America First At The MSG
Well it has been a while since we had an America First rally at Madison Square Garden. If you ask me it is long overdue for a repeat. So here we are again.
Here is the OG America First rally put on by the German-American Bund. See those guys in the aisles all dressed in brown shirts? Inspirational, don’t you think?
Here are the original America Firsters showing how illegal immigrants have all given them carpal tunnel syndrome.
Here are original America Firsters all dressed in white.
And here is the leader of the new America First Movement, again speaking at Madison Square Garden, riffing about how he has no teleprompter.
And at the risk of violating Godwin’s Law, do you know who else had no teleprompter?
Did you know that the vast majority of Americans these days have never heard of the “bund” meeting at MSG alll those years ago! I’d be pleased if someone rubbed their noses in it all!
1If he has no teleprompters, what are those little tilted lucite panels on each side of him? ‘Course we know he doesn’t stick to the teleprompts, which is how he goes off into the weeds about Arnold Palmer and such.
2Of course there is no teleprompter! When your entire spiel is vitriol and hatred delivered over and over to the simple minded, notes are not necessary.
3I got criticized a couple of days ago for comparing the German-American Bund rally in 1939 and the Donnei Trump rally this Sunday at the Madison Square Garden venue.
Well, I am in good company, since people like Tim Walz and Hilary Clinton have made the same connection (see below).
And this instant, listening to Scripps News, they just did a segment on the very same topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden#Legacy
“On October 27, 2024, Donald Trump held a grand rally in Madison Square Garden that featured speakers making various racist and dehumanizing remarks.[16][17] The event was compared to the 1939 Nazi rally by Hillary Clinton[18] and Tim Walz.[19][20] ”
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https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/1up
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/27/2279992/-1945-War-Department-Memo-on-Fascism-Perfectly-Describes-Today-s-GOP
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dbtexas @3, It is pretty much the same old BS, whether you hear it from iDJiT or one of his many surrogates.
Almost always the same themes and propaganda, full of fear inspiring crap, slurs, and hate.
The political TV commercials around here in Texas from the Rethuglikkkans all sound the same.
While the spots for Democrats are mostly optimistic and positive, although some of them do contain a well crafted dig on some aspect of Rethuglikkkanism.
Heather Cox Richardson called it out as well. Excellent letter from her with the parallels to 1939.
5The rat bastards on stage knew just how to feed the cult members the red meat they love. TFFG is just what he sounds like, and his congress critter supporters are just as despicable.
6Hope WaPo subscribers are making sure Bezos knew what he was endorsing by his silence. Same with the LA Times ownership. Last night is exactly what they were endorsing.
Godwin himself suspended Godwin’s law quite a while ago.
7If anyone (including the media) still thinks that TfFG is just doing an act, they’re not listening. He is everything he and his stage full of deplorables said last night and his cult ate it up.
8Hope Bezos is hearing what his non endorsement really was saying- it’s OK what trumpf says and does. Hope his subscribers make him pay.
Fran @ 5 So far as I have seen reported, no anti-trumper rushed the stage, to be clubbed down by security.
The spirit of the two meetings may have been similar, the first had brawling (organized primarily by Jews) while the second did not.
I think the comparisons are overblown, in two directions.
In 1939, the Bund was noisy and violent in a saloon brawl way but insignificant. In 2024, the America Firsters are comparatively orderly but much more significant.
9HE @8, You’re still not fully getting it.
These are the same people today as they were eighty five years ago, Nazis to the core.
Yes, they are far more dangerous now, their numbers and influence have grown exponentially. Facilitated by their sheer determination, and the lazy ignorance and casual indifference of too many on the left and middle about the reality of it.
They’ve had 85 years to refine and enhance their messages. But they’re still basically using the same format and imagery as before, because it works so effectively. All of it, from the core racism, hatreds, psych methods, to the formats of their klannish rallies.
Parallels across the decades or not, they must be stopped this time. There will be no other time afterwards if they win.
10They fully realize and understand the total extent and exercise of raw power.
Something that liberals and Democrats seldom even consider, and certainly never utilize effectively.
It’s long past time that we do.
Burning ballot boxes and Democratic party offices shot at around here in NW OR/SW WA. If we think that’s bad, wait till 11/6 and on.
11He definitely recreated the rally his daddy went to in 1939.
12Sandridge @ 9 But they aren’t ‘the same people.’ Historians who examined membership lists concluded that the Bund and its Italian cognate were almost entirely recent immigrants.
Perhaps surprisingly in view of that, neither got any serious support from its home government or party. (Maddow’s recent podcast is misleading on this point.)
