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All that is Wrong with Gilt
It’s the apocalypse season, when the media revs into high gear predicting the end of democracy, the outbreak of fascism, maybe a civil war, even outright Nazism. While the instant framing device is the midterm elections, which they expect President Donald Trump to cancel, nullify, buy or steal, the drumbeat has been steady. Because if not the midterms it is the Reflecting Pool, or the ballroom, or the arch, or the Gulf of America. They are used as shorthand for Hitlerian self-aggrandizement, of all that is wrong with gilt.
The National Review plain out just says: “Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État.” A high-ranking Biden-era defense official calls for the military to disobey any crazy Trump orders ahead of the midterms. A “legal icon” writes “Trump Plans To ‘Wage The Final Battle’ Against Democracy.” A lot of people seem in favor of fighting back; 59 percent of Democratic poll respondents said they would feel “very positive” or “somewhat positive” if they learned a junta removed Trump and seized control of the American government (hyped-up rhetoric can have real-world impact). Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin even warns “President Trump’s clearly expressed desire is to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections. November 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.”
More bad news as another column declares the Republican Party has a fascism problem in its ranks. Nobel prize-winner Paul Krugman predicts Trump will issue a Hitlerian “Nero Degree” if the Republicans lose the midterms, ordering American monuments like the Kennedy Center burned. Jittery Tom Friedman of the New York Times is worried because “the future of democracy” is on the line come November 3. Friedman is still recovering from the infamous January 6, which he said reminded him of the Beirut he covered as a cub reporter. Friedman’s newspaper loves to cite whatever thing is happening at the moment (ICE, some Army general fired) as a new Reichstag moment, loving those Nazi call-outs. However, if you prefer your fascism night terrors as fiction (or is it?) two new books chronicle with a straight face the coming Blue-Red civil war and subsequent AOC presidency. Meanwhile, another new book, purported to be a straight history, 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, hits all the familiar notes, and throws in that Hitler, too, had coarse manners and sought to build a ballroom extension onto the Reichstag building itself.
One of the really sad cases is Art Spiegelman, who of all people should know better. Spiegelman wrote the comic novel Maus some forty years ago, summing up his father’s recollections of the Holocaust. He portrayed the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, and those who remained silent as pigs. Spiegelman warns there are too many touch points between what happened then and what is happening now, citing ICE as an outgrowth of creeping fascism. He claims Trump has “very effectively dismantled” the country’s democratic ideals. He feels the president “is cutting off civil liberties and using his powers to squelch dissent” and he finds himself watching in alarm as ordinary Americans suffer a “new indignity every day”. He has no hesitation in describing the administration as fascist, and so demands a justified “counter revolution” to take down Trump. “This is worse than most things I know,” Spiegelman concludes about America. “I just don’t see how we get out of this.”
It is all disanalogy taken out to a singularity. People have become hysterical and it clouds their judgement even as it fills their wallet. Politics today can sound like a thriller novel where institutions collapse spectacularly on page one to set the story in motion. Every headline not supporting your own beliefs becomes evidence “democracy is dying.” It is a helluva lead-in to the midterms.
So are they right? Is it 1930s Germany out there?
No. Germany in the 1930s was a very different place from America 2026. The nation was ravaged by the First World War, reparations, and the hyperinflation of 1923. The Great Depression brought mass unemployment, banking failures, and political paralysis. The Nazi “democratic” election to power was preceded by years of political violence, Brownshirts in the streets, busting up rival parties’ meetings and beating Jews. Hitler was never elected dictator. He was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg after conservative politicians decided they could use him to achieve their own goals. Germany had already crossed from political crisis into systematic suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of opposition parties. Hitler, as we are famously told, dismantled the Weimar Republic in just 53 days. American journalists have been predicting the equivalent over multiple administrations.
