Donald Trump enables Nazi sympathizers- he is an evil creature not qualified to lead - declared bankruptcy six times!

Echo opinion by David Mastio published by Kansas.com in The Witchita Eagle newspaper:

This week, it became clear that the sickness among Republicans and conservatives who have been enthralled by Donald Trump is not going to end when he loses the presidential election. The disease will continue its course. Indeed, it is possible things will get worse. This week, Tucker Carlson, a man who had a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican Convention where he sat next to Trump, invited Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper onto his streaming show and into the lives of millions of his fans to rehabilitate Adolf Hitler as a spurned peacemaker who was pushed into Jewish genocide by a war-mongering Winston Churchill. This is insane.

Carlson is bringing his fascist apologia show to T-Mobile Center in Kansas City. Some people are paying more than $100 to get close. The next day, Carlson will be speaking before thousands more in Wichita at InTrust Bank Arena. I don’t think this is what T-Mobile and InTrust had in mind when they paid for naming rights to these venues. Carlson is no fringe figure. As a Fox News commentator, he had an audience of millions five nights a week. When he became too extreme for Fox to stomach, millions followed him to his internet platforms where his commentary and interviews have only grown in popularity. His work has been shared by billionaire X social network owner Elon Musk. Similarly, the guests who will be sharing the stage for his two shows, Megyn Kelly, a defrocked journalist, and Charlie Kirk, head of conservative group Turning Point USA, have millions of their own followers. Locally, Pete Mundo of KCMO has interviewed Carlson on his show.

Right now it is unclear if this descent into shilling for a long-dead dictator 💀responsible for the deaths of some 20 million people is enough to get Kelly, Kirk and Mundo to back away. 

Shilling for dictators is a growing pastime for those in what remains of conservative media if this week’s other news is any indication. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York indicted two employees of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda organization for funneling $10 million to a Tennessee firm, called Tenet Media, to pay conservative influencers Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin — also with their own millions of followers — to spew Kremlin propaganda to credulous conservatives skeptical of U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. 

A commentator for Blaze Media, a site co-founded by conservative commentators Glenn Beck and Mark Levin, was fired by that organization for her involvement in the scheme. Johnson, Pool and Rubin claim to be victims in this fiasco that was part of a larger Russian effort to influence the 2024, elections in favor of Trump. 

As of now, they are unindicted, so it may be true that they were unwitting tools or, maybe more accurately, fools👺👹 for Putin.

Fools for evil Putin

But, let me tell you why Johnson, the worst among the three, is willing to take millions from unknown benefactors: He has no other choice because he is unemployable. The serial plagiarist has been fired over and over again for his shady dealings.

It is not fair to say that all conservative media have been overtaken by edge-lord fascism fluffing. National Review, The Washington Free Beacon and The Dispatch, among others, provide solid reporting, untainted by Russian boodle, and commentary by writers unimpressed with Trump and his acolytes. 

But, unfortunately, millions of Americans are reading, listening and viewing “news” that appears to be from a conservative perspective but is untethered to reality by (junk❗) “journalists” who are willing to defend whatever garbage💩 behavior or half-truth is convenient that day.

As long as that is the case, Trump’s legacy😢 will be with us. 

Writer David Mastio is a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star opinion correspondent.

America's gun culture ignores the first Ten Commandment- Thou Shalt Not Have Strange Gods..."

Echo opinion by David French published in The New York Times:

Gun Idolatry Is Destroying the Case for Guns

On June 26, 2018, our family experienced one of the most terrifying nights of our lives. It began with a strange and chilling direct message to our son — an image of three Klan hoods. That was strange enough, but sadly not all that surprising. From the moment that I’d first expressed opposition to Donald Trump and Trumpism, our multiracial family (my youngest daughter, who is adopted, is Black) had faced an avalanche of threats, doxxing and vile racism.

