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Monday, October 28, 2024 6:00:30 AM
The right’s fascism problem
"Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes"
By IAN WARD
05/21/2024 07:00 PM EDT
Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on Feb. 17 in Waterford, Michigan. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Many more links
UNFORCED ERROR — Since Donald Trump emerged on the national political scene in 2015, journalists and pundits have been debating whether it’s appropriate to compare him and the MAGA movement to the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe — and, more specifically, to the Nazism that gained traction in Germany throughout the 1920s. Some of Trump’s critics — including Biden’s campaign — argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison. Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders — and even some of his more historically-minded critics — argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.
Yet the ongoing “f-word debate” seems to ignore one key dynamic: Trump and his campaign keep inviting the comparison themselves.
Trump’s latest self-inflicted juxtaposition came on Monday evening, when Trump’s official Truth Social account shared a pro-Trump video containing a reference to the “unified reich” — echoing the term that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party used to refer to the fascist empire that they aspired to create before the Second World War. The video was deleted from Trump’s account, and a Trump campaign spokesperson promptly stepped in to clarify that the clip was “not an [official] campaign video,” adding that it was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word.”
The Associated Press subsequently reported that the language in the video, which featured old-timey newspaper copy in the background, was referring to the 19th century unification of Germany, not Hitler’s Third Reich. It was copied from a Wikipedia entry that said: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” (The specific date from the Wikipedia article was not visible in the video that Trump shared.) But the political damage was already done: Within a few hours, an account associated with the Biden campaign had already posted screenshots of the video to X, claiming that the Trump campaign was “echoing Nazi Germany.”
Regardless of how or why the video made its way onto Trump’s social media feed, the incident highlights a broader problem for the GOP: Right-leaning corners of the internet are absolutely inundated with fascist or fascist-adjacent content, and that content is increasingly making its way — either intentionally or accidentally — into more mainstream conservative discourse.
After all, this isn’t the first time that the porous digital boundary between the online far-right and the MAGA movement has created real-world political problems for Trump. In July 2015, during Trump’s first bid for the White House, his campaign’s official Twitter account posted — and then quickly deleted — an image featuring Nazi soldiers reenactors .. https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/14/politics/trump-photo-nazi-uniforms/index.html , superimposed between the stripes of an American flag. At the time, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — a fellow by the name of Michael Cohen — blamed the incident on a “young intern” who apparently “did not see very faded figures within the flag.”
The problem is not unique to Trump. Last year, Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign fired a staffer who reposted a video featuring the Nazi sonnenrad symbol on an official campaign social media account. In a now-familiar refrain, a DeSantis campaign spokesperson wrote the incident off as a mistake by a young staffer.
The credibility of these explanations has been drawn into question by Trump’s own invocations of fascist language — including his recent comments calling immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood” of America — as well as his repeated overtures to white nationalist figures like Nick Fuentes. During his time in office, Trump reportedly claimed that Adolf Hitler “did some good things” and berated his generals with insults like “you f—king generals, why can’t you be like the German generals .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-complained-generals-werent-hitlers-book-says-rcna42114 … in World War II,” according to the account of former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Yet in some respects, the narrow focus on Trump’s actions obscures the broader problem for the GOP, especially as campaigns lean more heavily on digital content to spread their message: The conservative internet is so thoroughly saturated with fascist and neo-Nazi content that it’s increasingly difficult for campaigns operate in right-leaning spaces online without running into it.
The problem has gotten so bad that some conservatives are starting to quietly sound the alarm. In March, the conservative activist Chris Rufo .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/24/chris-rufo-desantis-anti-woke-00088578 .. took to X to note the proliferation of “Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting [and] extreme conspiratorialism” on the online right, nothing that, “The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement.”
“It’s getting insane,” Rufo wrote .. https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1772358867541692711 . “We have a problem on the Right.”
As Rufo’s critics pointed out, Rufo himself has had a central role in turning online trolling and “shitposting” into a powerful tool .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618 ..
