{"id":32460,"date":"2024-03-23T13:30:46","date_gmt":"2024-03-23T20:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=32460"},"modified":"2024-03-23T13:30:47","modified_gmt":"2024-03-23T20:30:47","slug":"republicans-are-following-a-key-part-of-hitlers-playbook-lying-your-way-into-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/03\/23\/republicans-are-following-a-key-part-of-hitlers-playbook-lying-your-way-into-power\/","title":{"rendered":"REPUBLICANS ARE FOLLOWING A KEY PART OF HITLER’S PLAYBOOK: LYING YOUR WAY INTO POWER"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

TUE, 3\/19\/2024 – BY\u00a0CARL GIBSON<\/a> (Occupy.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In January of 2017, Kellyanne Conway \u2014 who at the time was a senior White House strategist in former President Donald Trump\u2019s administration \u2014 was the first to coin the term \u201calternative facts.<\/a>\u201d She deployed the phrase after NBC\u2019s Chuck Todd confronted her about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer\u2019s debunked lie about Trump\u2019s inauguration crowd being the largest in history (Barack Obama\u2019s first inauguration<\/a> in 2009 was actually the largest). Even though Conway\u2019s remark was laughed off at the time, it was, in retrospect, prescient foreshadowing of the Republican Party\u2019s eventual full embrace of lying as its primary political weapon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the end of Trump\u2019s term, journalists at the Washington Post analyzed over five million of the former president\u2019s words, and found that he lied more than 30,000 times<\/a> (the Post\u2019s more polite wording was \u201cfalse or misleading claims\u201d). Notably, Trump\u2019s rate of lying rapidly snowballed in the latter years of his presidency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrump averaged about six [false or misleading] claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims a day in his second year, 22 claims a day in his third year \u2014 and 39 claims a day in his final year,\u201d the Post reported. \u201cPut another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donald Trump proved to his fellow Republicans that there were no consequences for lying, as any damage to their credibility from the lie is outweighed by the benefits of wielding political power. This has led the GOP to go all-in on what scholars call \u201cpost-truth\u201d politics<\/a>. And as history shows, this is perfectly in line with the strategy that Hitler and the Nazi Party embraced in their rise to power. What remains unknown is whether post-truth Republicans will succeed in 2024 as the Nazis did in 1933.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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THE GOP\u2019S LIES ARE WEAPONS AGAINST THE MARGINALIZED<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The centerpiece of Sen. Katie Britt\u2019s (R-Alabama) widely mocked response<\/a> to President Joe Biden\u2019s State of the Union address was the story of Karla Jacinto Romero \u2014 a Mexican victim of sex trafficking \u2014 to argue Biden was weak on border security and immigration policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPresident Biden didn\u2019t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days,\u201d Britt said. \u201cWhen I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That\u2019s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end,\u201d she continued. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden\u2019s border policies are a disgrace.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As journalist Jonathan Katz first explained in a viral TikTok<\/a>, Romero\u2019s story didn\u2019t take place during the Biden administration, but between 2004 and 2008, when former President George W. Bush was in office. Romero was also not trafficked by drug cartels, but by a street pimp. She didn\u2019t confide her story to Britt personally, but first told it to Congress in a 2015 hearing<\/a> on sex trafficking. And Romero\u2019s experience, while horrendous, didn\u2019t take place in the US or even near the US\/Mexico border, but in Guadalajara and Mexico City. The Post confirmed<\/a> with a Britt spokesperson that the Alabama senator was indeed talking about Romero, meaning Britt had to have known prior to her speech that Biden’s border policies had absolutely no connection to Romero’s experience. Yet she plowed ahead with the lie anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britt\u2019s response to Biden\u2019s address insinuated that Trump \u2014 not Biden \u2014 was the best choice for voters on immigration, border security, and helping victims of sex trafficking. But as lawyer and advocate Julie Dahlstrom and sociologist Heba Gowayed wrote for The Hill in 2022, the Trump administration\u2019s policies actually made it so people like Romero who were applying for T visas (specifically for victims of sex trafficking) were stonewalled by additional layers of red tape<\/a>. In 2019 and 2020, they wrote, T visa denials increased by 42%. In fact, Biden removed many of the roadblocks<\/a> to T visas that Trump put in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Britt didn\u2019t only lie about when and where Romero\u2019s experience took place, but she also lied about the circumstances in which it happened. She lied about who was to blame, and she even lied about whose administration would be more hospitable to sex trafficking victims like Romero. In an interview with CNN<\/a>, Romero made it clear she did not approve of or consent to Britt misrepresenting her story for political gain, saying \u201c[Britt] should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The late NFL commentator John Madden was famous for his Thanksgiving \u201cturducken<\/a>,\u201d which was a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck. In a similar way, Britt\u2019s anecdote was ultimately exposed to be a lie within a lie to justify a lie. But Britt\u2019s turducken lie is just the tip of the iceberg for the GOP. