284 American Democracy: an Obituary
You hate to say it but with each passing day in Donald Trump’s America Circa 2025 Goebbels assertions about democracy only become more relevant and germane. As for Godwin’s law-honestly it was always a dubious law.
While Hitler analogies can be used in apt ways or abuse to simply assert that NOTHING can be compared to the Nazis is the destruction of history-if there are no appropriate historical analogies. It seems to me that most examples of where Nazi analogies have been abused and misused have come from the Right-most from the Center Liberal Left have been apt and accurate. And useful. When the Right HAS used Hitler Nazi analogies they’ve accused liberals of being Nazis-and implied that Nazis are the real liberals…
Certainly more than ever we need to preserve some sense of history as alongside Trump’s now six month assault on democracy is his assault on truth. By definition this is necessary for any Orwellian system as Trump’s certainly is Karoline Leavitt his Press Secretary for the Ministry of Truth.
And I hate to say it but this assault on truth as had no little success. Just for one example, Nicole Sandler revealed in her weekly show with EmptyWheel this past Friday that her own daughter had bought into some of Trump’s lies about the assassination of Minnesota Rep and her husband-while State Senator and his wife were critically injured.
Emptywheel Friday (the 13th!) on the Nicole Sandler Show 6-13-25
Meanwhile the press twists itself into an epistemological pretzel engaging in the most appalling false equivalence. You have both Stephen A Smith engaging in the most reprehensible victim blaming claiming that Padilla engaged in a the terrible crime of INTERUPTTING Kirsti Noem. To be sure this just once again underscores that anyone taking Stephen A Smith seriously politically speaking is the opposite of serious. But then again allegedly “serious” people like CNN bigshot makes the same awful argument.
FN: Keith Olbermann.
Still as much as you should despise and dismiss hacks like Smith and CNN bigshot – it does underscore how degraded our public debate is at this point-if a hack like Smith a la CNN bigshot engages in such gross false equivalence it is DOES provide a barometer of where the conventional wisdom-again as a Nietzschean cum Zarathustran it’s hard to ever contemplate that phrase without considerable irony-ie that maybe it was a little wrong to assault a US Senator, knock him to the ground, and arrest him but OTOH it was wrong of Padilla to interrupt Noem’s Hitler Youth speech where she talked about “liberating” California from it’s duly elected leaders.
That’s where the public debate is Circa June 2025-where Biden not getting out of the 2024 race sooner is the crime of the century-there the media uses MORAL language Tapper and Alex speak of a “coverup” and “deception” but when we talkin about things like Trump’s Gestapo force arresting and manhandling elected officials-In the last few months we’ve seen the Trump Administration arrest a Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge, arrest the mayor of Newark, a Congresswoman-a Democrat naturally all these elected officials are Democrats-rough up and manhandle NY Congressman Jerrold Nadler’s staff member, and now we have the thuggish assault and arrest of US Senator.
Meanwhile Trump himself threatened to arrest the Governor of California and now on Saturday 6/15/2025 in a day that should and would live in infamy if there weren’t’ so many other days of infamy in the still less than six short months of Trump 2.0 The Absolute Immunity years we had an anti abortion anti LGBT extremist ie a Trump supporter engage in literal political assassination.
Yet the take from the “conventional wisdom” is both sides are doing some mean things?
Goebbels: democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.
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