------
[Insert: [...]How a Conservative Christian College Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot
[...] Arnn remains Claremont’s vice chairman, and from the first, he embedded Hillsdale into the institute’s intellectual orbit. Any number of Hillsdale academics are Claremont-affiliated scholars as well. (West Coast Straussianism’s “citadels are Claremont and Hillsdale,” according to the political philosopher Paul Gottfried.) Arnn also signed on visiting scholars like Christopher Rufo, the activist most responsible for making the academic discipline of critical race theory a boogeyman of the right. Arnn’s own CV lists longstanding affiliations with a run of influential conservative organizations. He serves on the Heritage Foundation’s board and is a member of the Council for National Policy, a secretive coalition of conservative heavyweights. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175224366
.. and ..
conix, Political correctness. "Woke". Critical Race Theory. Now Kendi. The latest conservative/GOP whipping post. Policy? C'mon.
We just attack. Kendi has always been with the others on the conservatives dart board. Just more in the background. Some others
"Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith"
[...]
How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory
Thanks. You saved me chasing those videos. I never heard of that Rufo dude before, yet
seems he's a key - even the KEY - player in the present political outrage around CRT.
P - To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon.
[...]
...Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the Web site of City Journal, the magazine of the center-right Manhattan Institute: “Under the banner of ‘antiracism,’ Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.”
P - The story was a phenomenon and helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi .. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-redefine-racism .. and Robin DiAngelo .. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism . Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/us/critical-race-theory-explainer-trnd/index.html , critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”
[...]
Since his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last fall, Rufo’s rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164563458
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166080529]
------
that Republicans wield to achieve their real-world political aims. But as the latest incident with the Trump campaign shows, Rufo was not wrong to note that the proliferation of neo-fascist content online creates a potential liability for the Republican Party.
The question now is how serious of a liability it actually is. The Trump campaign’s past run-ins with the fascist right have done little to weaken his support within the GOP — and the blowback to them may have helped solidify his support by fueling the narrative that the media is trying to gin up new controversies to attack Trump. Will this latest incident be any different? If recent history is any guide, don’t count on it
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2024/05/21/the-rights-fascism-problem-00159265
"Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes"
By IAN WARD
05/21/2024 07:00 PM EDT
Former President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally on Feb. 17 in Waterford, Michigan. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Many more links
UNFORCED ERROR — Since Donald Trump emerged on the national political scene in 2015, journalists and pundits have been debating whether it’s appropriate to compare him and the MAGA movement to the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe — and, more specifically, to the Nazism that gained traction in Germany throughout the 1920s. Some of Trump’s critics — including Biden’s campaign — argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison. Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders — and even some of his more historically-minded critics — argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.
Yet the ongoing “f-word debate” seems to ignore one key dynamic: Trump and his campaign keep inviting the comparison themselves.
Trump’s latest self-inflicted juxtaposition came on Monday evening, when Trump’s official Truth Social account shared a pro-Trump video containing a reference to the “unified reich” — echoing the term that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party used to refer to the fascist empire that they aspired to create before the Second World War. The video was deleted from Trump’s account, and a Trump campaign spokesperson promptly stepped in to clarify that the clip was “not an [official] campaign video,” adding that it was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word.”
The Associated Press subsequently reported that the language in the video, which featured old-timey newspaper copy in the background, was referring to the 19th century unification of Germany, not Hitler’s Third Reich. It was copied from a Wikipedia entry that said: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” (The specific date from the Wikipedia article was not visible in the video that Trump shared.) But the political damage was already done: Within a few hours, an account associated with the Biden campaign had already posted screenshots of the video to X, claiming that the Trump campaign was “echoing Nazi Germany.”
Regardless of how or why the video made its way onto Trump’s social media feed, the incident highlights a broader problem for the GOP: Right-leaning corners of the internet are absolutely inundated with fascist or fascist-adjacent content, and that content is increasingly making its way — either intentionally or accidentally — into more mainstream conservative discourse.
After all, this isn’t the first time that the porous digital boundary between the online far-right and the MAGA movement has created real-world political problems for Trump. In July 2015, during Trump’s first bid for the White House, his campaign’s official Twitter account posted — and then quickly deleted — an image featuring Nazi soldiers reenactors .. https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/14/politics/trump-photo-nazi-uniforms/index.html , superimposed between the stripes of an American flag. At the time, the executive vice president of the Trump Organization — a fellow by the name of Michael Cohen — blamed the incident on a “young intern” who apparently “did not see very faded figures within the flag.”
The problem is not unique to Trump. Last year, Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign fired a staffer who reposted a video featuring the Nazi sonnenrad symbol on an official campaign social media account. In a now-familiar refrain, a DeSantis campaign spokesperson wrote the incident off as a mistake by a young staffer.