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Occupy.com previously explored<\/a>, a primary objective of a second Trump administration would be the mass deportation of millions of immigrants. In order to justify the existence of his proposed nationwide immigration raids and sprawling detention camps, Trump has repeatedly harped on an alleged \u201cmigrant crime wave\u201d as the justification for his anti-immigrant agenda. Of course, there is no migrant crime wave: That too is a total fabrication. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In February, two NYPD officers were beaten<\/a> outside of a migrant shelter in New York City. An image of a man arrested after the altercation giving two middle fingers to news cameras (later identified as Jhoan Boada) went viral. Fox News\u2019 Sean Hannity referred to Boada<\/a> as an \u201cillegal immigrant who attacked [an] NYPD cop.\u201d The image of Boada also appeared in one of Trump\u2019s campaign ads. But in fact, Boada wasn\u2019t even present during the scuffle, and was ultimately exonerated<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NBC News dug into crime statistics and found that undocumented immigrants overwhelmingly commit crimes at a far lower rate<\/a> than native-born Americans and second-generation immigrants. Despite Trump and Republicans zeroing in on one-off instances of unauthorized immigrants committing violent crimes, crime data does not show an increase in crime as a result of higher immigration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[C]ontrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years,\u201d read a 2020 study<\/a> published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since Trump\u2019s supposed justification for his campaign to deport millions of immigrants has been proven to be a lie, what\u2019s his true motivation? He may have already told us: In late 2023, Trump said immigrants were \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country<\/a>.\u201d He specifically alluded to nonwhites, particularly immigrants \u201ccoming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.\u201d NBC observed that Trump\u2019s remark was lifted almost verbatim<\/a> from Adolf Hitler\u2019s manifesto Mein Kampf, in which the German dictator wrote \u201call great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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THE GOP TAKES A PAGE DIRECTLY FROM HITLER\u2019S PLAYBOOK<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Hitler lied about marginalized communities strategically to both justify his quest for power, and as a reason to stay in power. While Trump\u2019s claim that he didn\u2019t actually lose the 2020 election is known as the \u201cBig Lie,\u201d that term actually first came from chapter 10 of Mein Kampf<\/a>. Hitler used the term to describe how Jewish people were supposedly spreading a \u201cbig lie\u201d that German General Erich Ludendorff was the reason Germany lost World War I (Hitler maintained Germany didn\u2019t lose, but was instead betrayed from within). The New York Times\u2019 Edwin James observed that Hitler\u2019s claim that Germany didn\u2019t actually lose the war was his \u201cbiggest lie<\/a>.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in a 2018 Washington Post essay, Cold War historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobsen wrote that Hitler\u2019s assertion about Jewish people spreading a \u201cBig Lie\u201d was classic projection<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAdolf Hitler first defined the Big Lie as a deviant tool wielded by Viennese Jews to discredit the Germans’ deportment in World War I. Yet, in tragically ironic fashion, it was Hitler and his Nazi regime that actually employed the mendacious strategy,\u201d Jacobsen wrote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJews, Hitler contended, were the weak underbelly of the Weimer state that exposed the loyal and true German population to catastrophic collapse,\u201d he continued. \u201cTo sell this narrative, Joseph Goebbels insisted \u2018all 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.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn short, Nazi fascism hinged on creating one streamlined, overarching lie\u2026 the Nazis built an ideology on a fiction, the notion that Germany’s defeat in World War I could be avenged (and reversed) by purging the German population of those purportedly responsible: the Jews,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer also used the phrase \u201cbig lie\u201d in a 1943 report<\/a> (PDF link) for the Office of Strategic Services, for his profile of Germany\u2019s fascist dictator. Langer wrote that Hitler\u2019s \u201cprimary rules\u201d were to \u201cnever allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The above quote has a lot of obvious parallels to Trump \u2014 particularly in repeating big lies frequently until they are believed by a broad swath of the public. Trump\u2019s full embrace of lies has effectively created armor for him that is impervious to truth and fact-checking. The more his lies are exposed, the more he and his followers freely dismiss the truth as \u201cfake\u201d and double down on the lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A great example of this is in Trump\u2019s characterization of the United States today as a crime-infested, impoverished nation in decline led by an incompetent, doddering octogenarian that can only be saved by Trump swooping back into the White House to save America from total ruin. These are common themes in his campaign speeches, and they have an effect on public sentiment. Gallup found in November that 77% of Americans<\/a> believe crime has increased since last year. And in February, 55% of respondents<\/a> told Pew Research that they associated crime with higher immigration. 