Donald Trump and maga Repubicans are destroying our nation's democracy. Donald Trump is toppling democracy and Republicans are responsible

An American president toppling American democracy is uncharted territory: No, we haven’t been here before. By Renée Graham Globe Columnist, echo opinion published in the Boston Globe.

A common refrain on social media these days is to tell those fretting over democracy in retreat that “we’ve been here before.” 

It’s usually intended as a bit of tough love to counter scary and rampant fears about what the Donald Trump administration is doing to this country and the world.

While the idea that this nation has been in dark places before is true, it also misses a salient point about this particular petrifying moment in American history: Those of us alive today haven’t been here, in a place this dire, before.

Never before has this nation suffered under an American president using all available means to topple American democracy. By comparison, President Trump makes former president Richard Nixon, who ducked impeachment for his criminal activities by resigning, look like an ornery child.

Donald Trumps vision for our nation's crumbling democracy
is clearly Nazism ❗

In a social media post, Doanld Trump demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi (aka "Nurse Rached" of the Justice Department) act on his promised vendettas against his perceived political enemies.

At a memorial service for Charlie Kirk on Sunday, Trump said that, contrary to the far-right podcaster who he claimed “did not hate his opponents,” “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”

On Monday, Trump spread unproven claims linking autism to Tylenol use by pregnant women, repeated the discredited idea that vaccines may be tied to autism, and promoted an untested treatment for children with “autistic symptoms.”

Trump hasn’t said anything about reports his Justice Department shut down a 2024, FBI investigation into Tom Homan, now his border czar, for allegedly accepting 💲50,000 in cash from undercover agents posing as businessmen in exchange for future government contracts connected to border security.

But after last week’s sudden suspension of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show, which was scheduled to return Tuesday night, Trump had plenty to say about revoking licenses for networks if people there say negative things about him. (Awwww ❗ 😝😒)

That doesn’t even cover the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that are upending families and communities by disappearing people everyday and subjecting them to inhumane conditions, including some who are legally documented or American citizens.

Congressional Republicans have surrendered their constitutional obligations. Democratic leadership is stupefied. The conservative-led Supreme Court is using its shadow docket like a sledgehammer against democracy on Trump’s behalf.

Recent generations have never seen anything like this, as the worst president in American history surpasses his first term as the worst president in American history. Millions are justifiably bothered and bewildered, and Trump’s return to the White House is still several months shy of a year.

If many are mired in feelings of doom in a country that seems unrecognizable, it’s because we haven’t witnessed anything like this. And so long as the Trump administration remains in power, things will only get worse.

Of course, we’ve known national horrors like Sept. 11, 2001, and Jan. 6, 2021. We’ve lived through white supremacist massacres at a Buffalo supermarket, a Pittsburgh synagogue, a Walmart in El Paso, and a historic Black church in Charleston, S.C. This nation continues to have more mass shootings than any other country in the world.

Threads of fascism have always been woven into this nation’s flawed and incomplete democracy. Jim Crow laws thrived for nearly a century after the end of the Civil War and barred Black people from their constitutional rights as American citizens.

People of color continue to live under what those least affected accept as racial profiling, which the Supreme Court’s conservatives recently and temporarily endorsed as a tool for federal immigration enforcement. (Check my Maine Writer substack article at this site here- SCOTUS and the Nuremberg Laws.)

As Americans, we are the descendants of those who fought against codified racism and for suffrage. We are the children of the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969, and the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott that started in December 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus as the law dictated.

We are the beneficiaries of warriors known and unknown who gave their lives but never sold their souls to move this recalcitrant nation closer to its promise of “a more perfect union.”

In this moment, Americans of conscience now charged with meeting these hard times with determination, courage, and eyes toward a future that this malignant administration has made feel further out of reach than ever.

To say “we’ve been through this before” is to diminish the dangerous churn of current events. Most Americans today — excluding those who fled autocratic regimes for the promise of freedom here — have never lived under fascism. But Trump is destroying the Constitution as blithely as he destroyed the White House Rose Garden and replaced it with a tacky patio.

To fight against what Trump is doing to democracy and America requires recognition that his willfully catastrophic actions are a stark departure from all that has come before. History may serve as a guide, but its echoes and outcomes alone won’t save us.

P.S. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.😳😧😰

Reader response: Thank you, Renée Graham, for calling out the denialism, minimization of reality, and cataclysmic head-in-the-sand mentality that has washed over this country. The visceral horror of eroding democracy has proven too much for many to bear. And so, just like when one’s child is on drugs, one’s partner is cheating, or one’s business is failing, people are reverting to “this too shall pass.” Or “we’ve been here before.”

