As all are aware, today is the third anniversary of the assault on our nation’s Capitol by followers of former President Donald Trump, provoked by former President Donald Trump.

Earlier this week, MSNBC’s Morning Joe cited a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll which indicated that in 2021, 60% of adult Americans thought Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the riot; now, only 53% do.  Of that total, in 2021 27% of Republicans, 57% of Independents, and 92% of Democrats thought Mr. Trump had culpability; now, only 14% of Republicans, 56% of Independents, and – the diminution most surprising to me – only (relatively speaking) 86% of Democrats think he was responsible.

The Morning Joe panel professed to be reassured by the fact that a majority of Americans believe Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the Capitol riot.

I was appalled. We no longer live in an era in which we had to absorb our news through print media, with little if any benefit of pictures, an age in which written accounts would necessarily shift over time and any mental images they evoked in readers, no matter how initially vivid, would necessarily fade over time.  Now, we have the video of Mr. Trump speaking on January 6, 2021 – a record the accuracy of which no one disputes – urging his adherents, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”  Then, his followers stormed the Capitol.   

Over the last three years, given the information now in the public domain that wasn’t available in 2021 — the facts uncovered by the U.S. House of Representatives’ “January 6^th Committee,” the number of convicted January 6^th rioters who have said their actions were incited by Mr. Trump’s rhetoric, the guilty pleas by Trump lawyers to election interference-related charges, the almost-billion dollar defamation settlement paid by Fox News to Dominion Systems, the $148 million defamation award against Trump co-conspirator Rudy Giuliani to two Georgia election workers, the wide number of statements made by Trump White House staffers implicating Mr. Trump in various ways, to name just a few — the number of Americans believing that Mr. Trump bears responsibility for the Capitol riot should logically be significantly higher than it was in 2021, not lower.  Yet today apparently only a bare majority of our people believe Mr. Trump bears responsibility.

I suppose I should be heartened that we have the video of Mr. Trump’s speech and the ensuing actions of the rioters; it is alarming to contemplate how low a percentage of Americans would still consider Mr. Trump culpable for inciting the assault if the visual evidence didn’t exist.

When confronted with the effect that Mr. Trump’s repeated lies have had upon our people, I often consult his de facto handbook [which, even if (as he claims) he hasn’t read, he has absorbed]:  Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  What follows are Hitler’s own words about propaganda, published almost exactly a century ago; I leave it to you to decide how relevant they are to what we confront today: 

“… [P]ropaganda is no more than a weapon, though a frightful one in the hands of an expert.

… It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.

… The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses’ attention to certain facts … whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.

The whole art consists in doing this so skillfully that everyone will be convinced that the fact is real … its function … consists in attracting the attention of the crowd … its effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.  Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. … [W]e must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be exerted in this direction.

The more modest [propaganda’s] intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.

… The receptivity of the great masses is limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous.  In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan [Emphasis added].

… [Those who believe everything they read are] the great mass of the people and … the simplest-minded part of the nation. … To it belong all those who have neither been born or trained to think independently, and who partly from incapacity and partly from incompetence believe everything that is set before them in black and white. … [T]he influence of the press will be enormous.  [The great mass of people] are not able or willing themselves to examine what is set before them, and as a result their whole attitude toward all the problems of the day can be reduced almost exclusively to the outside influence of others.  This can be advantageous when their enlightenment is provided by a serious and truth-loving party, but it is catastrophic when scoundrels and liars provide it.  [Emphasis Added; included here for the irony.]

… The nationalization of the broad masses can … be … achieved only by a ruthless and fanatically one-sided orientation toward the goal to be achieved.

… The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of diplomats.  The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their sentiments more to the world of feeling.  That is where their positive or negative attitude lies.  It is receptive only to an expression of force in one of these two directions and never to a half-measure hovering between the two.  Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary stability.  Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in the fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward [Emphasis Added]. 

Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart.  Its name is not objectivity (read weakness) but will and power.

… The broad masses are only a piece of Nature and their sentiment does not understand the mutual handshake of people who claim that they want opposite things.  What they desire is victory of the stronger and the destruction of the weak or his unconditional subjection.  [Emphasis Added]”

This is what we are up against.  Propaganda is, as Hitler observed, a frightful weapon in the hands of an expert.  Mr. Trump’s support is, as Hitler would have predicted, extraordinarily stable.  Thomas Paine once declared, “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”  That said, in addition to concentrating on turning out the currently uncertain, disappointed, and disaffected who will, if in the ballot box, vote for Mr. Biden, the President’s team also needs to message effectively to reclaim as many as possible of the distracted 7% of Americans who in 2021 recognized that Mr. Trump was accountable for arguably the darkest day in our nation’s history, but reportedly do no longer. 

Since January 6^th cannot be undone, let its reminder be a tool to help us save our democracy.

On November 18, 2023, men wearing red shirts indicating that they were members of a neo-Nazi white supremacist group, the Blood Tribe, and almost all wearing masks, marched in and around downtown Madison, Wisconsin’s capital, carrying swastika flags and reportedly chanting, “There will be blood.” (You can find images online; Twitter blocked the links I attempted to add here.)

One might find it as pathetic as terrifying that twenty guys – so brave and proud of their beliefs that they hid their identities, on a day when it was sunny and not too cold; no one wants to be a wet or frozen fascist – strutted through the U.S. city that may be the most liberal between the coasts.

It’s still an indicator.  It’s still a warning.

I am not aware that any violence was wrought by or upon the marchers.  Although they may have hoped to incite a violent reaction from onlookers by parading through Madison, I would guess that violence was not the group’s intention, at least this time.  It was simply to secure a square on the board, to establish a presence, to enter a preliminary gesture of menace, of intimidation.  We can unfortunately be confident that this won’t be the last such overture, by this group and others, here or elsewhere.