Alt-right trolls had photoshopped images of my daughter into gas chambers and of her face onto old pictures of slaves. They had placed images of dead and mutilated Black Americans in the comments section of my wife’s blog. The threats had not stopped after Trump won. If anything, by 2018 they had escalated once again. So the Klan hoods sent to my son — which would have been chilling under any circumstances — were particularly ominous. What happened next was worse.

Within moments, my son received another message, a picture of a road several miles from our house. Then another picture arrived. A road sign. This one was closer. Someone seemed to be coming to our home.

This was not the first such incident. A few years earlier, a man had driven to our house, positioned his car to block our driveway, confronted my wife and kids and demanded to see me (I wasn’t home). He was later seen driving slowly around the parking lot of my kids’ school.

I was born in Alabama and grew up in Tennessee and Kentucky. As a son of the South, I was no stranger to firearms. We had a gun in our home. I learned to shoot at a young age. So did my wife. After the episode of the man demanding to see me, she not only bought a handgun, she attended multiple classes to train in armed self-defense.

So, yes, we had guns. And when my son received the Klan hood messages — as well as in other similar situations — we were glad we did. While we scrambled to determine whether the Klan hoods and street sign images were truly threatening or intended to be merely harassing, and while we considered whether to call the police (we did), I knew that we would not be defenseless if the threat were real and if our stalkers arrived before the police.

Thankfully, no one came to our house. It was likely just more harassment, but the presence of a police car outside our home may have deterred something more serious. I share this story to make two disclosures: Yes, we own guns. And yes, I support gun rights, not just for hunting or shooting sports, but for the purpose of self-defense. I’ve written in support of gun rights for years. I grew up in a culture that approached firearms responsibly, safely and with a sober mind. They were a tool — a dangerous tool, to be sure — but nothing more. In a fallen and dangerous world, a responsible, trained gun owner could help keep his or her family safe.

But the gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. 

As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values. At the edges, gun owners have gone from defending the rights of people to own semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s to openly brandishing them in protests, even to the point of, for example, staging an armed occupation of parts of the Michigan Capitol during anti-lockdown protests.

But we’re now facing something worse than gun idolatry. Too many armed citizens are jittery at best, spoiling for a fight at worst. In recent days we’ve seen a rash of terrible shootings by nervous, fearful or angry citizens. A young kid rings the bell on the wrong door and is shot. A young woman drives into the wrong driveway and is shot. A cheerleader accidentally tries to get in the wrong car and is pursued and shot, along with her friend. A basketball rolls into a man’s yard, and a neighboring 6-year-old girl and her father are shot.

All of these episodes occurred over the course of just six days.

Yet even worse than such shootings, which occurred because of fear or sudden rage, is the phenomenon that begins with a person who seems to want to fight, who deliberately places himself in harm’s way, uses deadly force and then is celebrated for his bloody recklessness. Take Kyle Rittenhouse. At age 17, Rittenhouse took an AR-15-style weapon to a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to, he said, “protect” a Kenosha business.

When you travel, armed, to a riot, you’re courting violent conflict, and he found it. He used his semiautomatic weapon to kill two people who attacked him at the protest, and a jury acquitted him on grounds of self-defense. But the jury’s narrow inquiry into the moment of the shooting doesn’t excuse the young man’s eagerness to deliberately place himself in a situation where he might have cause to use lethal violence.

And what has been the right’s response? Rittenhouse has gone from defendant to folk hero, a minor celebrity in populist America.

Or take Daniel Perry, the Army sergeant who was just convicted of murdering an armed Black Lives Matter protester named Garrett Foster. Shortly after the conviction, Tucker Carlson effectively demanded a pardon ❗ (now Carlson is FINALLY fired by Fox!). 

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas responded the next day, tweeting that “Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.”

Yet Abbott ignored — or did not care — about the facts exposed at trial. Perry had run a red light and driven straight into the protest, nearly striking Foster’s wife with his car. Witnesses said Foster never pointed his gun at Perry. Even Perry initially told the police he opened fire before Foster pointed his gun at him, saying, “I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.”