For too many Americans, if they allowed themselves to fully grasp reality, they would fall apart. The anxiety and looming sense of hopelessness would be overwhelming. One can only hope that luminaries in the media continue to try to break through the country’s willful blindness, because democracy is worth fighting for.

T.S. Eliot famously wrote, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” But we, as a nation, to save our country, have to find the courage to man-and-woman- stand up to defeat Trumpziism.

From Elaine Mintzer in Merrimack, New Hampshire

Republicans and Holocaust denial

Republicans are having difficulty deciding how they should think about Nazis and the Holocaust. 

Unbelievably, they even deny the actions they have publicly taken, propagate and then delete messages, verbally promote and legislatively limit teaching about what the Nazis did. They seem confused (Dah! ya'think?), but aren’t. Some Republicans cozy up to Nazis. Some Republicans, often the same ones, call Democrats Nazis. Many Republicans across the country are attacking the foundation of Holocaust teaching. These three arms of Republican behavior around the Nazis have a single result: (Danger!) to trivialize the Holocaust.

From 1933-1945 the world watched in shameful silence as the demonic anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler, attempted to exterminate the Jewish people from Europe.

Embracing Nazis always makes news. Carl Paladino, Republican nominee for NY Governor in 2010, Trump’s NY campaign chair in 2016, and current House candidate, is simply the latest fascist advocate. In a radio interview last year, which somehow did not become public news until this month, he praised Hitler: “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.” Paladino combines admiration for Nazis and old-fashioned American racism: in 2016, he hoped that Barack Obama would die of mad cow disease and suggested that Michelle Obama be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

Amazingly, the overlap between conservative Republicans and neo-Nazism has a long history. Former Nazis and neo-Nazis were founders of the Republican Heritage Groups Council in 1969, which excluded Black and Jewish Americans. 

Some Republican candidates in the 2018, elections were open Nazis, white supremacists and/or Holocaust deniers: Vox said 5, the Forward said 9. Illinois Rep. Mary Miller approvingly quoted Hitler the day before the January 6 riots, and recently won the Republican primary.

More Republicans stand next to Nazis without themselves praising Hitler. Arizona Republican office holders and candidates appeared at a 2021, rally organized by Matt Braynard, former director of data and strategy for Trump’s 2020, campaign, featuring Greyson Arnold as a speaker, who calls Nazis “the pure race” and supports the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. 

Mroeover, the Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared this year at the America First Political Action Conference, which is hosted by white nationalists who express antisemitism and deny the Holocaust. She posed for pictures with Holocaust denier Vincent James Foxx. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood proudly next to Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes at the same conference, where he later praised Putin and Hitler.

White supremacy has become integral to Republican messaging. A Twitter employee in 2019 argued internally that getting rid of racist content would involve deleting Republican Party messages, including Trump’s: “on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material”. Prominent Republicans who have openly promoted the “white replacement theory” that Democrats are trying to replace real Americans with ethnic minorities in order to win elections include Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. FOX’s Tucker Carlson has been the most vocal propagator of this theory. German Nazis could not have been so bad if our political celebrities want to take selfies with their American cousins and parrot their racist nonsense.

It only seems contradictory that for many Republicans, including those who happily consort with American fascists, “Nazi” is a favorite label for politicians and government employees they don’t like. Donald Trump, Jr., in 2018 said the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform was “awfully similar” to Nazi Party platforms. Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania nominee for governor, compared Democrats’ gun control proposals to the Nazis in 2018 and again this year. In June 2021, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said Democrats were like Nazis who want to destroy America. Even though Trump’s most notable achievement was the development of a vaccine, Republicans as a Party have criticized every government effort to save lives through masks and vaccines. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert called government advocates of vaccinations “needle Nazis” and “medical brownshirts” in front of a cheering CPAC crowd in July 2021. Sen. candidate Josh Mandel in Ohio in April 2021 and Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson in January 2022 compared our government’s health policy to the Nazis. Lara Logan, a host on Fox News Media’s streaming service, said in November that Anthony Fauci “represents Josef Mengele”.

Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the media for comparing Republicans to Nazis in May 2021, then said the Democrats were the “national socialist party”. When Nancy Pelosi announced rules in May 2021 requiring unvaccinated members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor, Greene said on a Christian Broadcasting Network program: “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” After the American Jewish Congress tweeted back, “Such comparisons demean the Holocaust”, she insisted: “I stand by all of my statements; I said nothing wrong, I think any rational Jewish person didn’t like what happened in Nazi Germany, and any rational Jewish person doesn’t like what’s happening with overbearing mask mandates and overbearing vaccine policies.” She was so convinced of her imagery, she used it the next week in a tweet about one company’s vaccination policy: “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

Greene is not demeaning the Holocaust. Playing with Nazis, calling her opponents Nazis, and comparing herself to Jewish Holocaust victims all serve to diminish the Holocaust. Republicans are attempting to remake the Holocaust into a normal political event. If America’s doctors are like German Stormtroopers, if requiring one’s employees or our members of Congress to follow the most obvious public health rules is like murdering thousands of Jews and others every day for years, then the Holocaust as a singular event has disappeared.

Weeks later Greene apologized. As one of the most public faces of the Republican Party, she had gone one step too fast in pursuit of the Party’s goal of normalizing the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is a dangerous subject for American conservatives, because it was the mass murder of Jews by Christians. A few prominent Nazis espoused crackpot theories of Aryan paganism, and Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox Christians were also slaughtered in vast numbers. But the murder of 6 million Jews was the culmination of centuries of official Christian persecution. Teaching about the Holocaust should begin with the Bible and must explain the violent antisemitism of nearly all Christian denominations right into the 20th century. Anti-Jewish racism was embedded in Christian European and American societies and their legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white Christians. The recognition of Christian responsibility for Western antisemitism and the Holocaust led every Christian denomination in Western Europe and America after 1945 to repudiate centuries of their own dogma.

The wave of Republican censorship of public school and university curricula in response to the sudden American reckoning on race after George Floyd’s murder purports to be about “critical race theory”. When Florida’s Board of Education banned “critical race theory” from public school classrooms one year ago, the Board seemed to protect Holocaust education by also banning any teaching that denies the Holocaust. But their language points in the opposite direction. Critical race theory “distorts historical events” by asserting “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” The Holocaust was caused by precisely such embedded white supremacy. And like American anti-Black racism, that white supremacy had deep roots in official Christianity.

I have seen my students become uncomfortable when confronted with facts about Christian persecution of Jews and Nazi admiration for American Jim Crow legislation in the 1930s as a model for the Nuremberg laws. The American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose 1916 eulogy for Nordic supremacy was entitled “The Passing of the Great Race”, was equally popular with American segregationists and Adolf Hitler, who called the book his “bible”. They were disturbed by the realization that German Jews, from the passage of Nuremberg Laws in 1935 until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, were treated essentially the same as African Americans here, whose racial persecution continued unabated into the 1960s. That same knowledge frightens today’s right-wing Christians across the Western world. The Christian nationalist parties in Europe all seek to diminish the Holocaust, especially the role played by Christians in their own nations: those in power in Poland and Hungary, and those trying for power in Germany and France.

The literal wording of recent Republican censorship laws bans education that doesn’t exist. The fake narrative that critical race theory is taught in public schools is the basis of this wave of legislation. A different and broader invention imperils Holocaust education: the claim in Wisconsin’s 2021 law that it is necessary to forbid teachers from indoctrinating their students with the idea “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex and that an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex.” That kind of systematically damaging pedagogy was in fact integral to American education for centuries. The long racial reckoning which began in the 1960s demonstrated how white supremacy was written into all levels of educational curricula. The claim that American racism is over, the foundation of the attacks on critical race theory, ignores the continuing power and weight of adult Americans who were subject for years to those curricula, as I was.

Any hint that a teacher is promoting racial or gender superiority is likely to be called out without any help from new laws. The Republicans are not anxiously hunting for hidden examples of white supremacy or male superiority. That’s what they promote. They want their supporters to believe that they will reveal and defeat the teaching that blacks are superior to whites and that women are superior to men, exactly the kind of fake crisis that dominates the politico-cultural war.

Over years of interacting with teachers of the Holocaust, I never heard of any who told students that they bore “responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex”. Holocaust teachers do mention that this was precisely what Christian churches had been saying for centuries about Jews. Such claims were fundamental to murderous persecution. But inducing guilt in today’s students is hardly useful in teaching history.

The discussions during the Republican effort in Louisiana to ban critical race theory display how the right-wing ideology of the Holocaust plays out at the state level. Republican state representative Valarie Hodges sponsored a bill in 2021 to mandate Holocaust education in Louisiana. Hodges was an avid promoter of the idea that Democrats are as bad as Nazis. She was part of the effort of conservative Republicans in the state to require the teaching of patriotic themes in American history and to block more teaching about America’s racial history. Hodges brought a Metairie resident to testify about the dangers of “communism” in our government: “To put it in Holocaust terms, the communists are now the Nazis and we are the Jews. They are the predators. We are the prey. We need to teach this history to our future citizens so we don’t end up like the Jews.” No Jewish organizations testified in favor of Hodges’ bill. The executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, speaking for professional historians in America, recognized the ultimate goal. “You’re saying, ‘You have to teach the history of the Holocaust, but you can’t teach the history of institutionalized, deeply embedded racism in the United States.’”

