Lessons of History and Trying To Avoid the Same Mistakes

[kaz]

https://twitter.com/MarkJacob16

With all the arguments over whether MAGA Republicans are fascists, I reread William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” to see how much the rise of Hitler and the rise of MAGA smell similar. Conclusion: They do. This thread lists 10 ways. Please take a look.

1. A big lie about treachery is used to foment resentment. Nazis: We didn’t really lose World War I. It was a “stab in the back” by Jews and other "November criminals." MAGA: We didn’t really lose the 2020 election. It was a “steal” by politicians and Blacks in big cities.




2. There’s an obsession with purity of the culture. Nazis: “Racial mixture” was a threat to Aryan culture, Hitler wrote. MAGA: “Great replacement theory” says immigrants threaten white culture.



3. Chaos is something to be exploited, not addressed. Nazis: Economic distress is a great political opportunity. MAGA: Economic distress is a great political opportunity.



4. The super-rich bankroll the right-wing seizure of power. Nazis: Thanks to I.G. Farben, Deutsche Bank, Thyssen, Krupp, etc. MAGA: Thanks to the Mercers, Uihleins, DeVos, Thiel, etc.



5. Some people think the fascist threat is overblown. Nazis: While Hitler posed a major threat, some said he "ceased to be a political danger.” (2 weeks later, he was chancellor.) MAGA: While Trump poses a major threat, many people think it’s “just politics,” no worries.


6. There’s a cult of personality. Nazis: The German army made a pledge of loyalty to Hitler personally. MAGA: Trump’s supporters bill him as “the most moral president” in U.S. history.



7. Christianity is used to legitimize the movement. Nazis: “The party stands for positive Christianity.” MAGA: Trump is described as the “Chosen One” protecting American Christianity.





8. Books are the enemy. Nazis: Any book that “acts subversively on our future” must be burned. MAGA: “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” says a Virginia school board member.




9. An independent news media is the enemy. Nazis: Any newspaper that “offends the honor and dignity of Germany” must be banned. MAGA: The press is the “enemy of the people.”



10. Educators are pressured to be politically compliant. Nazis: Teachers took an oath to “be loyal and obedient to Adolf Hitler.” MAGA: Florida’s DeSantis accuses teachers of “indoctrination” and pressures them to avoid references to America’s racist history and LGBTQ people.



I'm not saying that MAGA will end up as horrifically as Nazism. I am saying that America 2022 feels too much like Germany 1932, and I don't want to take the risk of watching MAGA cultism play out. We have to stop it now.



Why did Twitter put a “sensitive” warning on this thread? Who knows? My only theory is that it has a “hateful symbol”—a swastika on the cover of Shirer’s book about Nazism.

Some good points, but what scares me even more is all the Americans, partially but not strictly Democrats, who haven't learned how great we are and how lucky we were to be born here

 

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Florida Lawmakers Help DeSantis Shovel More Cash To Wall Street

The governor’s 2024 money chase could run up against a federal pay-to-play rule that’s previously tripped up other GOP candidates.

www.levernews.com

 

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Greg Abbott Signs Law Making EV Owners Pay for Their Gas-Free Cars

Starting September 1, registering an EV in Texas will cost $400 upfront and $200 every subsequent year. It's a lot more money than it should be.

gizmodo.com

 

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Republicans suffered two dramatic urban reversals on Tuesday when they lost the mayoralties of Jacksonville—previously the largest GOP-controlled city—and Colorado Springs.
In the Jacksonville runoff election, former TV anchor Donna Deegan beat Republican Daniel Davis, gaining 52 percent of the vote, while in Colorado Springs ex-Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams lost to independent candidate Yemi Mobolade by double digits.
The results mean Republicans govern none of the 12 most populous cities in the United States, and only five of the 40 most populous, in a sign of their growing disconnect from urban America.

While Republicans continue to lose with MAGA candidates, which gives the impression that eventually, the Republican politicians will see the light, the former Chair of the Republican Party sees it differently. He appeared on MSNBC last night with Stephanie Ruhle with a prescient statement.

“All of these little races are adding up to to a lot of losses,” Michael Steele said. “But they don’t see it that way. This is not so much in the traditional sense of winning and losing. This is about how you, over time, amass a degree of power that forces your will in your way on the general populace. And we’ve already begun to see some of the effects of that. So, you know, I think we need to be careful instead of looking at this as a balls and strikes kind of game. The Trump people are playing longball here. They’re not trying to win it all in one election cycle. They have systematically taken control of the RNC. They’ve systematically taken control of boards of elections and school boards across the country. Look at the big picture and understand exactly what’s happening. Instead of focusing on one little horse race, not diminishing what just happened in Florida. But just recognize they’re not as put out as you may think they should be because that’s a loss and a longer game of winning, and that from them is the end game.”

