Trump Admin borrows from Nazi, Soviet, Fascist Propaganda

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Labor Department social media campaign depicts a White male workforce​

The campaign has drawn scrutiny, with critics saying the agency is not realistically portraying the diversity of the country and is sending messages that feel exclusionary.

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The administration went after universities under the guise of the universities spreading antisemitism. Yet, here they are using antisemitic dog whistles and in some cases just blatantly loud whistles.

One of the great dangers of this administration is rewriting history. They are attempting to rewrite American history and their own history. They blatantly lie and through power and their own machinations attempt to make the lie become accepted fact. It will continue to take much courage to resist this.

Their attacks on academic freedom, general discussion, and protest demonstration are ways of controlling and constructing a narrative. They are saying, "WE decide what the narrative of history is."

Dangerous times.
 
The administration went after universities under the guise of the universities spreading antisemitism. Yet, here they are using antisemitic dog whistles and in some cases just blatantly loud whistles.

One of the great dangers of this administration is rewriting history. They are attempting to rewrite American history and their own history. They blatantly lie and through power and their own machinations attempt to make the lie become accepted fact. It will continue to take much courage to resist this.

Their attacks on academic freedom, general discussion, and protest demonstration are ways of controlling and constructing a narrative. They are saying, "WE decide what the narrative of history is."

Dangerous times.
Jews were just the convenient scapegoats for right wing fascists in the 1930s. The only difference today is their scapegoats today are a little browner.
 
Jews were just the convenient scapegoats for right wing fascists in the 1930s. The only difference today is their scapegoats today are a little browner.
Not really. Not that your comparison is wrong. It's more that you trivialize how deeply the feelings they tried to evoke were engrained in society. There was a visceral hatred in Germany and other countries with a strong connection to Luther that was a reflection of his personal rabid antisemitism. You only have to look at the Jewish quotas in universities and such to see that they just fanned the flames. Not that the Catholic Church and the prevalent belief in the blood guilt of the Jews concerning the crucifixion of Jesus did anything to make it better. It's more correct to say that they played on old tropes just like our administration is now.
 
Not really. Not that your comparison is wrong. It's more that you trivialize how deeply the feelings they tried to evoke were engrained in society. There was a visceral hatred in Germany and other countries with a strong connection to Luther that was a reflection of his personal rabid antisemitism. You only have to look at the Jewish quotas in universities and such to see that they just fanned the flames. Not that the Catholic Church and the prevalent belief in the blood guilt of the Jews concerning the crucifixion of Jesus did anything to make it better. It's more correct to say that they played on old tropes just like our administration is now.
I agree with you about the deeply entrenched antisemitism among the German people. I'm drawing a distinction, though, between that antisemitism and the Third Reich's use of that antisemitism to achieve its fascist objectives. It's not that Hitler, Goebbels, etc. weren't antisemitic. They were, deeply so. But their primary objective was not to kill Jews for the hell of it, but to cleanse the fatherland and expand Germany's borders and influence to the fullest extent possible. The German people's deep antisemitism was a tool used to achieve that objective.

Likewise, Trump and MAGA are using Americans' deeply entrenched racism against black and brown people as a tool to achieve their primary objective of cleansing the fatherland and expanding America's borders and influence to the fullest extent possible. I guess what I'm saying is that if Nazi Germany had been located in the middle of North America, its concentration camps would have been filled with black and brown people, not Jews. One might think that would give today's Republicans a moment of pause.
 
This. I love the WWII exhibit at the American History Smithsonian, mainly because it captures how the war was narrated to America as opposed to Germany. Trump's propaganda machine could have embraced historically "American" imagery and rhetoric. But it chose instead to channel Nazi propaganda, changing only the nation, not the message. That was certainly not an accident.

The good news is I don't see it working, at least not nearly in the same way it did in 1930s Germany. Trump is enjoying the unfettered power that a deeply misguided electorate gave to him in 2024, but he is not winning Americans to his side. He is becoming less popular and less able to move public opinion in his direction as we go. Thanks to a complicit Supreme Court and a cuckolded congressional majority, Trump has the ability over the next few months to continue his destruction of all that truly makes America great. But I continue to hold out hope that this enormous overreach will be the turning of this tide once and for all. The Republican Party needs to pay an astronomical price for supporting Trump's Nazi-inspired agenda. I can't wait to see that happen.
It’s my hope as well.
 