Rep. Ray Garofalo, the head of the Louisiana House Education Committee, sponsored a bill barring teaching about institutional racism. He then slipped and said the right-wing truth: any lessons about American slavery should include “the good, the bad, the ugly”. Garafalo’s other unprofessional antics made him such an easy target, that the Republican Speaker of the House removed him as chair, and replaced him with another Republican. All the bills about mandating and preventing subjects in Louisiana public education ultimately failed.

The legislative history of Republican censorship in Arizona offers similar clues about what the issues are and what will be attempted in the future. Arizona Republicans in the state legislature are unanimously in favor of putting an amendment to the state’s constitution before the voters. The bill’s lengthy section B enumerates seven varieties of fake complaints about non-existent educational practices. The key is section A: teachers in public schools from elementary to high school: “may not use public monies for instruction that promotes or advocates for any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex”. The bill’s sponsor, Michelle Udall, argued that, “If a teacher can’t teach [history] without placing blame or judgment on the basis of race, they shouldn’t be teaching.” She was clear about what she meant: it will be okay to say that a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery story happened, but it would “not be appropriate” to say that the mass murderer was a white supremacist. Her bill would insure that such teachers could be personally punished. Republicans in the Arizona House and Senate unanimously voted in favor. The bill was signed into law as part of a budget whose main item was a tax cut for better-off Arizonans.

How does one teach the Holocaust or slavery without detailing the responsibility of particular human groups for inhuman treatment of fellow humans of other groups based on racist ideologies?

Conservative politicians can count on well-funded organizations to create the local crises around curriculum that alarm enough parents to get educators fired. Nearly 900 school districts across the country, educating one-third of all public school students in the country, were targeted by anti-CRT efforts from September 2020 to August 2021. The most thorough study of the nationwide campaign against teaching about race concluded: “The anti “CRT” effort is a purposeful, nationally/state interconnected, and locally-driven conflict campaign to block or restrict proactive teaching and professional development related to race, racism, bias, and many aspects of proactive diversity/equity/inclusion efforts in schools, while — for some — gaining political power and control. The conflict campaign’s loudest, most powerful voices caricature actual teaching and stoke parent anxiety in a quest to control both schools and government.”

The real danger that Republican curricular censorship presents to Holocaust teaching is not the occasional eruption of stupidity, as in Southlake, Texas. Texas House Bill 3979 requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, told teachers,

“Just try to remember the concepts of 3979 . . . make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” That caused a small scandal. Despite posing for photographs with Holocaust deniers, Republican politicians don’t yet demand that Holocaust denial become part of the curriculum.

But when Holocaust denial comes from within the community, from antisemitic parents, the new laws make teaching difficult. A North Carolina teacher wrote: “My SUPERINTENDENT asked us to advise students to ‘ask your parents’ rather than insist that the Holocaust was real. We received professional development to help us navigate this political environment safely. Our superintendent attended and told us to advise kids to ‘ask your parents’ instead of try to show evidence to a child whose family swears the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

New Republican laws and their emboldened approach to white supremacy will inevitably lead to an attack on any Holocaust teaching which goes beyond the discussion of prejudice to analyze the power of embedded racism and Christian white supremacy.

For Republicans, teaching the histories of America and of the Holocaust is too dangerous to allow. Those educations cause intellectual, then social disturbance. Both explain the role of embedded racism in Western society and the disastrous consequences. The Holocaust is over, and Christian nationalists all over Western society have been calling for Jews to get over it. But American racism and sexism are not. The success of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in demonstrating the continuing influence of male and white supremacy has frightened Christian conservatives. They are using the inevitable discomfort of students learning that their predecessors committed genocide to try to sanitize the history they will learn.

The American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association, along with other educational organizations, released a statement in June 2021 opposing the new rollout of bills restricting the teaching of history. The statement focuses entirely on “the role of racism in the history of the United States”. Thus far, Holocaust teaching has suffered only collateral damage in the Republican war against American history. But without trivializing Holocaust education into anodyne lessons on intolerance, Republicans will never be able to cover up the historical truth that critical race theory foregrounds: racism has been and may still be embedded in American life.

Today teachers of American history are the targets of Republican censorship. Holocaust teachers, you’re next.

Steve Bannon- failed in the military, flopped in government and will surely blunder in Italy!

