Yale historian warns Trump’s rise perfectly mirrors frightening ascent of Fascism and Nazis in the 1930s

Typical Leftist cherry picking below.  He quotes a few bits he likes and leaves out the rest. He can't find much that Trump has said so he quotes Steve Bannon -- quite ignoring that Bannon is now out of influence with Trump.

He says that Trump’s showman style of populism is heavily influenced by Bannon. But Trump has been a showman for decades, long before Bannon was heard of.  You would have to go back a long way before you found a time when Trump was not in the news. Here's an example of Trump as a young man:



It is true that Trump's rise to power was rapid and Snyder  implies that Fascists rose to power overnight too.  But they didn't.  Hitler fought many elections before he was able to cobble together a minority administration in the "Reichstag". There is no comparison to Trump's sweep.

He does quote Trump as liking the prewar "America First" movement and implies that it was Nazi.  It was in fact the exact opposite. It was the chief anti-immigration and anti-intervention movement in 1930s America.  They were isolationists. The last thing they wanted was to march on any other county.

Snyder in fact just disproves his own argument.  He admits that America First was isolationist but then says that the 1930s Fascists were internationalists.  Che?  But they certainly WERE internationalists. Hitler tried to take over Russia.  Trump gets condemned for being too friendly towards Russia!

It is true that German conservatives gave Hitler some support but that was only because they saw him as a lesser evil than the KPD: the powerful German Communist party.  There was no such threat in America.  The Democrats trust in bureaucracy, not class war. It is in fact the Democrats who are the true modern Fascists.  Right into the war years, Hitler trusted in bureaucracy too.

And the guy below is a historian!  More accurately a fraud

Note that there have been many equally shallow attempts to brand Trump and his followers as being Nazi/ Fascist/ racist/ authoritarian.  As authoritarianism is my main area of academic expertise I have debunked all of them that I know of.  See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and  here.


Writing for The Guardian, Timothy Snyder warns that conservatives seem to be unaware that Trump is taking their governing philosophy into darker — and more violent — territory.

According to Snyder, Trump’s showman style of populism is heavily influenced by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

“Stephen Bannon, who promises us new policies ‘as exciting as the 1930s,’ seems to want to return to that decade in order to undo those legacies,” Snyder writes. “He seems to have in mind a kleptocratic authoritarianism (hastened by deregulation and the dismantlement of the welfare state) that generates inequality, which can be channeled into a culture war (prepared for by Muslim bans and immigrant denunciation hotlines).”

“Like fascists, Bannon imagines that history is a cycle in which national virtue must be defended from permanent enemies. He refers to fascist authors in defense of this understanding of the past.”

Noting that President Trump is not an “articulate theorist,” Snyder points out that the president gives Bannon’s dark vision a populist veneer that has historical parallels.

“During the 2016 campaign, Trump spoke of ‘America first,’ which he knew was the name of political movement in the United States that opposed American participation in the second world war,” Snyder explains. “Among its leaders were nativists and Nazi apologists such as Charles Lindbergh. When Trump promised in his inaugural address that ‘from now on, it’s going to be America first’ he was answering a call across the decades from Lindbergh, who complained that ‘we lack leadership that places America first.’ American foreign and energy policies have been branded ‘America first.'”

“Conservatives always began from intuitive understanding of one’s own country and an instinctive defense of sovereignty. The far right of the 1930s was internationalist, in the sense that fascists learned one from the other and admired one another, as Hitler admired Mussolini,” Snyder continued.

“One of the reasons why the radical right was able to overcome conservatives back in the 1930s was that the conservatives did not understand the threat. Nazis in Germany, like fascists in Italy and Romania, did have popular support, but they would not have been able to change regimes without the connivance or the passivity of conservatives.”

“If Republicans do not wish to be remembered (and forgotten) like the German conservatives of the 1930s, they had better find their courage – and their conservatism – fast,” the historian concludes.

SOURCE

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As a Teen Cashier Seeing Food Stamp Use, I Changed My Mind About the Democrat Party

Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me and that I needed to learn the value of a dollar. When her encouragement fell on deaf ears, she then demanded that I get a job, and so I did, as a cashier at Dillman’s, a local grocery store.

Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list.

Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce.

The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps. After a few months, I came home and asked Mamaw why only poor people bought baby formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks are considerably more likely to breast-feed their children.

As my job taught me a little more about America’s class divide, it also imbued me with a bit of resentment, directed toward both the wealthy and my own kind.

The owners of Dillman’s were old-fashioned, so they allowed people with good credit to run grocery tabs, some of which surpassed a thousand dollars. I knew that if any of my relatives walked in and ran up a bill of over a thousand dollars, they’d be asked to pay immediately. I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own d–ned tab.

I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

Mamaw listened intently to my experiences at Dillman’s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole.

Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mindset when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be.

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation.

Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region.

A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”

SOURCE

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NYT won't publish defense of Trump's Russian contacts

Harvard law professor emeritus and prominent liberal author Alan Dershowitz said The New York Times won’t publish him because he’s offering an “alternative point of view” on the Trump-Russia collusion allegations.

Mr. Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner in an interview Monday that he’s tried to get in touch with the The New York Times’ editors, to no avail. He said he wanted to publish an op-ed last month arguing that President Trump likely didn’t attempt to obstruct justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey.

“I said that I thought the readers of the New York Times were entitled to hear or read the other side of the issue whether there were crimes committed,” he said. “And I really do think The New York Times does not want its readers to hear an alternative point of view on the issue of whether or not Trump administration is committing crimes.”

A Times spokesperson declined to comment, telling the Examiner that the paper does not discuss the editorial process for op-ed submissions.

Mr. Dershowitz has made headlines recently for arguing that there was likely no crime committed by Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 when he met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in order to get potentially damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Mr. Dershowitz has stuck by his claim that the younger Mr. Trump’s conduct was likely protected by the First Amendment.

Mr. Dershowitz‘s comments have been most popular among conservative news outlets, but his goal is to “get out in the liberal media,” he told the Examiner.

Unfortunately, his view is “not the narrative they’re pushing,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “It’s not that I’m not credentialed,” he added. “It’s that I don’t have the right point of view.”

SOURCE

Dershowitz's essay eventually appeared in the Boston Globe and was reproduced here yesterday

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