63% of Americans<\/a> told Gallup in January that the economy was \u201cgetting worse.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But just like his claims about migrants, Trump\u2019s claims about crime and the economy are not even remotely true. Murder rates saw their most precipitous drop on record<\/a> last year including in large cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. FBI data shows that the rates of other violent crimes, like rape, aggravated assault, and robbery, are also trending downward<\/a>. Personal and property crime rates have been gradually declining for decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under any metric, Biden has presided over an economy that continues to outpace expectations. More than 15 million jobs have been created<\/a> since he took office, unemployment has remained at a historic low<\/a>, wage growth is outpacing price growth<\/a>, inflation continues to fall<\/a>, the Dow Jones<\/a>, the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500 have all hit record highs<\/a> this year, American consumer confidence hit a new two-year high<\/a> at the end of January, and the US has had the best post-pandemic economic recovery<\/a> out of all G7 countries. Even Trump\u2019s assertions about Biden being too old for the job are questionable \u2014 not only due to mounting evidence<\/a> of Trump\u2019s own cognitive decline<\/a> \u2014 but Biden\u2019s feisty, combative, hour-long State of the Union speech seems to have thrown cold water on that argument as well. Biden\u2019s campaign raised more than $10 million<\/a> in the 24 hours following his nationally televised address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

REPUBLICANS ARE WAGING AN ALL-OUT WAR ON TRUTH<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Republicans are nonetheless continuing to lie in direct defiance of the facts. Reps. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) \u2014 who chair the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees, respectively \u2014 are still charging ahead with their efforts to impeach Biden even after their primary source was indicted for lying to the FBI. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month, the DOJ charged 43-year-old Alexander Smirnov with making false statements to investigators<\/a> in a 1023 report (for confidential informants) about Biden and his son Hunter supposedly soliciting $10 million in bribes. Comer and Jordan used that now discredited report as the foundation of their own investigations. The DOJ later accused Smirnov a few days after the indictment of having contact with \u201chigh-ranking\u201d Russian intelligence officials<\/a> who sought to sow disinformation about Biden ahead of the 2024 election.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) posted a tweet<\/a> earlier this month suggesting Biden was soft on energy independence. That tweet was widely panned by both X\/Twitter\u2019s community notes function and thousands of commenters, who pointed out that domestic oil production under Biden\u2019s watch is outpacing not only Trump, but all other presidents as well<\/a>. Grassley has not deleted the tweet nor apologized for the claim as of this writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) recently suggested that Americans were better off four years ago<\/a> \u2014 when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the economy and was killing thousands every day \u2014 than they are now. In fact, in March of 2020, Trump was arguing that Americans shouldn\u2019t be let off of a cruise ship<\/a> because he didn\u2019t want to increase the number of active Covid cases, and Americans were panic-buying toilet paper<\/a>. Stefanik is notably on the short-list<\/a> of Trump\u2019s potential running mates. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republicans\u2019 lies don\u2019t start and end with elected officials: The far-right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) insisted that NBC was engaging in \u201cwillful disinformation\u201d<\/a> in reporting that Nazis were seen openly mingling with attendees at its 2024 gathering. However, the NBC reporter who authored the story stood by his claims and said Nazis were \u201cposting about their presence at CPAC online<\/a>\u201d and were still not removed from the conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The GOP is counting on the ability to lie freely and without consequence in order to reclaim the White House and the US Senate. It\u2019s incumbent on not just journalists and media outlets, but on voters themselves, to resist the urge to grow weary of fact-checking and let post-truth politics take over. History shows that the reliance on lies for political advantage is a precursor to fascism, and the final outcome of Republicans\u2019 well-documented plans to implement unchecked authoritarianism<\/a> will depend on whether voters will believe their lies over the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Barron\u2019s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TUE, 3\/19\/2024 – BY\u00a0CARL GIBSON (Occupy.com) In January of 2017, Kellyanne Conway \u2014 who at the time was a senior White House strategist in former President Donald Trump\u2019s administration \u2014 was the first to coin the term \u201calternative facts.\u201d She deployed the phrase after NBC\u2019s Chuck Todd confronted her about… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32461,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32460\/revisions\/32461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}