But the story gets worse. In social media messages before the shooting, it was plain that Perry was spoiling for an opportunity to shoot someone. His messages included, “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex” and “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”

That is not a man you want anywhere near a gun. Kyle Rittenhouse is not a man you want anywhere near a gun.

Our nation’s gun debate is understandably dominated by discussions of gun rights. But it needs to feature more accountability for gun culture. Every single feasible and constitutional gun control proposal — including the red flag laws that I’ve long advocated (which allow law enforcement to remove weapons from people who broadcast deadly intent or profound instability) — will still leave hundreds of millions of American guns in tens of millions of American hands.

I shared the account at the beginning of this piece to help explain to opponents of gun rights that there are times when a firearm can be the only thing that stands between profound evil and the people you love. I also share it to tell my gun-owning friends that I get it. I understand. I’ve faced more threats in the last few years than they might experience in 10 lifetimes.

But this I also know: Gun rights carry with them grave responsibilities. They do not liberate you to intimidate. They must not empower your hate. They are certainly not objects of love or reverence. Every hair-trigger use, every angry or fearful or foolish decision, is likely to spill innocent blood.

Moreover, every one of these acts increases public revulsion over gun ownership generally. The cry for legal and moral reform will sweep the land. America will change and gun rights will diminish. And the gun owners and advocates who fail to grasp the moral weight of their responsibility will be to blame.

Republicans support fake news like Nazis believed propaganda during World War II

Echo opinion letter published in The Roanoke Times, a Virginia newspaper:

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/propaganda_at_home_germany

Dear Editor:  I'm appalled by the #FakeNews #FoxNews Tucker Carlson's lies about the January 6th insurrectionist riot.

If you shot 41,000 hours of video of Germany invading Poland in 1939, you could select out video clips of German soldiers walking along without firing their weapons.

Fox News is a propaganda spewing fake news source! The anchors at FOX might easily "sprechen sie Fox".

You could claim they entered the country only as peaceful tourists — and that the nefarious forces of the oppressive Polish government had orchestrated a lie.

There's a catch, though. The only people who would believe you would be those who already sympathized with the Nazis (aka Trumpzis?).

Hallo! Sprechen sie Fox?

From Eric Nolan, Roanoke Virginia

Republicans desperately need reality training or find truth serum

Republicans deny reality, create fake news and reinvent history.

• 2020 election deniers
• January 6th was just a group of Capitol tourists
• Black history is not American history 
• America is a Christian nation

Democrats have loudly expressed outrage about House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to grant Fox News’s Tucker Carlson exclusive access to surveillance footage of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. 

Democrats say this will compromise security and enable Carlson to rewrite the day’s history with cherry-picked footage shaped into cleverly concocted propaganda.

Kevin McCarthy, opened mouth, apparently waiting for his ventriloquist to tell him what to say?

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Greg Sargent:

But Democrats have a better response to the California Republican’s tactic than fulmination: They can access the footage themselves. They can either allow news organizations to view all of it or at least respond to any distortions Carlson might conjure up by making whatever footage is relevant available to outlets.

This would be smart politics, but it would also be good for the country. Carlson says his producers have gained “unfettered” access to about 44,000 hours of footage and already insists some of it does “contradict” what’s publicly known.

But Carlson has a track record of falsely depicting the attack as a “false flag” operation, absurdly portraying rioters as political prisoners, and pushing other distortions and lies. It’s obvious Carlson will selectively pick from footage to try to further obscure public memory of that day with confusion and agitprop. Democrats can’t let that go unanswered.

If they so choose, Democrats can access all the footage now. After McCarthy granted access to Carlson, the Capitol Police explained that they are required to release it to congressional leaders or oversight committees that demand it.

Fox News Tucker Carlson says this January 6th insurrectionist was a Capitol tourist.

So, it turns out, this applies to minority leaders, too. Investigators on the January 6 committee, of course, were permitted to view the footage (only a fraction aired in hearings) while Democrats were in the majority. But a Capitol Police spokesperson confirms that Democrats can access it in a GOP-controlled House.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s the majority or the minority,” the spokesperson tells me, noting that “we cannot control what congressional leaders or the oversight committees do with the materials we provide.”

