Donald Trump tells Americans how he will destroy the U.S. Constitution

Echo opinion by Charles M. Blow published in The New York Times:  At a rally in Wildwood, N.J., former guy Donald Trump said that if he is re-elected, he will “immediately deport” any campus protesters who “come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism.”

Trump Is Still at War With the Constitution

Of course, Trump dwells in linguistic imprecision (😉IOW "lies"). What does “try to bring” mean? Are we using his definitions of jihadism, anti-Americanism and antisemitism? How would those sentiments be monitored? Would the deportations be extrajudicial? Would the deportations be only of student visa holders, or would it include green card holders?

This campaign pledge — this threat — is not only unworkable; it’s ludicrous. But it’s a powerful bit of propaganda. It ties together Trump’s message of nativism and xenophobia with one of his fixations: an iron-fist approach to protests that challenge his beliefs or interests.

Trump understands, intuitively, the power of crowds, and views it as a pressing threat when aligned against him.

Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said Trump was furious about the protests in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. In his memoir, Esper wrote that in one meeting, Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” According to Esper, Trump believed that the protests made the country — and him — look weak.

Trump has a thirst for authoritarianism because he conflates suppression with strength. In a 1990, interview with Playboy, Trump said this about the Chinese government’s response to the Tiananmen Square protests: “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”

It’s hard not to conclude that Trump relishes the idea of doing the same.

But what Trump seems to see as a weakness is actually one of America’s strengths, the First Amendment. It protects not only freedom of speech but also the freedom to peaceably assemble.

The First Amendment also protects the freedom of the press, which has been under constant assault from Trump. Not only have his incessant references to the news media as the “enemy of the people” helped to poison public sentiment about the trustworthiness of basic facts; he has long expressed a desire to erode press freedoms in the country in general.

During his 2016, campaign, he promised to “open up our libel laws” to allow news organizations to be more easily sued if they write what he deems “purposely negative and horrible and false articles.” There is already an avenue for litigation for false reporting, but it is the subjective “negative” and “horrible” designations that should set off alarms.

In many ways, Trump is at war with the Constitution itself.

In 2022, just weeks after announcing his current campaign, he took to social media, continuing his lie that the 2020, election had been stolen, writing: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In fact, one of the founders’ greatest fears was a populist demagogue.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote to George Washington in 1792, just a few years after the Constitution was ratified, “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion and bring on civil commotion.”

That is a rather prophetic description of the rise of Trump and the precarious point at which the nation now finds itself.

And if Trump is re-elected, some of his allies are already planning to indulge and institutionalize his authoritarian inklings. Much of what they have planned involves reshaping the executive branch and exploiting regulatory power.

But it would be unwise to think that Trump would limit himself in this way. With an obsequious Congress — which he would have if it is controlled by Republicans — he could also, potentially, enact laws that undermine the Constitution. We’ve seen this before.

In 1798, fearing a possible war with France, a Federalist Party-controlled Congress passed a series of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, permitting the president to deport “aliens” and allowing the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of citizens of an enemy country during wartime. The Sedition Act made it illegal to “print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government.

As the National Archives explains: “The laws were directed against Democratic-Republicans, the party typically favored by new citizens. The only journalists prosecuted under the Sedition Act were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers.”

The Sedition Act is no longer on the books, but it is now widely considered to have been unconstitutional. It’s alarming to see so many Americans shrug when a former president floats a similar idea.

As Benjamin Franklin printed in his newspaper, a half-century before our Constitution was written and adopted: “Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”

That appears to be Trump’s (stated❗) ambition.💥

Florida book banning is sweeping The Diary of Ann Frank out of school libraries

Book bans are an excuse for antisemitism.
Book banning in Florida

Escambia County, on Florida’s westernmost end, has pulled around 1,500 books, citing a new law that went into effect over the summer that targets novels with depictions of “sexual conduct.” Those removed have included multiple dictionaries and thesauruses and multiple issues of "Ripley's Believe It or Not!"

Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" also was pulled.

Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born Jewish girl (b. Frankfurt Germany 1929) who kept a diary in which she documented life in hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

In Central Florida’s Orange County, more than 600 books have been removed from classroom libraries for the same reason, according to data provided by the school district.

