As Trump Builds His Authoritarian Presidency, Echoes of 1930s Germany and 1950s McCarthyism Abound | Alternet
When Richard Spencer, a leading alt-right white power ideologue finished his speech at Saturday’s day-long “Become Who We Are” summit at Washington’s Ronald Reagan Building, someone yelled, “Heil the people!” and the room shouted back, “Heil victory.”
It
wasn’t the evening’s first Nazi reference nor most brazen. Soon after
Spencer started slamming the mainstream media, overlooking how it gave
the president-elect endless free coverage, he jeered,
“Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” The crowd
shouted back, “Lügenpresse,” a Nazi-era word for “lying press.” Spencer
continued, to cheers, that white power was rising. “America was, until
this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our
posterity… It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to
us.”
America under Donald Trump is entering an uncharted
authoritarian era. Whether apt historical precedents are in the first
months of Hitler’s rule in 1933 in Germany or closer to the 1950s
anti-Communist witch hunts led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy remains to be
seen. But there are myriad events that everyone is seeing and unfolding
behind closed doors that are forming a prologue to Trump’s authoritarian
rule.
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