Republican Congressman Mo Brooks quoted from Adolf Hitler’s evil book, Mein Kamph, yesterday on the House floor.
Brooks quoted Hitler writing in “Mein Kampf”: “In the big lie, there is always a certain force of credibility because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily.”
But Hitler wasn’t explaining how Nazi propaganda worked, as Brooks seemed to suggest.
Hitler was railing against Jews. “From time immemorial ... the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited,” the book continues a few sentences later, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.
WaPo
Today, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, target of Republicans and some AIPAC Democrats, called for accountability regarding Brooks.
Where are the calls for censure or a resolution? No doubt, Mike Pence and Benjamin Netanyahu will condemn Brooks.
Crickets.
Steny?
Crickets.
Something is happening here, and it’s becoming exactly clear. Much of the criticism of Omar is not made in good faith. Republicans not only tolerate Aryan Supremacists in their ranks, they aid them.
Update I: Some background on Brooks. He is a racist, a white supremacist, which is the same as an Aryan Supremacist to me.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) doesn't think that the hardline stance Republicans have taken on immigration could hurt the party’s standing with Hispanic voters. Instead, he thinks Democrats are hurting their prospects with white voters.
“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” he said during an interview Monday with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. "It's part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”
GOP Congressman Accuses Democrats Of Waging A 'War On Whites', 8/4/14
“There probably has not been a more racially-divisive, economic-divisive, president in the White House since we had presidents who supported slavery,” Brooks said during a radio interview on the Dale Jackson Show. “We did have presidents in the first 80 to 100 years of our country that supported slavery,” the Alabama Republican said. “You cannot say Barack Obama was worse than them.”
Congressman Accuses President Obama Of Being ‘The Most Racially-Divisive President’ Since Slavery
Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., advocated for President Donald Trump’s border wall in inflammatory terms on Sunday, saying that Democratic leaders in Congress have “American blood” on their hands for their refusal to allocate $5 billion for its construction.
“The question is going to be, how much blood, American blood, do you have to have on the hands of the Democrat leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer before they will help us with border security?” Brooks said in an interview with WAAY. “Or is their craving for power such that they are willing to accept the loss of American life?
Roll Call: Rep. Mo Brooks: Pelosi and Schumer Have ‘American Blood’ On Their Hands
Update II: When a known racist quotes from Mein Kamph, well, it’s hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Try a thought experiment with me. Replace the words “Mo Brooks” with “Ilhan Omar” in the story. Imagine the reaction if Ilhan Omar made the same statements quoting from the same book by the same author. There would be calls for expulsion by many Democrats and all Republicans. But a white, Christian male Republican with a long history of bigotry and racism, who believes, as Hitler did, that there is a war on whites, skates by with little confrontation.
Update III: Regarding the influence of American racism on Nazi racial laws targeting Jews, Bill Moyers talks about a recent book by a historian:
To get to the core of race in America today, read this new book by James Whitman. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. Prepare to be as startled as this respected legal scholar was when he came upon a meticulous record of a meeting of top lawyers in Nazi Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. Not only did those lawyers reveal a deep interest in American race policies, the most radical of them were eager advocates of using American law as a model. Scholars and historians have argued for years about whether American’s own regime of racial oppression in any way inspired the Nazis. Not only does Whitman throw a bright light on the debate, to this reader he settles it once and for all. Carefully written and tightly reasoned, backed up every step of the way with considered evidence and logic, Whitman reminds us that today is yesterday’s child, and that certain strains of DNA persist from one generation to another.
—Bill Moyers
Moyers: How the Nazis Used Jim Crow Laws as the Model for Their Race Laws
Brooks is not so far from his reading choices.