Reality aside, there is still that word, fascism, which is thrown around too casually. ICE abuse, however tragic, or a court decision you do not agree with does not make them stepping stones to fascism. People used to instead use perfectly workable terms like illiberal, populist, expansion of executive power, objectionable or constitutionally aggressive. Today “fascism” is a synonym for them all and as with all faux prophecies everything is a sign.
So what is behind the pre-midterm media juggernaut to proclaim the end of us? To be certain a large amount of the fear mongering is simply the economics of attention. Nazi stuff generates clicks and likes. “Democracy is dying” is a shocking headline. The problem is once you go full Nazi there is nowhere else to go rhetorically. You end up digging in, trying to defend a bad position, knowing you can’t top yourself but still have a podcast to fill. Where once a top-line media outlet could run a balanced piece headlined “American institutions continue to function, but several norms are under pressure,” it now has to go all Chicken Little to get anyone’s attention. The words have lost their shock value.
Another possibility is the media is using fear to motivate voters for their own political agenda. While their Op-Eds often focus on Trump’s slump in support, they ignore the contempt with which many voters hold the Democratic Party over the cultural storm clouds of the Biden years. Media red lights flashing about democracy collide with voters’ entirely different assessments of what government has done badly. The assumption that fear of Trump will automatically translate into Democratic votes is condescending toward voters. The idea seems to be as long as enough voters can be scared enough, they’ll at least reluctantly vote Democrat. If a population can be made to believe the other side is not merely wrong but an existential threat to democracy, voting Democrat becomes a moral obligation and the voter a patriot. It is a very cynical trick being played.
We are not in the early days of fascism. Democracy has never been the absence of ugly politics, the expansion of executive power, corruption or even bad presidents. Democracy is a system for surviving and correcting those things. The media needs to back off the scare tactics and have a little faith in the people.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Harvard Conservative Mag Suspended for Hitler Comments
The Harvard Salient, one of the lone conservative voices on one of the most liberal of campuses, was suspended from publication after language echoing a Hitler speech appeared in an article. The bigger story is one of a collision between defenders of free inquiry and the boundaries that define expression in elite institutions. It comes at a very bad time, as Harvard and President Trump themselves battle over the limits of free speech on campus.
Salient magazine, originally founded in 1981 during the Reagan era, was brought back to life in 2021 to provide a conservative counterweight at Harvard. It is editorially and financially independent from the university, but subject to the oversight of a Board of Directors made up of faculty and alumni, and they are unhappy.
At issue are several lines from the magazine, according to multiple sources including the New York Times. In its September print issue, the Salient published an article by student David F.X. Army that included the lines “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” echoing the words Hitler used in a January 1939 speech to the Reichstag in which he gleefully forecast that another world war would lead to the annihilation of Jews. The Salient piece also argued “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” and called for a return to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” The article went on to argue Europe’s native populations were being displaced by migration from Africa and Asia. There was also another Salient story, published following the September killing of Charlie Kirk, which described the left as “our enemies.”
The Board of Directors fired back, stating “The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning material — material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands. The Board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization” without specifying which articles it found reprehensible or what complaints it had received. An investigation is underway, and while that is ongoing the Salient is not to print. Its editor, however, has vowed to ignore the shutdown order, claiming this was all a mistake.
Editor-in-Chief Richard Rodgers wrote an email to the Salient’s mailing list calling the suspension an “unauthorized usurpation of power by a small number of individuals acting outside the bounds of their authority.” He pushed back against criticism in the school newspaper “branding The Harvard Salient as little more than a hate group that should be monitored and, if need be, silenced.”
Rodgers said the Hitler line was not intentional. He wrote “neither the author nor the editors had recognized the resemblance and that the phrase long predates the Third Reich,” though the Hitler quote should be well-known to students of history, forming the philosophical backbone of the Nazis’ plans to eliminate the Jews from Europe. Rodgers did not appear to address the use of the terms blood and soil. “Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden) was also a well-known central part of Nazi ideology. It combined racial mysticism (“blood”) with agrarian nationalism (“soil”), expressing the belief that the German people (the Volk) were spiritually bound to their native land. It appeared in propaganda posters, speeches, and art glorifying Aryan farmers plowing German soil, visual shorthand for racial and national unity. It strains belief that Harvard students would be unaware of those associations or their emotional weight they carry in the context of an article on third world immigration into Western Europe.