Echo opinion letters published in the Orlando Sentinel Florida newspaper:

Dear Editor: I was incensed after reading about the decision by the Orange County School Board to remove many Jewish books from the district. It is disheartening to read that Holocaust literature, such as “The Diary of Anne Frank,” is included in the “cleanout,” as well as other books of Jewish identity. 

It is crucial to every generation post-World War II to read authentic, classic literature which exemplifies life from this period.  The justification mentioned, that these books included references to human sexuality, sounds like an excuse to practice antisemitism. 

They will ensure that young American students grow up without tolerance for people who are not like them. #antisemitism

From Miriam Benkoe in Boynton Beach

Israeli war in Gaza is attracting dangerous white supremacists

Neo-Nazi groups are popping up at pro-Palestinian rallies:
White supremacist groups see an opportunity to further mainstream antisemitic tropes — and create new opportunities for extremist violence.

Echo essay published on MSNBC.com by Karen Dunn, co-lead counsel in Sines v. Kessler.

Why are white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups popping up at pro-Palestinian rallies across America, including most recently in Washington, D.C.; Orlando, Florida; Boston; and Missoula, Montana? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not because they care particularly about the situation in Gaza. No, for these groups, the large-scale protests across America present a golden opportunity to mainstream the same antisemitic tropes they have been pushing for years and, if they get their way, create new opportunities for extremist violence.

As one of the lawyers who sued the white supremacists responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, I checked in on those defendants to see what they have said about recent events. Jason Kessler, the lead organizer, wrote that Palestinians have a right to declare that “Jews will not replace us.” Richard Spencer, a longtime leader of the alt-right (an expression he coined), posted that lighting the Roman Arch of Titus in blue and white in solidarity with Israel was “a reversal and subversion of Titus’ achievement” (the arch commemorated the Roman Empire’s defeat of a Jewish rebellion in A.D. 81). Nathan Damigo, founder of the white supremacist organization Identity Europa, posted on October 7: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” The next day, white supremacist Matthew Parrott, a co-founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, praised Hamas’ attack, stating that “every military act by the Palestinian forces is an act of freedom fighters” and comparing the massacre of families to “breaking out of a concentration camp to attack your guards.”

And the National Justice Party, founded by white supremacists involved in Charlottesville, responded to the October 7 attacks by marching in front of the White House with signs that said “No White Lives for Israel” and “Zionism=Terrorism,” expressly calling for the “destruction of Israel.” NJP’s website now encourages people to “begin to imagine a world where Israel no longer exists” in an article titled “Four Ways The Destruction of Israel Can Benefit The West.”

While white supremacists target all nonwhite groups and their allies, the unifying animus is a hatred of Jews. One of the organizers of Charlottesville had a day job as an exterminator; he told his girlfriend he would rather be killing Jews than cockroaches. 

Another organizer said that when his newborn son opened his eyes for the first time, his first thought was of Adolf Hitler. And on the day before James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful counter protesters, he responded to his mother’s texting “be careful” with a picture of Hitler saying, “We are not the ones who need to be careful.” White supremacist leaders know the power of antisemitism, and they use it tactically to fuel the movement.

As one of the lawyers who sued the white supremacists responsible for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, I checked in on those defendants to see what they have said about recent events. Jason Kessler, the lead organizer, wrote that Palestinians have a right to declare that “Jews will not replace us.” 

Richard Spencer, a longtime leader of the alt-right (an expression he coined), posted that lighting the Roman Arch of Titus in blue and white in solidarity with Israel was “a reversal and subversion of Titus’ achievement” (the arch commemorated the Roman Empire’s defeat of a Jewish rebellion in A.D. 81). Nathan Damigo, founder of the white supremacist organization Identity Europa, posted on October 7: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” The next day, white supremacist Matthew Parrott, a co-founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, praised Hamas’ attack, stating that “every military act by the Palestinian forces is an act of freedom fighters” and comparing the massacre of families to “breaking out of a concentration camp to attack your guards.”