The good news is I don't see it working, at least not nearly in the same way it did in 1930s Germany. Trump is enjoying the unfettered power that a deeply misguided electorate gave to him in 2024, but he is not winning Americans to his side. He is becoming less popular and less able to move public opinion in his direction as we go. Thanks to a complicit Supreme Court and a cuckolded congressional majority, Trump has the ability over the next few months to continue his destruction of all that truly makes America great. But I continue to hold out hope that this enormous overreach will be the turning of this tide once and for all. The Republican Party needs to pay an astronomical price for supporting Trump's Nazi-inspired agenda. I can't wait to see that happen.
I don't know about the whole "turning of the tide once and for all" moment. The retrenchment to nationalism and fascism is not uniquely American and the forces pushing that are numerous and difficult to pin down. The technology available today makes it much easier to reach tons of people at once with a precisely targeted message and send them spiraling into an ever-wider rabbit hole of suspicion, conspiracy, and fear. I think Trump's MAGA movement can be beaten back, but unless and until we grapple with these informational and technological forces there will inevitably be a moment in the future, maybe even the very near future, when another movement built on similar ideas will capitalize on dissatisfaction and/or resentment and rise again.

BUT the good news is that I agree with you on the part where Trump and Miller (the true fascist in the administration) will find it a lot harder to turn America to Nazi-style fascism than the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s. Despite the widespread societal dissatisfaction being spread by those forces I discussed above - combined with the natural effects of avaricious capitalism - the current US is nothing like 1930s Germany. The population of the US hasn't lived through a war with millions of casualties or the crushing economic depression brought about by the Treaty of Versailles and then the worldwide Great Depression. No one here has ever wheeled around giant stacks of money to buy bread due to hyperinflation. To our great shame we have a large unhoused population that struggles with food insecurity, but very few (in a relative sense) Americans - especially few of those who actually vote - live in a true state of material deprivation. Americans are not truly desperate enough to embrace mass bloodshed in the streets or the actual deprivation and scarcity brough on by war.

Beyond that, as I have said, the same destruction of the national media apparatus and national media consensus that has allowed insidious right-wing propaganda to spread, thereby enabling the rise of Trump and his movement, will make it much harder for them to control messaging to the American public. Hitler and the Nazis needed only to control a handful of physical newspapers and radio stations to almost entirely take control of what the German people heard. Trump may bend many major media entities and broadcast stations to his will, but the information people get is coming from thousands of constantly changing information sources that can't be easily controlled or shut off unless you shut down the damn Internet or impose China-style controls, which Americans won't accept as necessary or proper.

So I do agree there is reason for optimism that Nazi-style propaganda can't actually bend the whole country to Trump's will, and will ultimately backfire. See the reaction to the shooting in Minnesota as an example. I'm just more skeptical that there is any "once and for all" defeat of darkness coming ahead.
 
I agree with you about the deeply entrenched antisemitism among the German people. I'm drawing a distinction, though, between that antisemitism and the Third Reich's use of that antisemitism to achieve its fascist objectives. It's not that Hitler, Goebbels, etc. weren't antisemitic. They were, deeply so. But their primary objective was not to kill Jews for the hell of it, but to cleanse the fatherland and expand Germany's borders and influence to the fullest extent possible. The German people's deep antisemitism was a tool used to achieve that objective.

Likewise, Trump and MAGA are using Americans' deeply entrenched racism against black and brown people as a tool to achieve their primary objective of cleansing the fatherland and expanding America's borders and influence to the fullest extent possible. I guess what I'm saying is that if Nazi Germany had been located in the middle of North America, its concentration camps would have been filled with black and brown people, not Jews. One might think that would give today's Republicans a moment of pause.
I am not sure it will give them much a pause. Once you are on the dear leader train, there isn't much room left for self-reflection.
 
To many Trump supporters, our bringing up the Nazi style propaganda is proof of our TDS.

The Trump administration clearly uses fascist/racist/other awful language/imagery/propaganda, etc., we point out how it is racist/fascist/etc. and then they accuse us of using violent rhetoric.

The thing is that Trump didn't turn these people fascist/racist, etc. They already were that way. He has given them reason to be open about it.

We can hope, of course, that they have pushed too far to turn enough people off. But we also should realize that there are more than we care to admit for whom the administration cannot push far enough.
 
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