This should have been just basic First Amendment stuff familiar to Salient’s overreacting board members. Though Harvard, as a private institution, isn’t bound by the First Amendment, it claims to uphold the same values of free expression. Hate speech, accidental or not, is not outlawed by the First Amendment; indeed it is speech that insults and angers that needs the most protection, whether coming from the right or left. It is heavy-handed of the Board to suspend publication based on what is known at present. If there is something more, the Board is obligated to surface that immediately to support their decision and maintain credibility. Their reflexive punishment risks confirming the narrative that elite institutions can’t tolerate ideological diversity. At the same time, Salient should understand when dealing with subjects as emotionally laden as Nazi philosophy, explanation and context are crucial. Ignorance is a poor excuse here.
Somewhere in the vast Harvard educational complex, there are journalism, history, and law classes which in 2025 teach just those very things. Everyone should learn their lesson and move on. The problem is we live in 2025, where dispassionate classroom wisdom often fails on the ideological battlefield.
The Salient case arrives in the middle of Harvard’s and America’s broader struggle between the political right and left. The university has spent months under fire from Donald Trump, who accuses it of ideological bias and hypocrisy. Though Harvard has distanced itself, noting the Salient is governed by an independent board, the controversy inevitably reflects on the university. Harvard cannot duck the larger issues here. As Salient editor Rodgers wrote about the censorship “The traditionalist student becomes the bigot. The publication that prints their ideas becomes the threat. ‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponized cliché, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the University.” He concludes Harvard is a campus that proclaims free expression while quietly cultivating fear of it.
Truth, veritas, Harvard’s motto, emerges through debate, not censorship. Harvard remains a mirror of America’s polarization, a place where liberals preach tolerance but struggle to practice it, and conservatives at times crudely test the limits of provocation in the name of free speech.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Kamala Harris Lost
This was an angry election; none of that “which candidate would you rather have a beer with” stuff here. Trump is an angry man representing angry constituents. Harris was angry things were not going her way and constantly expressed the Hillary-esque idea of “how could I possibly be losing to a guy like Trump?” Both sides prioritized personal attacks over policy. At times it felt like elementary school playground stuff, name calling, but in the end it was much more serious than that. Harris lost because she tried to make “Trump is a fascist” into her closing argument and no one was listening anymore. The girl had truly cried wolf for the last time.
Now to be fair Harris’ fate is also because she is wholly unqualified for the toughest job in the world, having distinguished herself as Vice President of Nothing. She was an empty suit and kept showing it. A candidate created whole from the womb by the media with a past that supposedly did not matter and a future as vague as her recollections of that past. As the saying goes, she had one job — the border — and made a royal mess out of doing nothing about the many problems there to the point where thousands of migrants (we use the word as a generic term because no one in the Harris house cared whether they were legal, illegal, asylees, protected peoples or whatever witches’ brew our immigration system could cook up) poured in.
Harris did nothing of substance as VP; she made matters worse by having no real plans or polices for her presidency but to give away money. Softball questions from the ever-so compliant MSM were met with ever-vaguer answers, bits of biography, and then some nasty remark about Trump. It was Orange Man Bad all over, and the electorate had had enough. Trump’s shortcomings were baked in after what seems like an eternity of campaigning, never mind years in the White House itself. The “Never Trumpers” had had their day four years ago. Most Americans had taken Trump’s measure, for good or ill. By contrast, many Americans remained unsure who Harris was and what she stood for. In the background, Biden’s inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s nagged. And working people worry much more about payday than they do J6.