Michael Steele: MAGA losses are acceptable to them because they are playing the long game.

Michael Steele understands the MAGA Republican psychology. Losing elections may be fatal for the Republican Party, but MAGA is playing the long game of building from the party's destruction. Michael Steele has a point. Watch Politics Done Right T.V....

www.dailykos.com

 

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[ A lie, told again and again, becomes truth in the minds of those who do not know any better ]

 

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[ Profit, profit, profit. Always above the health of people ]

 

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There Is a Reason Ron DeSantis Wants History Told a Certain Way, Jamelle Bouie/New York Times

As it happens, I’m reading the historian Donald Yacovone’s most recent book, “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity,” on the relationship between history education and the construction of white supremacist ideologies in the 19th and 20th centuries. It’s an interesting book, filled with compelling information about the racism that has shaped the teaching of American history. But I mention it here because, in one section on Southern textbook writers and the demand for pro-slavery pedagogy, Yacovone relays a voice that might sound awfully familiar to modern ears.

As Yacovone explains, pre-Civil War textbook production was dominated by writers from New England. Some Southerners had, by the 1850s, become “increasingly frustrated with the ‘Yankee-centric’ quality of the historical narratives.” They wanted texts “specifically designed for Southern students and readers.” In particular, Southern critics wanted textbooks that gave what they considered a fair and favorable view to the “subject of the weightiest import to us of the South … I mean the institution of Negro slavery,” as one critic put it.


(full article online)

Opinion | There Is a Reason Ron DeSantis Wants History Told a Certain Way

Certain anxieties over education have a familiar ring.

www.nytimes.com

 

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What Christian Nationalism Has Done to My State and My Faith Is a Sin, Susan Stubson (Wyoming Republican), New York Times
I first saw it while working the rope line at a monster-truck rally during the 2016 campaign by my husband, Tim, for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat. As Tim and I and our boys made our way down the line, shaking hands and passing out campaign material, a burly man wearing a “God bless America” T-shirt and a cross around his neck said something like, “He’s got my vote if he keeps those [epithet] out of office,” using a racial slur. What followed was an uncomfortable master class in racism and xenophobia as the man decanted the reasons our country is going down the tubes. God bless America.

I now understand the ugliness I heard was part of a current of Christian nationalism fomenting beneath the surface. It had been there all the time. The rope line rant was a mission statement for the disaffected, the overlooked, the frightened. It was also an expression of solidarity with a candidate like Donald Trump who gave a name to a perceived enemy: people who do not look like us or share our beliefs. Immigrants are taking our guns. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. You are not safe in your home. Religious freedom is on the gallows. Vote for me.

The messages worked. And in large part, it’s my faith community — white, rural and conservative — that got them there. I am a white conservative woman in rural America. Raised Catholic, I found that my faith deepened after I married and joined an evangelical church.


(full article online)

Opinion | What Christian Nationalism Has Done to My State and My Faith Is a Sin

Wyoming’s new crop of lawmakers seems intent on stripping us of our autonomy and our ability to make decisions for ourselves.

www.nytimes.com

 

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The rest is all the same language. Greene wants to impeach Garland for not prosecuting "leftist extremists" who peacefully protested outside Supreme Court justice's homes. She's very mad that Garland is not "prosecuting Antifa and Black Lives Matters rioters that have desecrated American cities and caused billions of dollars worth" of damage, a confusing line that can only be interpreted when you remember that according to Fox News, numerous American cities have been razed to the ground and the reason none of the rest of us know about that is, uh, because Democrats are keeping it a secret from you.

"Attorney General Garland has refused to prosecute the Biden family and its associates for the crimes they have committed at the expense of the American people," she scrawls, with nobody to this day being able to come up with a damn bit of evidence for these supposed "crimes" or even explain what the actual "crimes" are supposed to be. Sure, impeach Garland for not taking Rudy Giuliani seriously. God help us all if we strip the government of anyone who doesn't take Rudy Giuliani's bug-eyed rants seriously; there wouldn't be anyone left to empty the House cafeteria trash cans.

There's also a bunch of generic rants that don't accuse Garland of anything at all, just some word salad thrown in so we can get to the only part of it that matters: The Fox News Extended Universe belief that the government is "persecuting" Donald J. Seditionboy Trump in allowing the government to go find and return classified government documents Trump stole from the White House after the failure of his coup attempt.

