DANGER: WE HAVE DINOSAURS!

Or Communists...or Something that goes Bump in the Night

The worst news to hit the GOP-MAGA cult last year was that there was only one shooter acting alone in the horrific murder of young Charlie Kirk. They really wanted to be able to blame it on “the Left,” but instead were able to find nothing other than what I expected: A single, white, young male lunatic who was acting alone. This, of course, has not stopped them from creating a new “Red Scare” anyway, giving the term a new meaning. Instead of scaring the public by invoking Reds, as in Communists, they use communists to scare the new Reds, the “Republicans.”

I use quotation marks on purpose inasmuch as Donald Trump never joined the Republican Party; instead, he conquered it, and then he destroyed it in order to create, in its place, a new party of boneless chickens, politicians with no spines who give absolute loyalty to brutal and cruel men, all of whom exhibit the same psychopathic tendencies as Hitler’s Inner Circle. Just as the hate-filled misfits gathered around der Fuhrer, so have the misfits of our time gathered around Donald Trump. And just as it was useful for the Nazis to accuse every opponent of being a Communist, before concentrating on the Jewish people as their target, it has become useful for the MAGA spokesmen to accuse their every opponent of Communism, after first having concentrated on immigrants.

In the 1925 Joseph Geobbels began working directly with Adolf Hitler as the Berlin district leader (Gauleiter) to build a base of support for the Nazi Party and later was promoted by Hitler in 1930 to be the Director of Propaganda. The message was that the German people had enemies who were intent on destroying their way of life and everything they valued, including their culture and their religion. Part of the message was that the German people and nation were the greatest nation in the history of the world, and that they were threatened by the organized conspiracies of the Communists (or Bolsheviks), the Jews, and all of the inferior races. Furthermore, the message was also that only one man could save them, and that man was Adolf Hitler. We remember Nazi Germany through the lens of 1945, when the whole world was wrapping up the worst, the most destructive, war in history; and when the Holocaust in all of its full horror finally came to the attention of every country. For this reason, it is problematic to mention the Nazis at all, because someone will, thinking back through the 1945 filter, label any argument as Reductio ad Hitlerum.

IF I BELIEVED IN REINCARNATION…

But if we look back to the 1920s and the 1930s, and focus our attention on or before 1933, we are faced with alarming parallels. It is also true that Trump, in his first administration, bore more resemblance to Mussolini than to Hitler in several ways. And, even now, in a second administration when the Republican Party has become so weakened in comparison to 2017, Trump has not yet been able to wield the power that Mussolini and Hitler held in their countries. This is the case even though there are “no adults in the room” this time (that is, no sane and not so much as one principled person his present Cabinet). Nonetheless, we must look at the parallels where they really do exist, and that is that Trump continues to try to have as much power as those dictators had, and that the weapon of propaganda is used every day of every week. We are in danger, and we ignore it to our peril.

How then is the propaganda weapon used? The most startling words I heard in 2016 were during Trump’s acceptance speech as the presidential candidate for the Republican Party. He spent a lot of time scaring people with the same litany of fictional threats he had been using since the previous year, and concluded with the words, “I alone can fix it.” Here the mask came off for everybody who takes seriously the lessons of history. Not only had he filled people with fear of their neighbors, but by claiming to be the only possible savior, he assumed an antichrist identity; that is, in the original Greek sense of being an alternative anointed one. And, indeed, his supporters have openly called him a messiah.

The propaganda weapon of MAGA is exactly the same as was used by the German Nazis. It has two essential elements: Fictional threats to the nation presented with slanderous accusations of whole groups of innocent people, and selling the leader as the only savior. The second element includes a campaign of attributing greatness where, in reality, there is only pettiness and incompetence; success where, in reality, there is only failure after failure; achievements where, in reality, there is absolutely nothing at all, and strength where, in reality, there is only weakness. The other element is quite a story indeed, reminiscent of the Blood Libels that were used to stir up violence against the Jewish people all over Europe for centuries. A perfect example was the modern American GOP Blood Libel against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio who were targeted simply because Trump and Vance found it convenient to lie about them in 2024 during the election season.

“They’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats!” said Trump, causing Vice President Harris to laugh out loud in a debate. And while every intelligent human being was, at first, laughing at such ridiculous lies, enough of the MAGA base believed it that the slander led to bomb threats, causing whole schools to close, and causing church services to be canceled. At one point I found myself arguing with a man who was, to the great disgrace of his church, a bishop. This miter-wearing bigot actually told me that the Haitians were all eating the dogs and the cats “for the joo-joo in their blood. They are all practicing voodoo” At the time I was still the rector of an Anglican church in North Carolina, and I told him to stay away because we had several black members who spoke with accents. They were from Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana, but he probably would not know the difference.

Because of the modern anti-immigrant Blood Libels, several people have suffered horrible injustices, such as having been sent to a hellish prison in El Salvador, locked in detention centers that are not fit for human habitation, and some have been killed outright, murdered in public before our very eyes. Now the fascists need a new group of scapegoats, and so now Trump, along with notable liars including Mike Johnson, Marco Rubio, and, of course, Stephen Miller (whose deceased Jewish relatives are turning in their graves) are picking up where Hitler and Geobbels left off. Forget the filtering lens of 1945. Look at the Germany of 1933. Yes, it is harder for these thugs to take absolute power, and they are moving very slowly compared to the German Nazis because here, in modern America, we still have the ability to push back as much as we can, thanks mostly to the federal judiciary on appellant courts. In addition to Trump’s worn out lies about dangerous criminal aliens, which contradicts all of the actual records of law enforcement in the United States (where the statistics show that immigrants are the least likely people to commit any crimes), the new focus is on “the Communists.”

By “Communists” they mean people on the Left wing of the Democratic Party. The propaganda of the MAGA cult is that healthcare for all, affordable housing, lowering gasoline and food costs by prosecuting antitrust crimes, and free education, is no different from what the Soviets did. Of course, the Soviets did not do any of those things. The marks of Communism are totalitarian government, that is, the kind that Trump and his inner circle are obviously trying to impose, false elections, trying to take over the news media, and taking over businesses and corporations, all of which Trump has been doing or attempting to do. What actual Communist governments never put up with was anything that the modern American “Left” wants to do. Hell! Real Communists were not really socialists: Their idea of redistribution of wealth was for the Party elites to live in wealth and luxury at everybody else’s expense; it reminds me of the MAGA billionaires in America. And why not? The real socialists are the Republicans, with socialism for the rich - only.

No Communist country every became Communist because of social programs. The United Kingdom has had the National Health since 1948, that is for almost eighty years. The seventy-two democratic countries other than the United States have had a healthy balance of socialism and capitalism for as many decades. Most of them are in NATO, which was the most powerful force against Soviet Block Communism in history. The only countries to become Communist either did so because of a civil war, that is a violent revolution, or because they were conquered by the Soviet Empire. None of the economic reforms of the Democrats, not even of the Democratic Socialists, has the potential to produce Communism. Instead, we should ask who it is that actually is trying to control the news media, who is it that is trying to establish a powerful central government, who it is that is taking over the means of production, and living as the wealthy elites at everyone else’s expense. Look no further than Trump and the MAGA cult. As always, their accusations are projections and confessions. As my first history professor said, “Left and Right are meaningless. What was the difference between living under Hitler and living under Stalin?”

But, as for the kind of Communists Stephen Miller and company are warning us about: We are in as much danger from dinosaurs. What is extinct is extinct. However, the real danger, totalitarianism, refuses to die. We must drive a stake through its heart; and in America I can think of no better way to do that than to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against the First Domestic Enemy and his goons by prosecuting them in a court of law.