Echo report by Ben Munster published in the May 31, 2021, The New Yorker:

Maine Writer comment: Bannon (ugh!) irony- A man who failed as a Navy officer and made a name for himself by supporting conspiracy theories perpetrated by #FormerGuy, now wants to build a right wing Nazi style academy in Italy!?!  Obviously, Bannon does not read. There is zero, "Nein!" ie. "no", support among Italians for anything that resembles Facism, Mussoliniism, right wing revanchism* and the evils of Nazism. 

Predappio, Italy crypt Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)

 

Suggested reading list for Bannon. If he can't read, then somebody must read these to him:

• The Italian Front: Invasion of Sicily, Salerno, Monte Cassino, Anzio, Rome, Gothic Line (Campaigns of World War II), by Michael B. Haskew.
• Beneath A Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan
• The Vatican Pimpernel: The World War II Exploits of the Monsignor Who Saved Over 6,500 Lives by Brian Fleming
• The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni

The Last Stand at Steve Bannon’s “Gladiator School”

The Academy for the Judeo-Christian West is trying to stave off eviction from Trisulti, an eight-hundred-year-old monastery outside Rome, where its founder hopes to offer courses like “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare.”  By Ben Munster

At a café in a mountain town east of Rome, Benjamin Harnwell was wondering which of the five thousand applicants to his right-wing “gladiator school” he could introduce to a reporter without embarrassment. He thought of four, and dialled one up. “A journalist is looking to speak to some students,” he said into the phone, “and I don’t want him to wind up talking to some skinhead.” He listened, a religious medal rattling against his chest, his slicked-back hair shining. Harnwell hung up, saying that he’d been kidding about the skinhead thing. He then sped off in a white Fiat Punto, heading to the Certosa di Trisulti, a vast, eight-hundred-year-old charterhouse that is both his home and the site of his school.

Several years ago, encouraged by his friend Steve Bannon, the strategist behind #FormerGuy Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Harnwell, a forty-five-year-old British Catholic, began leasing the monastery, for about a hundred thousand dollars a year, from the Italian Ministry of Culture. 

Bannon has long been trying to foment populist insurgencies across Europe, and he viewed Trisulti as the perfect location for the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, in which a new class of right-wing “culture warriors” would be trained. The aim, Bannon said, was “to generate the next Tom Cottons, Mike Pompeos, Nikki Haleys: that next generation that follows Trump.”

Set high in the mountains and decorated with frescoes, the monastery is a lonesome outpost on Bannon’s European frontier. With Trump’s defeat and Bannon’s 2020 arrest, on wire-fraud charges (he was pardoned), the work of setting up the school feels newly urgent. Harnwell spent the past two years battling lawsuits, and now the Italian government is trying to evict him. He has until June to appeal, before the carabinieri drag him out. Bannon blames “corrupt bureaucracy,” saying, “This is the sort of thing you expect from third world countries, not a founding nation of Western Civilization.”

If the plan goes ahead, gladiatorial training in the Catholic conservative arts will be offered to about seventy-five students, who will receive academic credits, toward a master’s degree, from an as-yet-undisclosed Catholic university in the States. Students were to have resided in old monks’ cells (no Wi-Fi), among a few lingering brothers. Applicants range in age from eighteen to eighty and include Italian academics and former U.S. marines. “We want people who have a sense that Western civilization is under threat,” Harnwell said.

So, the student he called, Alvino-Mario Fantini, is a fifty-two-year-old Ph.D. candidate in the Netherlands. “It’s wrong to accuse someone of racism and xenophobia, or Nazism, or any other ‘-ism’ without knowing their beliefs,” Fantini said by phone. He bitterly recalled being labelled a “fascist” in college for wearing a Dartmouth Indians sweatshirt. (The team has been renamed Big Green, to Fantini’s chagrin.) He applied to the academy in 2018, sending Harnwell a few clips blasting political correctness from the magazine he edits,  The European Conservative.

.

The academy’s curriculum is devoted to the intellectual underpinnings of (stupid!) Bannonism, a cocktail of populist nationalism, libertarianism, and traditional (right wing!) Catholicism, angled vehemently against the European Union, China, Islam, gay rights, Pope Francis, abortion, and the left. Course titles include “Cultural Marxism, Radical Jihad, and the C.C.P.’s Global Information Warfare” and “The Early Church as a Business Enterprise.” The professors—whom Harnwell is reluctant to name—will include browbeaten conservative instructors from obscure Catholic finishing schools. The academy will also offer media training, taught, ideally, by Bannon himself, and inspired by sessions held at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. (As one cpac participant put it, “They taught us how to speak about gay marriage without revealing our real thoughts.”)