J6 was an embarrassing day for America but given a) it had no chance of making Trump the election winner and b) two weeks later, with not much in between, Biden was inaugurated. It was all about a day of rage, an angry expression of an unfavorable situation not unlike the BLM protests one summer that burned down pharmacies and convenience stores but accomplished little more. The system worked. The riot was put down. Congress, including Republicans, reassembled and certified Biden as the next president. Rage is not insurrection and while the People seemed to have figured this out by election day 2024, Harris and her ilk never did. It made Harris seem uninformed and out of touch, desperate enough to get elected as to cry the sky is falling over and over. It was tactic that did not work in 2016, was not decisive in 2020, and had little air left in it for 2024 except for the MSM and the Harris campaign, basically one in the same anyway.
Still, some of it might have stuck had it not come on the heels of the seemingly endless and seemingly pointless lawfare campaign. Mollie Hemingway of Fox News wrote “This lawfare against Donald Trump has been their beginning argument, middle argument, and ending argument. It obviously has backfired completely. The whole goal was to make sure that Donald Trump would be imprisoned, bankrupted, so discouraged, so distracted by being off the campaign trail dealing with these various examples of lawfare from Democrat prosecutors at the federal and state and local level, that he wouldn’t win. Well, he’s about to win, most likely, and it is a stunning rejection by the American people of that lawfare campaign.” “Should Trump defy history and return to the White House as a convicted felon, he will send a message to the world that elections don’t matter,” added the Daily Beast, quite unaware how democracy and elections work.
There were other factors. History may regard 2024 as a peak for gender-based politics, wrote the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Trump’s all-out appeal to a controversial model of masculinity that emphasizes toughness and strength is mobilizing hard-to-reach men, including members of racial and ethnic minorities. This prospect obviously worried the Harris campaign, which rushed out an agenda for black men.”
The media has so little credibility left its endless formal and informal endorsement of Harris not only did not matter but was tiresome. So desperate for an October surprise, they beclowned themselves with stories like this. The Atlantic had published a similar “Hail Mary” story in September 2020 citing anonymous sources claiming Trump canceled a 2018 visit to a French cemetery where American troops are buried, declaring that they were “suckers” and “losers.” The credibility of that story has also been refuted, with former national security adviser John Bolton denying Trump uttered these words and asserting the former president did not visit the cemetery for reasons related to weather and security. So why not try a failed move again?
And Liz Cheney — in what alternate universe did it seem like a good idea to bring in the Cheney family to help support a Democrat with progressive followers? Dick Cheney is personally responsible for the deaths of millions and Liz does not believe in abortion. Where are the Democratic votes in that steaming pile of war-mongering neoconism?
But the worst was saved for last, a Harris campaign closing argument based on a coordinated effort to proclaim Trump is an actual fascist, a real-life Dr. Evil who seeks the presidency so that he can rule as a dictator, destroying the Constitution and the rule of law as he goes about his nefarious tasks. It is the ultimate expression of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the ultimate Orange Man Bad. And it is what the Harris campaign chose to run on in the campaign’s final days.
The coordinated fascist line began with Generals Kelly and Milley announcing Trump is a flat-out fascist who seeks to be a dictator. Kamala Harris called an “emergency” press conference to tell the world that he is the second coming of Adolf Hitler. “Donald Trump is out for unchecked power. He wants a military like Adolf Hitler had, who will be loyal to him, not our Constitution,” she said. “He is unhinged, unstable, and given a second term, there would be no one to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses.” “He’s Talking Like Hitler’,” said The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, who warned Trump wants ‘absolute power’ in his second term. She also spoke about the similarities between Trump’s rhetoric and what she found in her research from the Stasi archives of East Germany’s secret police. “Trump is Hitler,” claimed James Carville. “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the 1930s at Madison Square Garden,” Tim Walz said during a campaign stop. Other Democrats such as Hillary Clinton made similar comparisons. Liz Cheney declared with authority either you vote for Harris, or this “may well be the last real vote you ever get to cast.” Whoopi Goldberg even explained how Trump is committed to being a dictator who will “put you people away… take all the journalists… take all the gay folks… move you all around and disappear you.” The October Surprise was the Dems ran out of ideas and could only fling around the “F” word. So much for the convention-era Harris’ promise of joy.
