Fascist Gives Fascist Speech Where Fascists Gave Fascist Speeches

By Jacob Weindling  |  October 28, 2024 | 10:50am
Photo vis CSPAN Screenshot
Elections Donald Trump
Fascist Gives Fascist Speech Where Fascists Gave Fascist Speeches

On February 20, 1939, the German American Bund, a Nazi organization for Americans of German descent, held a rally at Madison Square Garden. As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, this rally “drew more than 20,000 attendees who booed any mention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and cheered Heil Hitler!” Speakers were explicitly anti-Semitic, and violent revolution was preached by those like Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, who said “the spirit which opened the West and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man.”

On October 27, 2024, Donald Trump held a day-long rally at Madison Square Garden, and it was a garden variety Trump rally with some extra speakers. In other words, a safe space for fascists. “Comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe told racist “jokes” about almost every kind of person alive, which in the hands of someone talented could be seen as equal-opportunity dark comedy, but when it’s a middle school boy in his dad’s suit trying to do a toned-down Andrew Dice Clay impression, any art in the performance recedes into the background as the bigotry becomes the point.

The Trump campaign along with many other Republicans disavowed Hinchcliffe’s “joke” because they know how politically damaging it could be, but all the ones about Black people and watermelons and Jews and money or any other hackneyed trope that only those bereft of humor find funny were not condemned—which just further confirms that this all was one big fascist rally in service of white backlash and undermining the election—a modern ode to their Bund forefathers.

The comparisons between the two are unmistakable, and proof that this movement cited as inspiration by Adolf Hitler, a man who their dear leader openly admires, has never gone away. This is a strain of humanity we have been fighting against forever. The implicated other side in Martin Luther King Jr.’s famed “arc of moral history” quote. They are who it bends against.

It’s easy to find this scary. They’re promising fascism. There are aspiring SS Agents like Tom Holland on 60 Minutes dryly saying they can deport entire families in a bid to keep them together. Fascism is indeed at America’s doorstep, and this is why I am begrudgingly voting for Kamala Harris, because there is a greater threat to mankind than those responsible for a genocide. Welcome to a collapsing empire.

But one thing that should not be forgotten about this movement is how fundamentally weak it is—how its strength springs from an embrace of testing the limits of human ignorance, and the greatest surplus of ignorance in mankind’s history currently resides on the American right-wing. Propaganda is effective, and resisting it has little to do with one’s intelligence. Once it has its claws into you, things tend to spiral.

And while America is spiraling, the right-wing is too. They’re platforming a lame racist “comic” telling braindead bigotry that has been repackaged ten billion times by hacks far more talented than he is, and now they’re scrambling to undo the damage he did to their Puerto Rican coalition that is large enough to cost them basically every swing state, to say nothing of literally every other minority group he insulted. This was an obvious unforced error that has the potential to decide an extremely narrow election. The stupidity, it’s hard not to laugh at it.

Not to mention, Hinchcliffe defending his hacky shtick as just comedy and saying people need to lighten up is disavowing the word of Andy Warhol, as noted by actually talented dark comic Anthony Jeselnik.

We are witnessing a group of incompetent man-children try to do a fascism. Even the “we need to slaughter these people” line that clearly is talking about their margin of victory was tripped over, a seeming acknowledgement of the intentional or not, winking literal interpretation of what he was saying and his inability to do so with any charisma or showmanship. MAGA is driven by the most divorced guys alive who routinely blow their life savings on jet skis and literally anything with the word tactical in front of it. As much as these ignoramuses want to try to project confidence, whenever they come into contact with objective reality, like with Trump at the Univision Town Hall, or Trump at the debate against Kamala Harris, or the Department of Justice’s indictment of Tenet Media, these right-wing dipshits prove again and again and again that they are big dumb babies who don’t know anything.

Take their fascism seriously because our sclerotic aristocratic government makes that possible and monsters like Tom Holland are itching to get behind the imperial levers, but on a relative basis to the rest of society, we are probably dealing with the dumbest humans ever created. Fascism derives its power from a projection of popular legitimacy, and portraying these doofuses for what they are is one of the best weapons we have to undercut it.

 
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