House Democratic leaders, then, presumably have the option of making that footage available to other news organizations, just as McCarthy did for Carlson.

True, Democrats might hesitate out of security concerns. They have lambasted McCarthy’s decision for compromising information about security camera locations, procedures guarding lawmakers and other protocol. Democrats point out that the January 6 committee viewed footage under tight safeguards and didn’t air any unless the Capitol Police confirmed it wouldn’t endanger security. 

So they might justifiably be reluctant to reveal it now.

But now that Carlson already has access, Democrats should at least debate giving news organizations access as well. Presumably they would be at least as sensitive as Carlson — if not more so — to the risks of airing or reporting on specific footage without the Capitol Police signing off first.

Alternatively, Democrats could access the footage now by themselves, if only to prepare for the worst.

It’s hard to know what (fake news shenanigan) Carlson is planning. But it could involve graphic unseen footage of, say, the killing of Ashli Babbitt outside the speaker’s chambers (making her more of a martyr on the right) or of cops letting protesters enter the Capitol in isolated situations (making rioters appear unthreatening or supposedly exposing a “false flag” operation).

But if Republicans wanted transparency, why would McCarthy only grant access to Carlson? What makes McCarthy’s decision odious is the granting of special access to a propagandist with a history of serial deceptions about the attack. If Democrats make footage available, they’d be merely doing what Republicans pretend they want. How can they object?

However Carlson (yearns) and seeks to deceive, Democrats should be ready to invite in news organizations and fact-checkers to view context and visual information that conveys the full truth, on a case-by-case basis.

This would call Republicans’ bluff. After Democrats blasted McCarthy’s decision, some Republicans piously wondered why Democrats would oppose such admirable transparency.

But if Republicans wanted transparency, why would McCarthy only grant access to Carlson? What makes McCarthy’s decision odious is the granting of special access to a propagandist with a history of serial deceptions about the attack. If Democrats make footage available, they’d be merely doing what Republicans pretend they want. How can they object?

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who served on the Jan. 6 committee, says strategic decisions should be left to Democratic leaders. But Lofgren told me, “Should Mr. Carlson try to distort, we would have the opportunity, I presume, to get information and rebut the distortions.”

Of course, Carlson’s threat to air footage might be pure grift. In this scenario, Carlson and Republicans are just throwing the base a fake sop in the form of advertised revelations to come.

Notably, (marshmallow fashioned street walker!) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has been priming (aka "soliciting") the base to think big things are afoot, tweeting that McCarthy’s decision means “the video tapes are coming.” The goal might be to create the impression that the official story of January 6 is about to collapse. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene is the "Q" Diva QAnon queen.

Following this, even nothing-burger footage will be hyped by right-wing media as damning.

Democrats might be reluctant to respond to such a pathetically hollow gesture, instead preferring to let the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations speak for themselves. But at a minimum, Democrats should be prepared.

Whatever depiction of January 6 that Carlson airs likely won’t stop there. Expect it to become the party-wide message, repeated by scores of Republicans and right-wing media as a scandal of epic or even historic proportions.

Amid such supercharged information warfare, Americans’ memory of the January 6 hearings can’t be relied upon to help them sort everything out. Carlson and Republicans know this. Democrats should, too.

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.

John Bolton interviewed for his National Security Council position on Fox News and now his position is upstaged by Tucker Carlson

Michelle Goldberg echo opinion published in The New York Times.

"...there is a thin, bitter consolation in knowing that Bolton, like so many Trumpzi others who’ve worked for Trump, have sacrificed his principles for power and will likely end up with neither." Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times.

Say this for Donald Trump. He may be transforming American politics into a kleptocratic fascist reality show and turning our once-great country into a global laughingstock, but at least he’s humiliating John Bolton in the process.
Many people who get involved with this president end up diminished, embarrassed or, in quite a few cases, indicted. 

Rex Tillerson, once known as a corporate titan, will now be remembered for his brief, ineffectual record as secretary of state. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney, and Paul Manafort, his former campaign manager, are in prison.

