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Duck, Duck, Goose Step
This was "the week that shook Europe," according to Guardian chief Katharine Viner, who on Saturday
JD Vance once said Trump could be America’s Hitler. Guess that wasn’t a warning so much as Vance expressing his aspiration for the Fuhrer.
Let’s see if bloomberg steals this one…
The administration is following the Nazi playbook as well by beginning its control of the press. Back in the day the Nazi control of the press ( through intimidation and then violence) meant control of information. Concentration camps- just a rumor, nothing to see here, work is good for you. Stabbing allies in the back, what did you expect.
So the LA Times and the Washington Post (both owned by billionaires who apparently did not want to be left out of the con) did not endorse the opposition candidate, despite their intent to do so. The Associated Press is denied access to administration press conferences because they won’t rename the Gulf of Mexico just because he said so. He is suing television stations for billions claiming they are doing basically what he does regularly, that is altering reality.
If it quacks like a duck …
I don’t know about this one. As a European now forced to follow things closely I have every reason to dislike Trump & co but… are they virulent ideological racists? Never mind overtones or “accidental” everyday racism, would they honestly agree certain races (as opposed to classes of people, such as illegal immigrants) are inferior and should be eradicated or removed? Are they even ideological fascists as opposed to opportunists making a power grab? Even if you go to the worst swamps of Trump supporters, you might find calls to liquidate the leaders of the political opposition (sadly hardly something confined to extreme right), but are unlikely to find suggestions to do so to black people or Jews for example. But racism was the cornerstone of Nazi ideology, and not the “these asylum seekers should go back to their home country” racism, the “the subhumans have no rights” kind.
In my local context the media spends 10 years equating criticism of Islam or immigration with historical ideological racism, and then the dreaded Sweden Democrats or Finns Party come to power and nothing happens. No ethnic cleansings, maybe lamentably incompetent governance but that’s not particularly scary.
But of course, there’s a big difference of course that in the U.S. some consolidation of power is actually happening. So maybe this time it is the Nazis. Who knows.
Heisenberg is 1. objectively smarter than I am, 2. a political scientist, and successful 3. American so you should absolutely take his word over mine and logically also I should believe him if he says that is what it is. I was also silly enough to think Trump 2.0 would be more of Trump 1.0 which is obviously false. I’m still probably not going to buy it at this reading.
Boy, you’ve umm….. never been to the American South, have you?
Also, Johan, I was personally present (i.e., in the room) for the production of Kremlin-linked, anti-immigrant propaganda aimed at stoking anti-Islam xenophobia in your country. That’s not strictly relevant here, but it’s tangential. I saw, and knew personally, people who worked around the clock to fan the flames of division in “your local context,” and those people were at the same time working to help elect Donald Trump in 2016. I can assure you that those very same people (literally the same actual guys) are still working to undermine your society, and I know they’re still pushing Trump’s propaganda and also cheerleading for Marine Le Pen and so on. Although I won’t claim to have any sort of proof, I’d bet a very large sum of money that a very large share of those guys’ funding comes from outfits which, with perfect information, could be traced all the way back to the Kremlin’s doorstep.
All of that to reiterate a point I’ve made in these pages over and over and over again: The vast majority of Westerners have no conception whatever of the extent to which they’re caught up in an information war with the highest of high stakes. That war is part and parcel of the far-right populist wave that swept across Western democracies this past decade.
Oh, one more thing, Johan. On this: “… would they honestly agree certain races (as opposed to classes of people, such as illegal immigrants) are inferior and should be eradicated or removed?” … the answer’s “absolutely yes” they would, depending on who “they” is. Trump himself might not agree with that, but generally speaking, the answer to your question there is “yes.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/make-south-africa-great-again?_sp=d801f191-0921-4955-a715-5bd7eaa1e982.1740252887688
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/eugenics-isnt-dead-its-thriving-in-tech/
Thank you for taking the time to set me straight in so many words, gave much to think about. And for doing what you do!