The credibility of these explanations has been drawn into question by Trump’s own invocations of fascist language — including his recent comments calling immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood” of America — as well as his repeated overtures to white nationalist figures like Nick Fuentes. During his time in office, Trump reportedly claimed that Adolf Hitler “did some good things” and berated his generals with insults like “you f—king generals, why can’t you be like the German generals .. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-complained-generals-werent-hitlers-book-says-rcna42114 … in World War II,” according to the account of former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Yet in some respects, the narrow focus on Trump’s actions obscures the broader problem for the GOP, especially as campaigns lean more heavily on digital content to spread their message: The conservative internet is so thoroughly saturated with fascist and neo-Nazi content that it’s increasingly difficult for campaigns operate in right-leaning spaces online without running into it.
The problem has gotten so bad that some conservatives are starting to quietly sound the alarm. In March, the conservative activist Chris Rufo .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/24/chris-rufo-desantis-anti-woke-00088578 .. took to X to note the proliferation of “Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting [and] extreme conspiratorialism” on the online right, nothing that, “The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement.”
“It’s getting insane,” Rufo wrote .. https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1772358867541692711 . “We have a problem on the Right.”
As Rufo’s critics pointed out, Rufo himself has had a central role in turning online trolling and “shitposting” into a powerful tool .. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618 ..
------
[Insert: [...]How a Conservative Christian College Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot
[...] Arnn remains Claremont’s vice chairman, and from the first, he embedded Hillsdale into the institute’s intellectual orbit. Any number of Hillsdale academics are Claremont-affiliated scholars as well. (West Coast Straussianism’s “citadels are Claremont and Hillsdale,” according to the political philosopher Paul Gottfried.) Arnn also signed on visiting scholars like Christopher Rufo, the activist most responsible for making the academic discipline of critical race theory a boogeyman of the right. Arnn’s own CV lists longstanding affiliations with a run of influential conservative organizations. He serves on the Heritage Foundation’s board and is a member of the Council for National Policy, a secretive coalition of conservative heavyweights. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175224366
.. and ..
conix, Political correctness. "Woke". Critical Race Theory. Now Kendi. The latest conservative/GOP whipping post. Policy? C'mon.
We just attack. Kendi has always been with the others on the conservatives dart board. Just more in the background. Some others
"Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith"
[...]
How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory
Thanks. You saved me chasing those videos. I never heard of that Rufo dude before, yet
seems he's a key - even the KEY - player in the present political outrage around CRT.
P - To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon.
[...]
...Rufo summarized his findings in an article for the Web site of City Journal, the magazine of the center-right Manhattan Institute: “Under the banner of ‘antiracism,’ Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights is now explicitly endorsing principles of segregationism, group-based guilt, and race essentialism—ugly concepts that should have been left behind a century ago.”
P - The story was a phenomenon and helped to generate more leaks from across the country. Marooned at home, civil servants recorded and photographed their own anti-racism training sessions and sent the evidence to Rufo. Reading through these documents, and others, Rufo noticed that they tended to cite a small set of popular anti-racism books, by authors such as Ibram X. Kendi .. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/19/the-fight-to-redefine-racism .. and Robin DiAngelo .. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism . Rufo read the footnotes in those books, and found that they pointed to academic scholarship from the nineteen-nineties, by a group of legal scholars who referred to their work as critical race theory, in particular Kimberlé Crenshaw and Derrick Bell. These scholars argued that the white supremacy of the past lived on in the laws and societal rules of the present. As Crenshaw recently explained .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/us/critical-race-theory-explainer-trnd/index.html , critical race theory found that “the so-called American dilemma was not simply a matter of prejudice but a matter of structured disadvantages that stretched across American society.”
[...]
Since his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” last fall, Rufo’s rise had matched that of the movement against critical race theory.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=164563458
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166080529]
------
that Republicans wield to achieve their real-world political aims. But as the latest incident with the Trump campaign shows, Rufo was not wrong to note that the proliferation of neo-fascist content online creates a potential liability for the Republican Party.
The question now is how serious of a liability it actually is. The Trump campaign’s past run-ins with the fascist right have done little to weaken his support within the GOP — and the blowback to them may have helped solidify his support by fueling the narrative that the media is trying to gin up new controversies to attack Trump. Will this latest incident be any different? If recent history is any guide, don’t count on it
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2024/05/21/the-rights-fascism-problem-00159265
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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