One can have reservations about how diligently Israel, the nation-state, has tried to protect the safety of Palestinian civilians while defending itself and its citizens against the Hamas terrorist group.  I suspect that these Neo-Nazis aren’t even aware of the dangers currently faced by innocent Palestinians; they hate Muslims as much as they hate Jews.  The Israeli-Hamas conflict has simply provided them a pretext to come out of their holes.

I truly believe that the vast majority of the American people are well-meaning, although some lack perspective.  May the overt acts by malign groups that we will inevitably see over the next year cause those of our well-intentioned citizens who are uncertain as to the best direction for our nation, due to sincere misgivings about what they perceive as progressives’ excesses, to recognize that democracy and humanity are more important than policy differences or cultural emphases, and that the actions of these hate groups – and those politicians and political groups who encourage them — must be confronted legally — but with all our strength. 

My apologies for disturbing you on consecutive days, but … I can’t resist.  In the last few days much has been made in the mainstream media as well as in yesterday’s post linking former President Donald Trump’s use of words and phrases describing Mr. Trump’s opponents – principally among them, the word, “vermin” — to the words and phrases used by Fascist Nazi Fuhrer Adolf Hitler during the 1930s to depersonalize Hitler’s opponents.  On his social media platform, Mr. Trump referred to his opponents (whom he clearly sees as enemies) as “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

During the day’s endeavors following yesterday’s post, I happened to see a report of a Trump Spokesman’s response to the outcry about Mr. Trump’s use of frankly fascist language, but I dismissed and ignored it because I really thought it was a spoof like many others one sees in liberal quarters to mock the former President.  Particularly given the substance of the sharp criticism being leveled against Mr. Trump, I didn’t think anyone on the Trump team would actually be dumb enough to say what was being reported as its response — the irony would be too think, even for MAGAs.

I was wrong.  It was real.  For those who missed it:

“Those who try to make that ridiculous assertion [comparing Mr. Trump’s rhetoric to that of Hitler] are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House [Emphasis Added].”     

We’ll come back to the breadth of Mr. Trump’s characterization of his opponents as a component of a future post.  Noting the blindingly oblivious fascist irony is sufficient for today.

This recently passed through my Twitter feed. It is perhaps the ugliest, most upsetting, and yet most apt entry I have ever published in these pages. I have never heard of Mr. Parkhomenko, but feel that this is worthy of your attention.

“MAGA MIKE JOHNSON”

• Post by former President Donald Trump on his social media website, Truth Social.

Credible polling data indicates that over 40% of our citizens – not a fringe minority that can be comfortably ignored — have expressed a willingness to vote for Mr. Trump if he is the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee.  Republicans in the United States House of Representatives have elected U.S. LA Rep. Mike Johnson, whom I have seen described as, “[MAGA U.S. OH Rep.] Jim Jordan wearing a coat” and “a primary architect of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election,” as the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Mr. Johnson’s selection makes him, by law, second in succession to the presidency of the United States.

Long time readers of these pages may recall that way back, when Mr. Trump nominated William Barr to be his Attorney General, I indicated that we needed to give Mr. Barr a chance to see how he performed in office before declaring him Mr. Trump’s lackey.

We saw how that turned out.  I don’t care if Mr. Johnson is milder in manner than Messrs. Trump and Jordan or many in their cohort.  We no longer have the luxury of giving MAGAs the benefit of the doubt.  Say whatever else you will about them:  they make their intentions plain.  They intend to institute an American Apartheid. 

What is set forth below is the renowned part of one of Abraham Lincoln’s most renowned addresses, delivered on June 16, 1858, in Springfield, Illinois, over two years before he assumed the presidency.  Several preliminary notes:

The italics in the passage are as they appear in the text of Mr. Lincoln’s address in the volume from which it is drawn; presumably, he had underscored them to be sure that he emphasized them as he spoke.

In his speech, Mr. Lincoln provided no attribution for the quote, “A house divided,” presumably expecting that his listeners would understand his allusion to the Gospel of Matthew, 12:25.

I have substituted for only three words Mr. Lincoln declared 165 years ago.  As you read the speech, I expect that you’ll readily discern what three words I inserted – one of which is italicized, since it replaces a word Mr. Lincoln underscored in his remarks — and what three words my substitutions replaced.

“Mr. PRESIDENT and Gentlemen of the Convention.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to fascism agitation.

Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. 

In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half fascist and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Either the opponents of fascism, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.

Have we no tendency to the latter condition?”

You get it.  One could argue that Mr. Lincoln’s words (as modified herein) have chillingly broader implications for our entire democracy today than they did even in the toxic circumstances in which they were uttered.  (Despite the South’s outrage at Mr. Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 and its consequent attempt to secede from the Union, nobody claimed that the election outcome was “rigged,” or stormed the Capitol.) 

Since we are able, in Mr. Lincoln’s words, to determine “where we are, and whither we are tending,” I would submit that we must, as he suggested, “judge what to do, and how to do it.”

All that read these pages are well aware of the deep misgivings I have about Vice President Kamala Harris’ substantive readiness to assume the presidency.  That said, I am tired of democrats’ (small “d”) lack of imagination about the forces they face.  As long as Mr. Johnson holds the House Speakership, President Joe Biden and Ms. Harris should never – never – allow themselves be in the same place at the same time.

As to our future:  Are enough of our people sufficiently motivated to exert all legal (this qualification is vital; otherwise, neither side is better than the other) measures to protect our democracy?