I’d also be very interested in hearing more about the story in reply #2 if there is a story about it. Being a useful idiot for Russia is not something I am interested in.
It’s not about “setting” you “straight.” I think sometimes readers over-interpret my snappy replies to comments. I’m not trying to get deference from readers. I’m just replying as one might when one spends an hour writing something and someone disagrees with it.
Don’t overthink it. Imagine you wake up tomorrow and write 1,200 words on how to make a good apple pie, and then someone says, “Well, ok I guess, but if I’m honest, I’m not convinced that’s the best recipe.” What are you going to say? The nicest among you might say, “Thank you for reply! I’ll consider tweaking my recipe!” but most of you would say something like, “Have you ever baked an apple pie? I have, many times, and I’m telling you my recipe is hands down the best. Go bake it. You’ll see.” That’s all my comments really are.
On the second point, yes there’s definitely a story, Johan. You can read about it here:
https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/12/12/the-consultant/
And also here:
https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/07/17/dances-with-wolves/
No – but I will take your word for that one. It’s hard to understand the nuances from the outside, and the ignorance is genuine.
Marco Rubio has negotiated a deal to send whomever Trump pleases to an El Salvador prison from which no one ever escapes. We will pay them money per head. That’s akin to Hitler with a 21st century twist where you pay someone else to run your concentration camp anticipating that lets you off for the hook for torture and death (hey, it wasn’t us). Immigrants, specifically brown ones, have replaced the jews for some of the far right. While the right don’t openly advocate for extermination they are happy to render them somewhere else where shit happens.
Have you ever been to the american south? Is not a bad place to start in order to understand different colors of fascism, expecially relevant to understand different colors of fascism between Europe and USA.
Probably the best movie to understand racial and fascist undertones is ‘Mississippi Burning’. Even that is not complete it takes a lifetime of cultural propaganda to understand the examples they used. However it is a good start. Our racism is subtle, not overt. It was illegal to do what southern states did to the black former slave populations, but they did it anyway and many times go away with it. The ‘good’ boys were provoked, provoked by being alive.
The Klan (military arm of the confederacy) has always trafficked in deniable euphamisms. You are always over-reacting and under reporting. Only they can tell the story correctly. Oh so subtley they will suggest. They traffic in sexual abuse to control local populations, in sexual harassment to lower stature of people they do not want others to listen to. At war always and always looking for a victim to control. Singles, Women and minorities are their favorite objects of control.
Let’s not forget that Hitler based much of his initial antisemitism on the South’s Jim Crow laws.
I grew up in CA. Played football in OK, lived in a segregated dorm. Was drafted in NFL. Leaving Atlanta Stadium I heard chants of Falcoons by police and fans. I drove down a street in Covington GA with a deputy, he increased speed moving close to a black lady on a bike with a child on the back just missing her – the deputy turned to me and said “a good cop never passed up the opportunity to legally kill 2 Ns. The sheriff of Covington County took me on a ride in his police car, we stopped at a farm gate, a black man walked out saying yes sir Mr Odom, yes sir Mr Odom. Sheriff Odom took out a gun pointed at his head and said N, you open that gate and when we return you better be standing there to open it again. We drove onto his property, shot guns, he told me where killed Ns, pointed to where they were buried, said he used hoe, it’s blunt and sharp, need to kill one every now and then to keep them in line. This is just the tip of the iceberg of my experience of living and playing football in OK, LA, GA, MS AL. Yes, I’m the original meaning of WOKE. I have a nice 5 year NFL pension, I would not have it if blacks were allowed to play back in the 60, early 70s. SEC had no blacks. I remember teammates telling me about running off black recruits – funny, one of them is in the Steelers Hall Of Fame, think we could have use him? Five years NFL, competed against 1 black man, I thought I played at the highest level, it was a lie. Racism steels from everyone. I went to an alumni game in OK after Obama was elected, our QB said to about 50 people at a tailgate gathering “we will teach America to never elect another negro! Sorry I can’t stop, so much pent up angst I never talk about…..
