With my favorite topic, fascism, in the news, a lot of people have been asking me if Jews or other minorities are going to get sent to camps under Trump's rule. To which I usually say, "Uhh, no, and I don't have my Rite Aid card. Can I just give you my phone number?"
We’re living in very strange times. However, it's always good to raise awareness of mass genocide, so I'm glad people are talking about the Holocaust. I visited the memorial at Auschwitz a few years ago, and it changed the way I look at the world. History has been of great and grim comfort to me in the weeks since we elected a reality TV star to be president. Is Trump a Hitler or a Berlusconi or a neither? We’ll just have to wait and see on this crazy ride called life! Unfortunately, as with most things, the media ruins and distorts history to a place where it is almost of no use (please read this essay by Rick Perlstein about how the media manipulates history to write a frantic and mostly fictional narrative called "the news").
This is not to say that history and media are incompatible; a responsible journalist can distill past events to inform their current work and educate a bewildered populace. But most history is far too complicated to fit into a 250-word newspaper article, and journalists are lazy, and so we end up with headlines like "John Legend says Donald Trump's 'Hitler-like' remarks might turn U.S. into Nazi Germany," devoid of necessary context, like the fact that the Third Reich was borne over many years of acute disillusionment and unemployment, and was preceded by a crippling ground war and a mass famine.
Perhaps John Legend is at once a smooth crooner and a scholar of Weimar Germany – people are full of surprises. But it feels as if right now we are trapped in a feedback loop that feeds on hysteria: The media makes a shallow connection between our present-day situation and situations past (did you know Hitler said he would "make Germany great again?"), audience clicks, freaks out, Googles "how to buy a gun," repeat.
There are many troubling things happening in this feedback loop, predominantly the focus on rhetoric in the absence of facts. And by rhetoric I mostly mean tweets. Last weekend, Democratic Party stenographer Ezra Klein devoted an entire article to analyzing Trump’s tweet about how illegal immigrants made the popular vote invalid, or something. However, worse than Klein's word goulash was that the mainstream media, from Politico to The Washington Post, parroted Trump’s tweet as fact. And this morning it is happening all over again.
This is not only bad, it is very lazy. There is a 90 percent chance that whenever a story is published about someone tweeting something, the person who wrote it was not wearing pants while writing it. It is laziness and bloviation masquerading as reporting and thinking. The conversation is not being pushed forward by these stories. Journalists are taught that when someone powerful says something, it is news, but we are far past such quaint notions. Trump's Twitter is propaganda, a distraction, a dog whistle; whatever you want to call it, it is making Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl high-five in hell.
Alas, Trump's tweets are working. They give his base a giant boner, make journalists piss themselves with excitement, and stoke fear in liberals. Mission accomplished!
Twitter is not reality though. Frankly, I have no idea what reality is right now. This is where I turn to herstory. I assume if you're reading this newsletter you like to read, so I am going to suggest some things for you to read that might inform your thinking on our current political situation. No pressure. Warning: All of these things are books. Warning: I only read non-fiction. Disclosure: None of these things are affiliate links. Suggestion: Send me money.
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