If anyone ever needed proof of Donald Trump’s affinity for the aberrant views of the Breitbart alt-right, you have it now with the president’s threat to defund UC Berkeley, claiming that the school restrained free speech by cancelling Milo Yiannopolous’ speech to the College Republican chapter:
If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017
Trump clearly offered his threat in response to the cancellation of Yiannopolous’ speech. The Daily Beast even mocked the tweet with its headline: Daddy Trump’s Empty Threat to Defund Berkeley over Milo. As an editor at Breitbart, the provocateur is a close ally of Steve Bannon, now the president’s key ideologist. So Trump now uses his bully pulpit on behalf of Breitbart agitators and to advance the agenda of the neo-Nazi alt-right.
It’s doubtful Trump can punish UC Berkeley in any way. Cutting funding would violate federal regulations (not that this would stop him). But I do expect a phone call any day now to Chancellor Dirks lecturing him about how low he’s fallen in the president’s estimation. First Mexico’s president, then Australia’s prime minister, now UC Berkeley’s chancellor. Who’s next?
Stormtrooper pumps poison gas into the base of a tree surrounded by dead “Jewish” rats. The rats are labelled “stock exchanges,” “the press,” and “trusts.” The branches of the tree are German industry, agriculture, commerce, the arts, and workers. One of the earliest Nazi images suggesting poison gas to kill Jews.
Another example of this is Scott Shane’s NY Times feature on the dark Islamophobic roots in Trump administration policy regarding Islam. The arbiter of Islamophobe chic is Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Islamophobe (er, “Security”) Policy, and leading advocate of the paranoid theory of Islam…Shane quotes Gaffney claiming that Muslims in the West are a fifth column; “termites” burrowing deeply into western civilization and hollowing it out from the inside:
By his account, potential enemies are hidden in plain sight — praying in mosques, recruiting at Muslim student associations and organizing through mainstream Muslim rights groups — and are engaged in “this stealthy, subversive kind of jihad.”
“They essentially, like termites, hollow out the structure of the civil society and other institutions,” Mr. Gaffney said, “for the purpose of creating conditions under which the jihad will succeed.”
If this sort of rhetoric sounds familiar to students of history, that’s because it is. You read the same poisonous phrases in Der Stürmer (see accompanying image whose caption I’ve paraphrased) calling Jews vermin, rats, etc. This particular cartoon pictures “Jewish” rats invading the “German oak” with its branches representing German commerce, agriculture, finance and art. An SS stormtrooper is pictured applying poison gas (!) to root out the ‘vermin.’
In another piece of Nazi propaganda, Jews are even called “foreign termites.” We supposedly poison the pure blood of the Aryan peoples through interbreeding. We kill Christian babies and bake their blood into Passover matzah. We strangle the economic system like a baby in its cradle. We introduce cancerous ideas like Bolshevism into the body politic. So this thinking is alive and well. Except that now it’s burrowed like a termite inside the White House and has hollowed out a great Republic. And now controls the policies of the most powerful nation on earth.
Terry Gross’ Fresh Air guest, Sarah Posner, offers an excellent tutorial on this subject on today’s program.
I must say I am amused by the outcry from right-wing Jewish groups about the deliberate omission of Jews from Trumps statement on the Holocaust. They thought only the despised Muslims would bear the brunt of Trump’s administration. Well, they were wrong, as they should have known. One of the reasons why the American Neo Nazi’s are so fond of Israel is because Israel puts the Muslim Ayrabs in their place, but another is because they (secretly for now, but maybe openly soon) wish American Jews would move there. Racists that they are, they believe that Jews and Asians have disturbingly high I.Q’s, which threaten their own rightful place at the top of society in the US.
[Comment deleted: you are now moderated. I just deleted another comment of yours about the UC Berkeley event telling you it was off-topic. Now, you’re repeated the same offense. You are moderated. If future comments respect the comment rule, they will be approved. If not, they will not.]
