Dear Friends,

CHARLES AND ED DISCUSS:

(00:40) Is Trump a fascist?
(21:08) Packing plants and China’s control of US agriculture;
(35:52) How to respond if the election doesn’t go your way;
(53:40) Challenging the “feeding and fueling the world” narrative, with Kathy Byrnes.

Because it needs to be said and FCC regulations limit what I can say on my radio show:

VOTE FOR KAMALA HARRIS!

Even if, like me, you’re not particularly excited about her.

Even if, like me, you’re dismayed at the Democratic Party’s transformation into a corporate-funded defender of the status quo.

Even if, like me, you support major reforms to improve the fairness of our elections and help third parties gain viability.

Vote for Harris to stop Donald Trump from destroying our democracy and ushering in fascism.

And no, it’s not 100% certain that Trump will turn America fascist. Perhaps the remaining pillars of democracy will continue to stand strong.

But that’s a risk none of us should be willing to take.

Lately, Trump’s opponents, including Harris, have been more outspoken about whether Trump is a fascist, with comparisons to Adolf Hitler. Trump has given his critics plenty of material to work with. One of the best I’ve seen is this short clip from The Daily Show. Here’s the text of that clip:

TRUMP: We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

HITLER: I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breed like vermin.

TRUMP: They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done.

HITLER: The peoples will have to atone for the sins of this worldwide poisoning with their blood.

TRUMP: I said, no, they’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals. I’ll use the word animal, cause that’s what they are.

HITLER: An opponent which … consists not of human beings, but of animals.

TRUMP: You gotta get these people back where they came from. You have no choice. You’re gonna lose your culture. You’re gonna lose your country.

HITLER: In every mingling of Aryan blood with lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people.

TRUMP: Does anybody believe in genes? Do you guys believe in genetics? A murderer. I believe this. It’s in their genes and we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.

HITLER: Individual vices always recur in peoples as long as their inner nature, their genetic composition, does not undergo any essential change.

TRUMP: It’s the enemy from within, all the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country.

HITLER: This scum of the nation.

TRUMP: I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

HITLER: The hour of retribution will come!

The links between Hitler and Trump — and between 1930s Germany and 2020s USA — are hardly fantastical. A column in The Nation by Dan Simon (Who Voted For Hitler?, January 15, 2021) reviews a prescient book of the same title by Richard F. Hamilton, written in the early 1980s.

Hamilton’s Who Voted for Hitler? is more relevant now than ever. The author examined German voting records from 1928-1933, and found that a majority were opposed to the Nazis. Here are a few excerpts from Simon’s column:

“[T]he key election was the one that took place on July 31, 1932, when Hitler’s Nazi party secured only 37.3 percent of the national vote.

“[T]he greatest danger with a movement like the one embodied by Hitler’s militant National Socialists does not stem from the movement itself, always a minority, but rather within the larger society and its halfhearted disavowal of the Nazis, together with a kind of secret brainwashing of the educated and well-off middle class that is vulnerable precisely because they think they aren’t.

“Nazis came to power because they had enough support from almost every demographic group, and not strenuous enough opposition from any demographic or gatekeeping group. And if your heart is sinking because of how familiar that sounds, I feel the same way.

“The idea of the Good German is dangerous to us because it suggests that the national character flaw by which Germans fell into the hell of Hitlerism could never happen here. The percentage of American voters who still support Trump is already vastly greater than the percentage of Germans that supported Hitler during his rise to power.”

If we’re candid about the threat we face, and if we act now, we might still prevent a slide into the unthinkable abyss of fascism. There will be plenty of work to do and many strong stances that need to be taken. For now:

ENCOURAGE EVERYONE YOU KNOW TO VOTE FOR KAMALA HARRIS.

Thanks for reading, listening, and taking action. — Ed Fallon

 

 

 

 

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