The public did not buy it. When asked whether Trump or Harris “would do a better job” of “defending against threats to democracy,” 43 percent picked Trump while 40 percent chose Harris. This was the same result when Biden was the nominee. While over half said that threats to democracy were important to them, the voters trusted Trump (44 percent) more than Biden (33 percent) in protecting democracy. Voters, featured on Mark Halperin’s 2WAY platform, commented Harris’ Hitler remarks were off-putting or unlikely to help her win the November election, while none raised their hands when Halperin asked if the vice president should be campaigning on this issue.
Most damning of all, Harris’ Hitler remarks were called out by an actual Holocaust survivor. In a powerful video clip circulating on social media, Jerry Wartski, a Holocaust survivor, blasted Harris and her fellow Dems for comparing Trump to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis. “Adolf Hitler invaded Poland when I was nine years old. He murdered my parents and most of our family. I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” he stated. “For Harris to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my 75 years living in the United States.”
When your campaign is based on insulting the memories of actual Holocaust survivors for political gain, your campaign has run out of gas. Kamala Harris ended up where she did most of all because she had no real connection to the American people. She was a manufactured entity, full of catchphrases at first, paranoid, bitter insults at the last. Her disappearance from public life will not be missed.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dachau Does Not Believe in Tears
Right now someone in the media is finding another excuse to proclaim Trump is Hitler, America is Germany 1933, and something about concentration camps on the southern border. So I went to Dachau, just outside of Munich, to see a real concentration camp.
You deal with the irony first. The people who in too loud voices mill around the station entrance asking “Is this the train to Dachau?” then the conductor’s announcement calling out the name as the next stop as if it was just another. The mediocre station has a McDonald’s. The bus stop sign for the shuttle you need to take has “Concentration Camp” written in English. Everyone around you is on vacation, dressed for it and chattering like it. You arrive at a visitor’s center, and there’s a rush for the toilets and the snack bar. Which way to the camp, Dad? Can we see the crematorium? Can we?
A hundred steps outside the snack bar the world changes. The road turns gray even though the light playing through the poplars is from a postcard. They’ve changed the entrance location from a few years ago, and now you enter through the former SS barracks and come to the gate; it really says Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free) on the iron bars and you walk through just like they did. The gate only swings one way; you will leave, today, but it wasn’t originally designed that way and you can tell. There may be a hundred people with you but it is finally silent as you enter Dachau.It is too small. You see the administrative buildings to the right, the reconstructed prisoner barracks to the left, the assembly ground in front of you. You see the fences and walls on all four sides, walkable in a few minutes at an easy pace on a gorgeous day. It is too small to have held all those people, too small for all that happened, too small to be the symbol of Nazi power it was then. You expect something more substantial, with the distant site lines obscured, like at Disneyworld, where tricks of the eye make it seem more grand.
It is too familiar. It takes just a few moments to get your bearings. You’ve seen photos before, and there are many posted, populating the place with buildings and people once here and forever gone. It is unlike say an art museum on the scale of the Met or the Uffizi where hours of circling corridors later you have no idea where you’ve been. You know Dachau.
The museum unfolds in the order new prisoners were processed in. The early days of National Socialism are explained where the prisoners were first assigned numbers, the seizure of power by Hitler is documented in the room where people were stripped and deloused (subtlety is missing when the unit of measurement is Nazism) and you exit onto the campgrounds awkwardly after reading about their liberation by the 45th Infantry Division.
You think, after all that reading and those museum exhibits (and it is a thorough education, much more than an Instagram collection of artifacts, and oh look, a real prisoner’s uniform, honey!) you understand something. But not yet. You have really just arrived and in front of you is Dachau itself, the ground, the air — the same ground they saw and air they breathed — and you have a choice. Many visitors turn back toward the snack bar, falsely satiated after an hour thinking they saw Dachau and anxiously trying to remember if the shuttle bus runs back to the station on the hour or the half-hour.