Yeah – in response to another comment, I don’t mind being piled on and didn’t intend the response to the H to indicate I was displeased with his reply either. I’m here to learn. It’s undoubtedly true that there is racism in America. These racists would obviously like R over D and Trump over Harris. The question though is whether the county’s current leadership is programmatically, ideologically racist to the extent that calling them Nazi is justified and we can expect racist political action. For example, embracing colorblindness over quota hiring does not necessarily appear so; countries like France seem to implement colorblindness. The most substantial argument that the political leadership is ideologically racist seems to be the association between Musk, Thiel and eugenics, but I’m left uncertain to the seriousness of it. If the political movement is highly different from European fascism then I’m not sure using the terms of European fascism for it is helpful.
I’m not saying this to pile on but I can’t resist as a new englander who lived in (southern) VA and LA at different times, H is 100% right about racial ideology in large swaths of this country. I was once kicked off a public playground outside new orleans with a group of kids from the community center where i worked by municipal employees because the after school program run by the local department of recreation didnt want their kids to “mix” with my kids. I know thats not genocide but its blatant dehumanization and segregation in the 21st century. Notwithstanding our current far-right snowflakes’ attempts to whitewash history, subjugation and genocide are fundamental to our country and functioned as pervasive parts of our government and broader economy until the 1960s. And one of our most prominent cultural symbols is a flag representing pro slavery secession. Alright anyway carry on.
Elon doesn’t care if folks are starving.
Donald doesn’t care if eggs are high.
They don’t care if the stock market is crashing.
They’re so rich, they’ll totally get by.
They don’t care if temperatures are rising.
They don’t care if hurricanes increase.
They don’t care if elephants are dying.
That won’t make their bottom-line decrease.
Trump and Musk both care about money.
Trump and Musk just care about themselves.
Trump won’t care if National Parks are sold off.
Elon doesn’t care if veterans die.
They don’t care if forest fires ravage.
They don’t care if suffering people cry.
They don’t care if you stop getting your mail.
They don’t care if you eat poisoned food.
They don’t care if river dams all fail…
and by floods you find yourself pursued.
Trump and Musk both care about money.
Trump and Musk just care about themselves.
They don’t care if you can’t buy insurance…
so you lose all things that you once owned.
With them, there is only one assurance,
they’ll work to ensure they’re not dethroned.
Trump and Elon both are greedy bastards.
They have one concern and one alone.
They desire to take whatever you have…
and in time to make it all their own.
If you thought Trump & Musk were here to save you,
you should know, they care not a bit.
To them, you are merely irritations.
To them, you are little more than shit.
H — with the German elections tomorrow, I would love your take on the rise of the AfD and any parallels you see to the far right here (or anywhere really).
I am purposefully ignorant about religion, which I view as a personal strength even if it is embarrassing sometimes. I am of mixed race (Chinese and Irish/German) but am ethnically indeterminate to people who don’t know me – most people guess Latino, followed by Jewish, Greek and even Eskimo once (she was drunk). I identify more as Chinese than White, but don’t have many Chinese friends and am often predisposed to be critical of Chinese people when I encounter them. I feel this sort of ethnic neutrality often gives me an advantage of not having an agenda or any predispositions.
My biggest cohort of friends is Jewish, followed by musicians then probably pot smokers. As noted, I am often mistaken for being Jewish because I am short with (formerly) dark hair, have a Jewish given name (Adam) and hang out with a lot of Jewish people. I am on good terms with almost all my Jewish friends, but have had a falling out with a few over my criticism of Israel over the Gaza war/genocide or my empathy for any of the Muslims in the region starting with the Palestinians. Some of these now former Jewish friends have even labeled me an antisemite, and blamed folks like me (and also The Squad and college campus protesters) for ultimately helping to get Trump re-elected. I don’t really follow this reasoning as this is not in my heart or head, but I could not disabuse them of it before I quit trying.
