nazis will seek to divide us. They went after undocumented immigrants and DACA recipients first, because they are the most vulnerable. But if we fail them, they will come for the rest of us.
As we think about the shutdown, we must remember this.
Call your senators and representative.
Tell them to stand firm for DACA recipients.
Tell them to stand firm for us.
— @subirgrewal