And the National Justice Party, founded by white supremacists involved in Charlottesville, responded to the October 7 attacks by marching in front of the White House with signs that said “No White Lives for Israel” and “Zionism=Terrorism,” expressly calling for the “destruction of Israel.” NJP’s website now encourages people to “begin to imagine a world where Israel no longer exists” in an article titled “Four Ways The Destruction of Israel Can Benefit The West.”

While white supremacists target all nonwhite groups and their allies, the unifying animus is a hatred of Jews. One of the organizers of Charlottesville had a day job as an exterminator; he told his girlfriend he would rather be killing Jews than cockroaches. 

Another organizer said that when his newborn son opened his eyes for the first time, his first thought was of Adolf Hitler. 

And on the day before James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, he responded to his mother’s texting “be careful” with a picture of Hitler saying, “We are not the ones who need to be careful.” 

White supremacist leaders know the power of antisemitism, and they use it tactically to fuel the movement.

White supremacists may be looking specifically to exploit division on college campuses and provoke violence between protesters and counter protesters, just as they did in 2017. What was publicly called “Unite the Right” was privately called the “Battle of Charlottesville,” and it was inspired by an earlier violent event that year called the “Battle of Berkeley.” This was because the ultimate goal of these groups is an all-white ethno-state, which, the theory goes, can be achieved only after a race war.

To have a “race war,” you have to have battles, conflict and violence. White supremacists want antisemitism to be the match that starts the fire (or lights the tiki torch). 

In Charlottesville, that’s what happened. It started with hundreds of people carrying torches and chanting anti-semitic slogans and ended in violence against all races and ethnicities, terrorizing an entire town, killing a woman and grievously injuring many other people.

It is important that our college campuses, cities and town squares be places for speech, debate and protest — all rightfully protected under our Constitution. But we should not tolerate antisemitism anywhere, not only because it is morally wrong, but also because for a growing white supremacist movement, it is a mechanism to rally the troops against all nonwhite groups and usher in what Spencer once called “a new world of political violence.” The leaders of that movement are reveling in this moment, hoping that antisemitism becomes normalized, is allowed to flourish and creates a more acceptable gateway to racial hatred and violence.

If Charlottesville taught us anything, it is that accepting the normalization of antisemitism carries with it tremendous costs for Jews and non-Jews alike. 

We allow antisemitism to surge at our own peril. And make no mistake, the violence that ensues will affect all of us.

Conspiracies theories are rooted in evil intent

Excellent opinion essay published in the History News Network!

Thank you Professor Steve Hochstadt!

My brother emailed me to make sure I knew that we Jews had space laser technology capable of starting wildfires out West. Naturally he wondered who controlled it--Orthodox or Reform? But here’s the question I asked him as we corresponded about the suggestion by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that we, the Jews, in the guise of the always convenient Rothschilds, pointed a laser from the sky to start fires in California: “If we could burn up any place in the world, why would we pick California?”

Greene is absurd to publicly broadcast an idea that stupid. But many people where she lives sent her and her message to Washington. She imagines a plot reminiscent of those scary 1950s movies about some impossible bogeyman. Now the bogeywoman sits in Congress, and everybody is listening.

She is one sharp thorn on a much bigger political club wielded by American conservatives so they can run our governments. That club is the invention and propagation of weird tales of horror, often called “conspiracy theories,” where the monsters are liberals, or even better, Jewish liberals.

If Jews, whatever group of humans that label might bring to mind among her fans, had so much power, why would we burn California, where one out of every six American Jews live? Explaining the central absurdity of that idea, or of the idea that mass shootings whose blood and death we all know about were actually a hoax, or of the idea that Democrats stole a national election, is where these theories fail.

Holocaust denial created a model for modern absurdity theories by focusing on facts. Millions of words and photographs and diagrams and scientific-sounding analyses have been created to explain why any particular known fact about the Holocaust is made up. David Irving, the premier Holocaust denier with historical credentials, sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel, because she labeled him “a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot,” who “manipulated and distorted real documents”, as Wikipedia puts it. Richard Evans, the British historian who advised Lipstadt’s defense, made an official report: “Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject.”