But I read the article in the link below which I don’t have the background or knowledge to really assess, but it resonated with me. Perhaps it’s easier for me to understand since it applies to Germany – a more extreme case and one less subject to my own national biases about the US. But the article suggests that to a certain extent, some (and maybe a significant part) of any rise in antisemitism (perceived or real) might not be secular in nature as much as a product of a sort of carte blanche that the West, led by Germany and the US, have given to Israel. In short, Israel can do whatever it wants because of the ever-present cloud of antisemitism, and any questioning of that stance is, per se, antisemitic. I don’t buy that shit and it makes me angry, although I have difficulty defending myself or even countering due to my marginal foundation on all these topics. But I know what I know, and seems to me that genocide in Gaza does not fail the duck test.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-157681412
Now I can afford the loss of a couple of Jewish friends and we’ll see what our rightward march has in store for me here in the states. But I also feel a little trapped in an (un)fun house of mirrors when I read about IDF soldiers executing their own white-flag waving hostages or last week’s story about a Jewish man in Miami shooting two Jewish people he thought were Palestinians, with the victims claiming antisemitism before learning their assailant was Jewish and mistaken.
Any guidance/insight would be appreciated and sorry for the long comment. I considered sending it off-line, but thought maybe some other commenters might have some valuable feedback. Plus, you could always just delete if it’s too much. Thanks in advance.
It’s remarkable to witness the mental gymnastics required to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. As a father, I feel awful about what the Bibas family has endured, but I feel equally awful for the Palestinian children blown up and buried in rubble. I don’t know how soldiers anywhere find it in themselves to kill so many people, but it has similarities to religion where the powers that be discourage critical thought and questioning about whether the mission or creed is righteous.
What Israel is doing in Palestine reminds of the treatment of Native Americans. Mass slaughter and forced removal were always justified by the “bad” Indians. It didn’t matter whether a tribe was involved in any raids or murders themselves. There was always a reason to displace and murder tribes if they got in the way of manifest destiny. The bad actors gave Americans in the west and Israelis today a convenient excuse to take what they want regardless of what happened to innocent bystanders.
Doesn’t require any mental gymnastics at all. Hamas as the elected government of Gaza has been waging war with Israel constantly, including missile strikes almost daily, bombing civilian buses, suicide attacks, kidnapping for years. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars building fortifications, tunnel networks and munitions factories rather than improving the lot of their citizens. They have stated repeatedly that they intend to destroy the state of Israel.
They finally went too far. The state of Israel exists in a constant state of existential dread. The phrase “never again” is etched into the soul of every Jew. every Jew is cognizant that few countries accepted Jewish refugees during ww2. The US turned away refugee ships.
So yes, no imagination needed to understand the devastation that Hamas brought upon Gaza by its own hand.
I don’t care what the circumstances are: firing missiles that kill children indiscriminately requires mental gymnastics, but whatever helps you sleep at night.
Joe, almost all of what you say here’s self-evidently true and correct, however, the equivalence you implicitly draw between Mohammed Deif’s al-Qassam Brigades and Hitler’s war machine is completely absurd. I’m sure you know that.
Hamas doesn’t, didn’t and never will have the military capacity to destroy the state of Israel, a nation armed with dozens (at least) of nuclear weapons. Hezbollah was orders of magnitude more capable than Hamas, and had the distinction of fighting the IDF to a standstill previously, and look what happened to them when Israel took the gloves off: They lasted less than a month.
The al-Qassam Brigades were impressive as fanatical Sunni militias go, but that’s a pretty low bar. They aren’t (weren’t, past tense) even a military by the standards of Hezbollah. Comparing the al-Qassam Brigades to The Wehrmacht and to Hitler’s war machine more generally, doesn’t make any sense at all.