Or, as Greene would have it, "documents he legally declassified," which is yet another Fox News and Trump lawyer wackadoodle claim, based on Trump’s assertion that can and did automatically pre-declassify whatever classified documents the FBI might have discovered in his Mar-a-Lago resort. Oh, and that he did it without telling anyone, using only the powers of his mind.

It is May of 2023 and Trump's allies are still pushing this secret-mind-powers explanation, and the federal government is still having to explain to these puddingheads that no, actually, there's a very specific procedure for declassifying government documents, one Donald Trump himself knew about this whole time, and "I did it secretly when you weren't looking" is not an actual defense.

I do not know how many decades it will take to explain this to Greene and the other Republicans who believe a reality television host obtained fully autocratic powers upon sliding into the White House on his own slick film of lies, but it will still not be a thing even if Greene spends the next 40 years of her life not understanding it.

Again, this is all part of the same pattern from House Republicans, and the important part is that none of us living normal lives are supposed to understand it; if Greene's rantings look like a string of unconnected buzzwords plucked out of right-wing conspiracy circles it's because that is exactly what they are. She doesn't care if everyone in Washington, D.C., who is not Jim Jordan, James Comer, or an OAN host looks at her like she's grown two heads when she presents this stuff.

Everything Greene and her associated Republicans do is meant to appeal to the small set of Americans who live and breathe Fox News conspiracy claims. It's not the Biden administration, in her scribbled-up document, it's the Biden "regime." It's not an American writing a pro-choice message in chalk on a sidewalk near a Supreme Court justice's house, it's a "leftist extremist" who "harassed" the justice with her chalk-based opinions.

Garland "has declared war on American parents"! Garland has "weaponized" the justice system! How dare he prosecute those who violently attacked police officers in the U.S. Capitol, while not similarly prosecuting Black Lives Matter protesters who "desecrated" our cities!

And, above all, it is not that Donald Trump took boxes of classified and other government-owned documents from the White House and put them in a Mar-a-Lago storage room, or that he lied about it to investigators, or that he took steps to hide them from investigators, it is that Merrick Garland wants to "persecute" His Royal Highness as a means of "silencing" the Fox News base!

All of it is premised on the notion that the government should be focused on prosecuting conservatism's enemies more, and should be focused on prosecuting conservatives themselves not at all, not for death threats, or making off with classified documents, or an attempted coup, or anything else. Greene may simply not be bright enough to realize her beliefs align one-to-one with fascism's own, but it doesn't matter. She and Republicanism's other loudest voices have cribbed its major themes and techniques with precision.


(full article online)

Marjorie Taylor Greene's plan to impeach everyone reaches Merrick Garland

A House Republican is now introducing articles of impeachment against Attorney General Merrick Garland, but before anyone gets too worked up about that, just know that the House Republican is walking medical-grade conspiracy theory dispensary Rep....

www.dailykos.com

 

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US Rep. and very serious man with hands on hips Jim Jordan is vowing that Republicans will investigate — checks notes, yep — Hillary Clinton. Why not.

 

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Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) sharply criticized her colleague Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on Sunday for his continual blockade of military nominations, saying the Alabama Republican is “holding the entire nation’s national security hostage.”

Tuberville has for months refused to support about 200 promotions for military officers over a Pentagon policy that provides travel reimbursements and leave for service members to seek abortions out-of-state, which was updated after the Supreme Court voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade.

The GOP senator has called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind the effort, pledging to stand in the way of the usual unanimous consent process to approve military promotions to the ire of his colleagues. Tuberville also said he would allow the promotions to advance if Democrats hold a vote on legislation that would end the Pentagon policy, even if it was largely guaranteed the bill would fail, but the party has refused to do so.

Duckworth told MSNBC on Sunday that Tuberville was risking the safety of the nation “for his own personal social agenda.”

“There’s a process that can change that policy,” Duckworth, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on the network’s “The Sunday Show,” pointing to the National Defense Authorization Act, which is set by Congress each year. “But instead he’s holding out the promotions of hundreds of generals hostage and these are people who are going to be you know, the general in charge of all logistics for the army. … He’s really putting our national security at risk for his personal social agenda.”


(full article online)

Tuberville Draws Fire For Holding Hundreds Of Military Promotions ‘Hostage’ Over Abortion

"He’s really putting our national security at risk for his personal social agenda," Sen. Tammy Duckworth said of her colleague.

www.yahoo.com