Trump Is Not Hitler, at Least Not Yet

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

05 June 16

 

ilthy Jew Terrorist William Kristol Says a Third Party Candidate will be Introduced,” the headline screamed. America's top neocon had just tweeted that he would soon announce an “impressive” independent candidate to run against both Republicans and Democrats, and the pro-Trump Daily Stormer was responding in its customary fashion.

America’s most successful neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer proudly takes its name from Julius Streicher’s notorious Nazi hate sheet, Der Stürmer. It openly calls Trump “The Leader” ‒ in German, Der Führer. And though hardly more than a one-man band, The Daily Stormer is arguably the most noxious face of Donald Trump’s nativist, xenophobic, racist, Muslim-bashing, and Jew-baiting base.

Wondering aloud whether Kristol’s intervention was “just a way to confound the goyim,” the Stormer’s founder and editor, Andrew Anglin, made clear where he was coming from. “Is this tweet serious?” he asked. “Is it a joke? Or is it simply intended to cause fear in the hearts of White Americans?”

“Trump responded to the Jew,” Anglin reported. “If dummy Bill Kristol actually does get a spoiler to run as an Independent,” the presumptive Republican presidential candidate tweeted, “say goodbye to the Supreme Court!”

Anglin saw even greater danger. “Any third party candidate would have zero chance of winning,” he wrote. “The goal is to get Hillary elected.”

“After Hillary, there will be no country left,” he went on. “She will destroy absolutely everything. She will ban the First and Second Amendments by installing communist judges and she will flood the country with so many immigrants – and give citizenship to those already here – that it will be impossible for a non-Democrat to ever win an election.”

“So the #NeverTrump Jews are actually calling for an end to America.”

Kristol’s effort has so far proved a damp squib. The most impressive candidate he could find is David French, a highly decorated combat officer, conservative lawyer, and columnist for the right-wing National Review. Widely unknown, French has yet to say yes. Even if he does, Kristol – the neocon nursemaid to Dan Quayle, the Iraq War, and Sarah Palin ‒ will once again look like a loser.

Anglin and his Daily Stormer are playing to win. Donald Trump, his Leader, clearly built on the white supremacist attitudes to which the Republican Party has pandered since Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and “War on Drugs.” Trump also draws on the liberal racism that Bill and Hillary Clinton embraced with their attacks on black “super-predators” and their mass incarceration crime bill, not to mention the way Slick Willie rushed back to Arkansas during his presidential campaign to preside over the execution of a mentally handicapped black man named Ricky Ray Rector.

But Trump goes beyond coded dog whistles and liberal pretense. A skilled demagogue and relentless bigot, he consciously plays to the longstanding racism that the anti-Muslim “War on Terror” and election of a black president brought to the fore – overt racial hatred that Trump himself helped stir up with his widely publicized claims that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States.

The neo-Nazi Anglin was quick to see the potential Trump represented, endorsing him last June, only days after the showman threw his hat into the ring and at a time when most other observers saw him as little more than entertainment and a profit source for big media.

“The modern Fox News Republican has basically accepted the idea that there is no going back from mass immigration,” Anglin wrote in his Daily Stormer. “Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: It’s time to deport these people. He is also willing to call them out as criminal rapists, murderers and drug dealers.”

Trump’s overt bigotry has enabled a motley crew of neo-Nazis and white supremacists to crawl out from under the rocks where they have lived for years. But none have used the opportunity more cleverly ‒ or pungently ‒ than the Internet-savvy Anglin and his Daily Stormer.

“Just like Hillary has no strategy to fight The Leader,” he wrote on June 3, “the Jews have no strategy to fight the Alt-Right.”

“The Jews” are, of course, the evil masterminds behind all efforts to suppress the white race, while the “Alt-Right” is the common front of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and their useful idiots.

In the past, white nationalists had taken great pains to pretend that they were not about hate. But Anglin urges them to new candor.

“Now, when these kikes say that the rising neo-Nazi Alt-Right movement wants to gas the six million, we’re just like “yeah I know right, lol, get in the oven filthy kike ‒ daddy needs a new pair of lampshades.”

Donald Trump has enabled Anglin’s all-out effort to win over America’s white working class to unabashed racist hatred. Neo-Nazis and Christian Nationalists make similar appeals to disaffected whites in Europe, though they generally find it an easier sale to bash Muslims than Jews.

How do decent people beat back the hate? Only by offering the disaffected a clear understanding of how corporate globalism, neo-liberal economics, and Wall Street-inspired trade treaties have killed middle-class jobs and any hope for the future. Bernie Sanders tries to do that. Hillary Clinton does not. Which do you think has a better chance to stop the juggernaut that Trump has set in motion?

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A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.