Bolton’s comeuppance is of a different kind. By taking to Fox News to kiss up to Trump, he became national security adviser, a job that no other president would have ever given to a discredited warmonger. Unfortunately, Bolton's reward is that, after devoting his life to the expansion of American power globally, he’s a hapless party to its contraction. For a person to sell out his putative ideals for such a hollow victory would be like a Greek drama, if the Greeks had written dramas about such small men.

Bolton is sometimes described as a neoconservative, but that’s not really right. Neoconservatives purported to champion the expansion of American values, while Bolton just wants to impose American might. On the surface, he seems an excellent fit with Trump, who is also uninterested in human rights and contemptuous of multilateral institutions. Both are bellicose nationalists, dismissive of climate change, eager to empower the Israeli right, hostile to Islam but solicitous of Saudi Arabia.

But the uber-hawk Bolton, who still refuses to admit that the Iraq war was a mistake, has long believed that America’s most implacable enemies include North Korea, Russia and Iran. One multilateral organization he appears to value is NATO, a counterweight to Russia that he once called “the most successful political-military alliance in human history.” Now, at the summit of his career, he’s part of an administration that makes a mockery of his longtime foreign policy philosophy.

When the George W. Bush administration, in which Bolton also served, lifted some sanctions on North Korea in 2008, Bolton seemed almost heartsick. “Nothing can erase the ineffable sadness of an American presidency, like this one, in total intellectual collapse,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
So one can only imagine the ineffable sadness he felt over the weekend, when Trump stepped into North Korea to shake the hand of his friend Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s (evil!) totalitarian leader. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was considering putting aside the goal of getting North Korea to surrender the nuclear weapons it already has, instead trying to get the country to stop making new nuclear material.

Given Trump’s limitations as a statesman, that’s probably the best that can be hoped for. But it’s almost certainly not what Bolton, who was calling for pre-emptive strikes on North Korea just before Trump appointed him, thought he was signing up for. In response to the Times article, Bolton tweeted angrily that he’d heard of no such plan, though he might have simply been out of the loop. After all, while Trump was flattering Kim, Bolton was in Mongolia.

Also on Sunday, Politico reported on a white paper prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff about expanding Russian power. “Russia has a growing and demonstrated capacity and willingness to exercise malign influence in Europe and abroad, including in the United States,” the paper said.

Bolton used to decry this influence. Vladimir Putin’s efforts in the 2016 election, wrote Bolton in 2017, was “a casus belli, a true act of war, and one Washington will never tolerate.” When Putin lied to Trump’s face during their first meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Bolton hoped Trump would take it as a “highly salutary lesson about the character of Russia’s leadership.” Obviously, Trump learned no such lesson. At the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, last week, the president joked with Putin about election interference and the murder of journalists, a scene that will now be part of Bolton’s legacy.

There is one major issue left on which Bolton could shape history. On Monday, news broke that Iran had breached a limit on how much nuclear fuel it can possess under the 2015 nuclear deal, which the Trump administration abandoned. That comes after months of escalation on both sides, and the threat remains that Bolton could goad an erratic Trump into war.

Standing between us and that apocalyptic possibility is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, 

...(whaaaa....?) who has been urging Trump away from a military confrontation with Iran. Last month, Carlson used his opening monologue to eviscerate Bolton, calling him a “bureaucratic tapeworm” for whom war is “always good business.” In normal administrations, national security advisers have more authority than cable news hosts, but it was Carlson, not Bolton, who was with Trump at the Korean Demilitarized Zone this weekend. (Carlson later called into “Fox & Friends” and rationalized North Korean atrocities, said that leading a country “means killing people.”)

It’s nightmarish to live in a country where our foreign policy has been reduced to an intramural battle between Fox News reactionaries. And there’s still a danger that Bolton could outmaneuver the isolationists. But right now there is a thin, bitter consolation in knowing that he, like so many others who’ve worked for Trump, sacrificed his principles for power and will likely end up with neither.