But if you wait for them to leave, now you can see Dachau.
Most of the place is empty, acres of crushed stone with flat markers showing where the now-missing barracks where. The trees lining the central road bisecting the camp are old. They were here when Dachau was working. You can match up an individual tree from a 1942 photo with the one in front of you and touch it. The sun is warm this day, a beautiful late summer afternoon with those wonderful tickles of early fall around it. A day to be alive grandpa would have called it. There must have been days just like this in 1942 here. Were there afternoon moments when for the length of time one could close one’s eyes the prisoners left the camp?There is some minor archaeological excavation work going on. The archaeologist stands over a hole about three feet deep and explains he is looking for evidence of the original fence line, the border of the camp before it was expanded in 1937. He found some wooden post fragments and some barbed wire. So the bottom of that hole is 1937 I ask? Yes, he says, the dirt and stones piled here haven’t seen sunlight since then. I ask if I can take one of the stones with me as a keepsake, and he explains that is not allowed, even as he looks away just long enough. Doing the right thing is hard enough elsewhere, never mind in Dachau.
A sign simply states the area in front of you is where the barracks used for medical experiments on live humans stood. Another denotes the punishment barracks, where the SS found darker ways for those already living inside a camp designed only to punish. You see where the bodies were stacked like cordwood but you know wood is strong and straight and the images you are recreating show corpses floppy and tangled in their piles quite unlike cordwood. Now you are seeing Dachau, here in the deeper waters.
Dachau does not believe in your tears. This is not a sentimental place. It is not clean. A universe of victims died here but this is not a place that acknowledges victimhood, or raises awareness, or gives voice, or traffics in the shallowness of hashtags. Dachau is here to declare what happened and to charge you with doing something with that information on the scale and with the accuracy Dachau requires.See, by coming here, it is now handed to you, that obligation. Hitler and his Dachau did not emerge from an election which frowned on a favored candidate. Following WWI Germany was purposefully humiliated and saddled with war reparations which were unpayable. An economic crisis unrolled. Inflation drove the nation to starvation. With no history of democracy, Germany was willed into a republic as unprepared as two virgins in an arranged marriage. Across the border the new Soviet Union and at home a powerful domestic Communist party threatened. Hungry people weren’t tricked into a strongman because of Facebook or some Electoral College fluke, they demanded one.
Within three months of taking office Hitler gave himself the right to amend the Constitution, ended representative government, created special political courts, made criticism of the government a capital crime, and established Dachau. Two months after that Jews were fired from government positions, political parties and unions prohibited, opponents murdered, and books burned on government orders. There was no slippery slope, it was not incremental. It was inevitable.
So there is obviously more to this story than a travelogue about an interesting day trip out to Dachau by train from nearby Munich. To say Trump is Hitler, America is Germany in 1933, or a grimy detention facility is a concentration camp means you have never been to Dachau.The presentation at Dachau is very un-2019, where everyone vies for adopted victimhood and chosen trauma. Dachau is cold, because only its facts matter. Tweets childishly mocking political opponents and regulations preventing a small number of self-declared trans people from joining the Army have nothing to do with Dachau. To stretch 2019 border facilities or exaggerate the historical impact of a march in Charlottesville is to turn Dachau relative, the dial jiggered to magnify some other event. It makes people numb, it dumbs down discussion, it is cheap, inaccurate, and exploitative. It demands mighty outrage from a partial set of facts. Both butterflies and elephants have legs, but no one should claim a butterfly is an elephant.
Propagandists have always used ignorance to manipulate. Yet while CNN works to convince viewers silver mylar blankets instead of comfy quilts for migrants means there are concentration camps in America, Dachau reminds physicians here dissected human beings alive as part of medical experiments. Just as is taught in beginning writing courses, truth comes from showing not just telling. For those who think there is little significant difference between Germany 1933 and America today, there is Dachau to visit.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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