When the idea for the academy was first floated, in Trump’s heyday, Harnwell had the support of a broad coalition of right-wingers, but that base is crumbling. The Italian government has moved leftward and has repeatedly taken Harnwell to court, alleging failure to pay rent and irregularities in his lease application. (Harnwell calls the charges “leftist disinformation.”)

He prevailed until last month, and the litigation has drained him, financially and emotionally. He has also lost support from revanchist elements in the Vatican, and other allies are now disillusioned with Bannon’s attempts to re-create Trumpism in Europe. “They said it would be a cultural project, that they would make Trisulti again a place of study and prayer,” Rocco Buttiglione, a conservative-leaning former Italian minister, said. “Then Steve Bannon entered into the picture.”

Protests have been erupting in the woods near the monastery, the monks have fled, and Harnwell is preoccupied with pet problems: his dog likes to eat lamb shank, and his cat drowned in a medieval well. But he remains determined to open. “This is an existential battle for me between good and evil,” he said. But months of potential gladiatorial prep time have been wasted, and it’s hard not to be glum. “Now I’m a fund-raiser for my lawyers,” he said. 

Published in the print edition of the May 31, 2021, issue, with the headline “Gladiator 101.” The New Yorker.

*Revanchism/Revanchist is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement.

Postscript - May Bannon and company should also read about what happened to the Former Guy Academy. 

Trump as Conspiracy Theorist in Chief

"... it follows a pattern. Trump has repeatedly refused to give press credentials to major news outlets when he disagrees with coverage decisions."

Donald Trump created a "do not report" list - now the Washington Post is included in this august list

In addition, Donald Trump continues to create conspiracy theories about President Obama.  

Nazism built its evil "group think" around the irrational fear of the Jews. As a result, 6 million people were the victims and World War II took millions of lives.  

Trumpism is creating the very same "kool-aid" response to a simmering skeptism about Muslims.

Now, Donald Trump revokes The Washington Post press credentials because he doesn't like his coverage.

Donald Trump said Monday that he is "revoking" the Washington Post's press access at his campaign events, calling the newspaper "phony and dishonest."

In a Facebook post, the presumptive GOP nominee (candidate Donald Trump) attributed the decision to the newspaper's "incredibly inaccurate coverage" of him.

The Post's executive editor Marty Baron responded:

"Donald Trump's decision to revoke The Washington Post's press credentials is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press. When coverage doesn't correspond to what the candidate wants it to be, then a news organization is banished. The Post will continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along -- honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We're proud of our coverage, and we're going to keep at it."

Monday's announcement was an astonishing move by the Trump campaign, given the Post's status as one of the most respected newsrooms in the United States.

Related: Is Donald Trump using Bill O'Reilly's playbook for dealing with media?
But it follows a pattern. Trump has repeatedly refused to give press credentials to major news outlets when he disagrees with coverage decisions.

Reporters who do not receive press credentials are sometimes still able to attend Trump events as members of the general public. But sometimes the denial of press credentials restricts access altogether.

BuzzFeed, Politico, The Daily Beast, Univision, and The Huffington Post are among other outlets that have been blocked in recent months. 

Some journalists have described this as an emerging Trump "blacklist."

From last September: "Why Trump is freezing out reporters"

The Huffington Post tweeted at The Post on Monday afternoon and said "Welcome to the club."

Vladimir Putin surely studying Hitler communication -Russia's propaganda war

To bolster Vladimir Putin’s cult of personality, the Kremlin cultivates washed-up Western movie stars.  (This would be Saturday Night Live humor if it weren't so scary.)

After reading this article published in The Week May 15, 2015, it seems like the comparison between two of modern history's evil leaders are being reincarnated by Vladimir Putin. Adolf Hitler's relentless take over of other countries because he could, seems analogous to Putins' take over of the Crimea and his moves into the Ukraine. Of course, Joseph Stalin was the Russian leader responsible for opposing Winston Churchill and creating the 20th century's Cold War.  

Putin certainly seems intent on reliving the legacy of both.

Perhaps, Vladimir Putin's bedtime reading includes 20th century history because he's clearly intent on using already tried strategies to affirm his ambitious leadership. In fact, it's a fair assumption to consider how Putin is evaluating how Hitler succeeded and where he failed. Likewise with Stalin. And Putin intends to fix what both of them did wrong and to get it right. Why? Because Putin has become delusional, corrupted by his own power. In "The Week" report, it appears Putin's strategy is heavily dependent on a propaganda war to garner domestic support.

Vladimir Putin’s government is engaged in a global Orwellian campaign to sow confusion and undermine the West.

