There has been more fallout from the Madison Square Garden! I was watching PBS News Hour when this segment came on...
The racist, sexist, and vulgar remarks at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, from the former president himself and his slate of speakers, have drawn significant criticism. For more on the rhetoric and its impact, Amna Nawaz spoke with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University.
Amna Nawaz:
The racist, sexist and vulgar remarks at Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden rally from the former president himself and his slate of speakers has drawn significant criticism the day after.
For more on the rhetoric and its impact, we're joined by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University.[...]
Amna Nawaz:
So we are just days from Election Day. This was probably one of the ugliest collection of remarks from selected speakers that we have seen at a Trump rally. You study this kind of rhetoric. So what stood out to you about this type of language this close to Election Day?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
So this place in Madison Square Garden, and it was one of many occasions that the Trump campaign has chosen to allow comparisons to be made to the Nazis. So that was Madison Square Garden, which was the site of a rally by American Nazis in 1939, talking about polluting the blood, speaking of Americans as an enemy within.
This is all straight from fascism. In fact, fascism — the core of fascism in Italy and Germany were combatants who followed their leader to bring the war home and turned their force against their own people. And when Donald Trump was talking about America as an occupied country and he was going to liberate it and also in the past talking about using the military on Americans, this comes out of fascism and also the tradition of military dictatorships like Pinochet in Chile.
So it's a purely authoritarian spectacle that we saw.
Wow! She doesn't mince words. I think we all knew that but to see it in print kind sinks in!
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
I think Trump has been conditioning Americans since 2015 to see violence as something justified in certain cases and even patriotic.
He's been conditioning them to see other Americans as enemies, as diseased, as dirty. And what we have to remember is that authoritarians might initially target one group, and he's been talking mostly about immigrants. But he's also calling the enemy within the political opposition.
And when the Nazis built Dachau in 1933 because they were running out of space in prisons — they built this camp Dachau. And they didn't put Jews in it at first. It was for the political opposition, liberals, leftists. Then it had Jehovah's Witnesses, then LGBTQ people. All kinds of other people went in there, and then Jews were targeted as well by the regime.
So when they're talking about deporting so many people in America, this is a massive amount of people, and thus you need an infrastructure of repression. You need camps. And the whole thing is a dystopia. And this is not what America is. But Donald Trump has been conditioning Americans to think that this is the way.
The Republicans are calling the Democrats fearmongering for calling Trump a fascist... the technical name for what the Republicans are is "gaslighting."
REP. BYRON DONALDS (R-FL):
This is the problem with most media today. They're too busy trying to fearmonger everything, instead of actually talking about the facts and the substance.
Amna Nawaz:
So, Ruth, members of the Republican Party now also criticize Vice President Harris for calling former President Trump a fascist, saying that that is the dangerous rhetoric. Are those kind of remarks on the same level to you?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat:
Not at all.
And this is part of an authoritarian projection mechanism. I call it the upside-down world of authoritarianism, where, ever since Mussolini, he was the first to call democrats the real tyrants and fascism was going to be freedom. Fascism was going to make Italy great again. That was a slogan, as was drain the swamp. Trump took that from Mussolini as well.
So this is pure projection to — and it's all — the endgame is to justify — to justify whatever they would like to do for retribution, locking up the political opposition by saying that they're the ones who are the tyrants, they're the ones who are repressive.
This was an eye opener!
MSNBC also had and interview Ruth Ben-Ghiat along with Anne Applebaum... just listen to the first minute and half.
To paraphrase Maya Angelou... "When someone shows you that they are a fascist, believe them the first time."
Vote Blue to save America from fascism!
Vote "Yes" on the Connecticut ballot question.
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