Like most other crazies who go public, Irving was eventually unmasked, but he screwed around with facts for decades, because his political message about Jews was welcome in many corners of the Christian world. But abstracted from the slippery “facts” that dominate Holocaust deniers’ writings, the most absurd part of their message is rarely addressed. For 75 years, “the Jews” enlisted millions of the most prominent and powerful people across the world to recreate history in word and location, and to promulgate in every way that impossible history as truth.

Antisemites have never underestimated our cleverness, although denying the evidence that some of us actually are smart. So how do they explain how we did that? I don’t mean how we got some old man to talk about non-existent gas chambers in Auschwitz or how we forged a document enumerating the people whom Nazis had just shot. How did we bring that immense conspiracy into being and how have we maintained it all these years? We must be really powerful, beyond the imagining of Greene and her ilk, if we could create these enormous conspiracies without leaving a trace.

Where are the letters, emails, photographs, diagrams, and web pages, even self-constructed á la Irving, showing us, the Jews, creating and leading that conspiracy? Or creating the magic laser to incinerate our friends instead of our enemies? How did the libs manage to both rig elections in Republican states and then create the worldwide spectacle that Biden won?

Mike Pompeo spent two months since the election pretending that Biden’s victory was not legitimate. For years, he has exercised vast control over a network of highly trained people around the world, many of whom had been sent out as emissaries of Trump’s ideology. But none of them sent back a bit of evidence explaining how or why every government in the world has dismissed the stolen election fantasy. If Pompeo had anything that could be bent, twisted, chopped up and regurgitated as proof that Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin and Justin Trudeau all signed on to the plot to rig the election and defend it afterward, why hasn’t he produced it? Is he waiting for his next political campaign?

No, I think there is another reason. It seems to work quite well to just assume that central absurdity without explanation. Somehow it is not important to explain how a group of people, many under constant scrutiny by all forms of media, could be so secretive, so organized, so depraved and evil, to run a vast child abuse ring underneath a pizza place in Washington DC. The original Reddit post that touched off this particular conservative flight into absurdity, claimed in fact the abuse was easy to spot: “Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.”

The absence of any explanation of the origins and inner workings of these great conspiracies, the successful veil of utter secrecy that the world’s official bodies have cast over their diabolical plans, implies a much larger conspiratorial network. Pizzagate and Holocaust denial and our space laser require full participation from police and security forces at all levels. Recent conservative absurdity theories have thus transformed the FBI from heroes of the fight against crime into co-conspirators. Trump had no choice but to include denunciations of the FBI in his flights into the absurd.

Holocaust denial is co-terminous with antisemitism. The people whom the deniers reach already believe that Jews are capable of unimagined evil, that we are all in it together, that we exercise unbounded but secret power. They don’t have to be convinced by some sleight of hand of the theorists. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have to explain to her voters why we Jews would dream up a remarkable plan to burn out our own. Her followers are already there. They just want to know the details. In this case, Greene may be up a creek. No “space expert” has jumped in to explain our technological blueprints. She might have to walk away from that one entirely. She can blame this one on her “team” of social media producers, probably the same people who shared a video on her Facebook page where Nick Griffin, a well-known British Holocaust denier, says an “unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation.”

The seemingly less absurd absurdity theories that are twisting our national politics, “Stop the Steal” or “I wasn’t defeated, I am really President,” have just enough details to obscure the more potent, unspoken, and fundamentally preposterous idea behind them. The Dems stole the election, they created a Disney spectacle of victory in an endless loop, and they convinced tens of millions of ordinary Americans, everyone’s neighbors and relatives, to go along. I swear this is true, because some people I don’t know, with no inside knowledge, say it’s true, and I share their hatreds.

The believers in new undetectable conspiracies by vast numbers of satanic people overlap with the generations of promoters of Holocaust denial. That denial began with the perpetrators themselves as they were killing millions of satanic Jews, who were trying to take over the world. Without lasers.

Steve Hochstadt
Jacksonville IL
February 1, 2021

Steve Hochstadt is a professor emeritus of history at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois. He joined the faculty in 2006 after teaching for 27 years at Bates College in Maine.