Since it annexed Crimea a year ago, Russia has launched an all-out disinformation campaign on multiple fronts. State-run international news channels and websites such as RT and Sputnik give a pro-Kremlin slant to real news stories, and spread outright lies and outlandish conspiracy theories. State agencies and private firms employ platoons of bloggers who scour Western and Russian news sites for articles about Russia or Ukraine and swamp them with pro-Kremlin comments. Russian agencies have set up news websites in several East European languages. The order to create this propaganda campaign, on which the Kremlin spends an estimated $600 million a year, came straight from the top: President Vladimir Putin said in 2012 that Russia would develop “a matrix of tools and methods to reach foreign policy goals without the use of arms but by exerting information and other levers of influence.” The propaganda is surprisingly successful in sowing confusion. “Journalists are taught to report both sides,” said Rick Stengel, former managing editor of Time and now a U.S. undersecretary of state. “When the Kremlin says there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea, they have to repeat it. How do you combat someone who just makes stuff up?”

What tools does the Kremlin use?

One primary tool is the television network RT, which was called Russia Today until authorities renamed it to obscure the Russian connection. RT has cable and satellite channels in English—including RT America, which potentially reaches 85 million viewers. It covers current events in the U.S., focusing on police brutality, protests, and poverty, but it also produces wacky segments investigating whether, for example, the CIA created Ebola. Few Americans watch RT, and one of its anchors quit after publicly disavowing the “lies” that she and others were ordered to tell about the conflict in Ukraine. But the web version, RT.com, does have reach. It became the first news channel to rack up 1 billion views on YouTube. In the past year, the main theme has been the supposed rise of neo-Nazi groups and fascism in Ukraine—making pro-Russian separatists the good guys.

How are stories faked?

StopFake, a Ukrainian myth-busting site run by journalism students, has documented hundreds of fake photos spread by Russian news sites and social media. Peter Pomerantsev, aleading authority on Russian propaganda efforts, says that stories alleging that Ukrainian fascist gangs, trained by NATO, had murdered children were popping up all over these sites in early 2014, when Russia was taking over Crimea and fomenting unrest in eastern Ukraine. StopFake traced the photos back to their original sources and found that some were from past Ukrainian conflicts, some were from crime scenes in other countries, and some were actually stills from movies. The group also discovered that Russian news shows were using actors to play weeping or wounded victims and tell tales of Ukrainian government brutality. Russians call this maskirovka, or masquerade—an information war to accompany actual war.

What about East European sites?

Dozens of pro-Russian news sites have cropped up in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Fluently written in the local languages, the sites carry the same kinds of faked photos and articles about supposed Ukrainian fascism as well as skillfully argued analyses extolling Russia’s benevolent intentions. Czech counterintelligence has flagged one of the sites, Aeronet.cz, as “a source of dangerous pro-Russian propaganda.”  Earlier this year, when a NATO convoy passed through Czech territory, several of these Czech sites reported that the local population was outraged by the incursion of “foreign” troops. In fact, the convoy was greeted with Czech throngs waving U.S. flags.

What do the Kremlin’s bloggers do?
Russia has a 24-hour “troll factory” in St. Petersburg, where hundreds of employees work in 12-hour shifts writing pro-Putin comments on Western and Russian news articles, fabricating their own news stories, creating and posting satirical videos, and posting tweets and Facebook updates from fake profiles. “They bombard the websites of CNN and the BBC,” says one former employee, Marat Burkhard. One day’s assignment, he said, was to assert that NATO troops had been embedded with Ukrainian forces all along. Another was to call President Obama an uncultured “monkey” for chewing gum during his January visit to India. “You work in the Ministry of Truth, which is the Ministry of Lies, and everyone kind of believes in this truth,” says Burkhard. “It’s Orwell.”

What’s the ultimate goal?

To give the Kremlin plausible deniability of its aggressive activities, and create sympathy for Russia in the old Soviet bloc. In eastern Ukraine, Pomerantsev says, Russian media managed “to create a parallel reality where ‘fascists’ have taken power in Kiev, ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine are in mortal danger, and the CIA is waging a war against Moscow.” 

Russia recently launched a similar campaign in former Soviet republic Estonia, which has a large ethnic Russian population. 

In March, Russian-language television in Estonia broadcast a faked clip purporting to show Estonian government support for Nazism—a clear attempt to foment another pro-Russian uprising. “This is a new idea of war,” Pomerantsev says. “This is information-psychological war with endless subversion.”

Putin’s movie star pals

To bolster Vladimir Putin’s cult of personality, the Kremlin cultivates washed-up Western movie stars. Action hero Steven Seagal, for example, is a personal friend of the Russian leader. Both men have black belts in martial arts, and palling around with Seagal helps bolster Putin’s ultramacho image. 