Oh. I thought the topic was the UC Berkeley event. My bad.
@ Ben: The subject was Trump’s tweet and threat against UC Berkeley. THe subject was not the event itself or the violence at the event.
[Comment deleted for comment rule violation. This was your 5th comment in the past 24 hrs. Don’t publish more than 3 in any 24 hrs.]
Apparently, liberal democracy allows only free speech of liberal ideas but not other ideas.
The left practice just as much violence as the right. Different sort of violence but still violence.
@Jim
These days, the Left seems to be even more violent than the Right.
Here’s Richard Spencer being sucker punched in the head.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/20/politics/white-nationalist-richard-spencer-punched/
Hi Benny. Does ‘these days’ include Alexandre Bissonnette?
Or these:
The 2015 Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting (3 killed), the 2015 Charleston church shooting (9 killed), the 2014 ambush attack on Las Vegas police officers (5 killed), the 2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting in Kansas (3 killed), the 2014 Pennsylvania State Police barracks attack in Blooming Grove, Pennsylvania (1 killed), a 2012 tri-state killing spree by white supremacists, David Pedersen and Holly Grigsby (4 killed), a 2012 ambush of St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana police (2 killed), the 2012 Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting (6 killed), the 2011 FEAR group attacks (3 killed); a murder in 2010 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (1 killed), a 2010 suicide attack by airplane in Austin, Texas (1 killed), the 2009 shooting of Pittsburgh police officers (3 killed); the 2009 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting (1 killed), the 2009 assassination of George Tiller (1 killed), the 2009 murders of Raul and Brisenia Flores in Pima County, Arizona (2 killed), the 2009 murders in Brockton, Massachusetts (2 killed), the 2008 Knoxville Unitarian Universalist church shooting (2 killed), and the 2004 bank robbery in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Your posts are so convincing. Keep up the good work.
@ Ben: I don’t permit fact-free comments in the comment threads. The list of right-wing violence in the U.S. Israel is voluminous. The list of victims is enormous. Same holds true for Israel.
But it is instructive that you, a pro-Israel apologist, is sticking up for Richard Spencer, a neo-Nazi. You’re not such strange bedfellows after all.
You are now moderated. Further fake news from you could result in banning.
Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood? Pennsylvania State Troopers Barracks?
How are these ‘Right wing’? Because Elizabeth says so?
Talk about fake news!
And BTW. I said left wing violence THESE DAYS, not from 8 and 13 years ago.
BTW. I’m not sticking up for Richard Spencer, and I won’t stick my head in the sand and ignore leftist violence either.
@ Ben: The Colorado Springs killer was most certainly a far right extremist. They have been murdering abortion providers for decades.
Elisabeth also omitted some earlier right wing extremist violence like the Murrah Building Oklahoma City bombing (153 dead) and a more recent one: the assassination of a federal judge and near murder of a Congresswoman in Arizona.
One masked person punching one neo-Nazi does not constitute an outbreak of left wing violence. Though I would argue that Richard Spencer courts such violence through his own deliberate alt-right hate speech. He IS shouting fire in a crowded theater. That is speech that could & should be regulated or restricted given that it incites violence by its very nature.
As opposed to a single punch in the jaw, thousands have been killed in far right violence in the U.S. & around the world over the past decades.
It’s been nearly 5 decades since the Red Brigades & Bader Meinhoff gang terrorized Europe. And even longer since anarchists assassinated William McKinley here in the US. Nice try though.
One more then:
Hi Benny. Does ‘these days’ include Alexandre Bissonnette?
“One masked person punching one neo-Nazi does not constitute an outbreak of left wing violence” – TRUE BUT, open TV and see the violent protests against Trump, all the property damaged and silencing whoever doesn’t agree… than you can see clearly the outbreak of LEFT WING VIOLENCE.
[comment deleted: anti-Semitism is grounds for immediate banning. You are now banned.]