Hitler had both the desire, the willingness and the capacity not just to carry out an industrialized genocide against the Jewish people, but in fact the military wherewithal to embark on a quest to conquer every nation on Earth, including the United States. We’re talking a man here who genuinely believed he could defeat the UK, the US and the Soviet Union at the same time. The only thing Hamas ever defeated in battle was a fence.
I don’t like having to point this out, but when I get comments like the one above, I have little choice: Israel just committed a mini-genocide in Gaza. We all saw it. You can give it another name if you want to, and you can argue that whatever you decide to call it was justified, but what you can’t do is try to equate the al-Qassam Brigades with the Nazi war machine.
They shared a desire to eradicate the Jewish people. And if you want to argue that’s really the crux of the matter here, I’ll concede the point as long as you concede that’s where the parallels stop.
Conceded indeed. However, fighting an enemy in an urban environment inevitably results in civilian casualties. Hamas picked the battlefield.
I find it interesting that you differentiate Jews from musicians from pot smokers, as if Jews cannot be musicians or smoke pot. That is racist in itself. Would you categorize Christian’s or Muslims the same way? Pretty sure most Jews can pass as American without anyone being the wiser.
I didn’t say the cohorts were mutually exclusive, Joe. And I singled out Jews for a specific reason which is clearly evident from my post.
Suggest you loosen the strap on your Antisemitism Patrol Cap.
Joe Weisenthal wrote yesterday on twitter, that the fall of the soviet union was fueled by liberation of information, which allowed for right wingers like Yeltsin to promote nationalism and identity politics and ultimately the collapse of the state (he mentioned the book “Collapse” by Zubok).
He then made the comparison to the Obama years and the invention of social media, which brought liberation and wide spread of dark ideas and politics in a developed liberal democracy. Then Trump, January 6th and Trump again.
Now mix those thoughts with the stories from Heisenberg’s past (see his comments above) and imagine read this on the same day: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections#
“… the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.” From an Adam Serwer piece at The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-attacks-dei/681772/?gift=MEpCTQExoFIUxpSYhsgq4hET9hetdPYcaYcDVMi-Pso&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Anecdotal.
The only Republican congressman from my state represents a large, very rural, quite low income, and very red/redneckish area. Farmers, ranchers, lumber, national forest, and so on.
He held a town hall last week. The room was packed with furious constituents yelling at him, about how they or family members had been fired (turns out a lot of his voters are federal workers or work on federally funded programs) or can’t access services (turns out a lot also depend on federal programs). He was reportedly trying to reassure them and was getting shouted down, “don’t lie to us!” and so on.
Presumably similar input is being received by other Rep legislators in a growing number of districts.
Just wait until the GOP starts to slash Medicaid spending. That program funds healthcare (hospitals) in righwing rural areas. Republicans cleverly deemed it “medical welfare”, pushing the narrative that it mainly gives free healthcare to able-bodied young men who would rather sit at home on their couch playing videogames than take rewarding minimum wage jobs which would allow them to buy private health insurance. Sadly, a quick glance at the breakdown of recipients paints a much different picture – around 40% goes to children.
Another unspoken but widely-held notion is that it mainly goes to lazy minorities. Maine is the whitest state in the nation, yet “nearly one-third of Mainers rely on MaineCare to get the care they need”. Many of them live in the rural areas which voted for Trump. And often as not when asked, a good chunk of them sheepishly admit that they get their coverage because their wife works for the school district or they have public works job.
You have to give credit to how Republcans have continued to successfully push a message that gets people to vote against something that is so clearly in their family’s best interest.
14 Flags, 14 gear teeth, sending tweets with date, time 14. He seems obsessed with 14… hmmm.
Someone needs to investigate how much nazi and hitler crap was played non-stop on the History Channel between like 1998-2016. Seemed like way too much, the H logo seemed to stand for Hitler after awhile. Wonder how many people were brainwashed by all of this constant Nazis on TV. Plus it went from standard WWII doc to Hitler and the Aliens, Hitler and Bigfoot. Seemed like the History channel was trying to it into comic books and for a lack of a better word, cool.