“He is one of the greatest world leaders, if not the greatest world leader, alive today,” Seagal has said of Putin. On a boxing tour of Russia last year, actor Mickey Rourke wore a Putin T-shirt and said Putin was “a real good regular guy.” Another Putin admirer, French actor Gérard Depardieu, even accepted Russian citizenship as a way of avoiding French taxes. He has praised the Russians’ “powerful temperament,” adding, “One must be very strong to be Russian.”

THE WEEK
May 15, 2015

James Foley a modern martyr to raise the reality of ISIS evil in the world

The evil perpetrated by the tragically brutal slaying of journalist James Foley is a horrible way to remind Americans about what's at stake if the ISIS terror in the Middle East continues.  It must be stopped and eradicated.

Foley's death is close to home for New Englanders, where his home and family in Rochester New Hampshire are close to the border with Southern Maine. Moreover, because Foley's family lives near many news media centers, the story of his slaying gets maximum news attention.  

Although the ISIS statement, demanded at the execution, is one of retribution against American intervention in the Iraq and the Middle East, the slaying of the journalist should, instead, affirm US resolve to destroy the heinous ISIS force of evil. 

Possibly, if ISIS can be destroyed, the eradication of this terror group could, potentially, bring a slim legacy of hope to the dozens of others held captive by the evil doers among them. In a tragic way, Foley's martyrdom could focus energy on the eradication of this black mark on history. 

Foley's murder is a sign that ISIS (Muslim nation) is stressed by American intervention in their progress toward creating a "black Muslim nation" in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the tragedy of the modern martyr is also a brutal reminder of how it is that the world is confronted with the horror of ISIS. This disgusting group of evil perpetrators is an outgrowth of social upheaval in Iraq, resulting from the failed leadership of Al Maliki. Worse, Al Maliki's failure is the result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, under the false premise of finding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which never existed.  

Nevertheless, transgressing beyond past wrongdoings, the ISIS evil begets more evil.  Indeed, ISIS must be annihilated, in the same way Nazism was destroyed in Hitler's Germany and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was eventually destroyed.

Islamic State wants to paint the Middle East black: genocide has another evil perpetrator with Hitler, Po Pot etc.

Horrible litany of genocide continues in the evil tradition of Adolf Hitler's Nazism in Germany and Po Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  

Even Osama Bin Laden and his evil legacy seems to pale in the wake of the evil perpetrated by Abu Bakr as-Baghdadi.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, CEO

On 4 October 2011, the US State Department listed al-Baghdadi as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist and announced a reward of up to US$10 million for information leading to his capture or death. Only Ayman al-Zawahiri, chief of the global al-Qaeda organization, merits a larger reward (US$25 million).

As a perpetrator of unmitigated evil, Abu_Bakr has perpetrated, genocide and random slaughter of people deemed not to be Muslim enough. It appears he has even put forth a strategic plan for the group ISIS.  In a nutshell, his plan succinctly reported by Al Jazeera is to turn the entire Middle East "black". In other words, Abu Bakr wants the evil of ISIS to be displayed in black robes, endless yards of bleak women burkas and even painted on the faces of retail manikins.  

When Nazism engulfed Europe in the 1930s and 40s , the reaction of the western world was to eradicate the evil by destroying the entire movement. After the war, a relentless routing of Nazi war criminals became an obsession.

Likewise, when the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of Cambodians, the result was for the East Asian nations, including Vietnam, to destroy the evil. Nevertheless, little has been done to prosecute the perpetrators of the genocide after the Cambodian monarchy was reinstated.

It's difficult to understand how Muslims will stand up to one of their own, even when the demon is as horrifically evil as Abr-Bakr. Meanwhile, Christians and Jews are the most vulnerable to the horror of advancing and radically evil ISIS terror.  

Nevertheless, just like the Europeans had to eventually confront Nazism and the Asians had to oppose the Khmer Rouge,  evil in the Middle East must be decimated. Otherwise, ambiguity in the face of evil is like a welcome mat for ISIS to move forward with even more horrific reports of beheading violent acts against humanity. 

ISIS must be destroyed and thereby prevented from declaring a Muslim Black Nation. It will take a strong and united Middle East leadership coalition to accomplish what must be done before the sheer terror of ISIS consumes the Middle East, like a firestorm.  

Unfortunately, Americans came to think the world was rid of evil when Saddam Hussein was toppled, and Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed.  Instead, those two evil monsters seemed to have begot a bad  seed progeny in the person of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.