The Bund was mostly a grifting opportunity for Kuhn and the other -leiters. The Italian fascist organization was more like a Mafia protection racket.
The native fascists were in Huey Long’s Share the Wealth, though barely organized and with no real program beyond getting Huey elected. The carefully organized native fascists, of which Pelley’s were the biggest, were tiny groups, never a threat to anybody but each other.
Share the Wealth was closest to trump’s version. Neither had or has any ideology, though each had issues.
I think it is well to understand these movements on a deep level if one hopes to effectively oppose them. Shouting ‘Hitler’ at MAGAts doesn’t work, because they know they are not Hitlerians.
It is astonishing to me how little even experts get this. Last week, the NYTimes ran a long piece scouting historians of fascism about whether trump is or is not a fascist.
This thumbsucker started out by defining fascism. Nowhere in a 3,000-word article was ‘leader principle’ mentioned.
trump is the first American to actually achieve the status of duce. Many have offered to be the fuehrer. Why has he alone been acclaimed?
13HE, I am convinced that the Trump MSG event certainly conveyed the SPIRIT of the 1939 bund meeting in MSG. What you might not know is that Nazi groups were all over the country scouting out Americans who had immigrated to this country from Germany or just about anywhere near that country or were ther derscendants of “recent” immigrants. Thery were exceptionally well organized and kept written data. They had address lists of such Americans and actually canvassed them. They did ther canvassing in small groups of 3 or 4 people who knocked on the door and “appealed” to the native geneology to join them in the cause, specifically to keep the US out of the war Hitler was starting. My grandma was naturalized in this country as a child and she ripped those Nazis a new one. They actually ran away!
Other Nazis were in this country learning about Jim Crow and native Indian reservations and their inability to vote. My goodness! How generous were were with these jackwads!
14Harry E @12, Yes, you are making good points, but I think that you’re missing that the Krauts actually folded their original principles back from a North American phenomenon.
Hitler and the early German Nazi movement actually drew much of their ideological inspiration from the American Confederacy.
And I just didn’t bother to mention the concept of “Führerprinzip” because it gets too complicated.
Exactly right that Komrade Donnei is fitting into the role of the Rethug Führerprinzip better than any other preceding Rethug.
He has some ‘qualities’ that seriously appeal to masses of RWNJ follower types.
I’d never really heard of the asshole until relatively recently. I probably channel-hopped into his idiotic TV show long ago, but would have been so repulsed that watching it was inconceivable.
But I had/have?*I a RWNJ brother who decades ago kept bugging me about how some ‘fantastic businessman’ that he knew of was what we needed running our government with an iron hand.
In retrospect, I think that iDJiT was who he was smitten with so long ago.
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15* Don’t know if he’s still around, cut off all contact over a decade ago, because of his radical RWNJ viewpoints. When they begin threatening the lives of your college student children (let alone your own), because he suspects that they’re probably acquiring librul ideas in such an educational environment, it’s past time for any kind of tolerance bull.
Oh yeah, that reference I made to my original comments on this topic, and you criticized, wasn’t actually ‘ couple of days ago, It was a couple of weeks ago, on 14Oct in a Salon article.
16And now everybody and their sisters are all over the news today talking about the 1939, and yesterday’s, MSG actual original and Neo-Nazi conclaves; and the many similarities..
Written by Half Empty, 14 Oct:
https://juanitajean.com/get-em-while-theyre-hot/#comments
17A slight digression, but if anyone is interested in the immediate pre-WWII political environment there’s a good book about it: Those Angry Days. It’s interesting how that original America First Committee differs from the current low-IQ one. Plus how it immediately evaporated on Dec 7, 1941.
It only briefly mentions Huey Long (and his Rush Limbaugh, Father Conklin on the radio).
18The first America First was a true mass movement covering all sorts of isolationists. Hence it was unstable.
And while some nazis like Lindbergh got into its leadership, it was never a nazi or even a pro-German organization.
A little-remarked simultaneous movement among Japanese immigrants had them supporting Japan’s war with China, without being in any way disloyal to the United States. People can be complicated.
On a personal note, I had a chance to save Lindbergh’s termite-ridden last home on Maui. The National Park Service planned to bulldoze it into the gully next door.
I knew this because the national park was my beat. If I had written about it, there is no doubt in my mind that I could have sparked a national drive to rehabilitate it, but since I did not think we needed any more nazi shrines, I held off writing until after the deed was done.
19Debate all you want about the historic parallels to the 1930’s version, but Sunday’s hate fest just repeats and defines TFFG, his handlers and magat cult.
By now, I suspect that undecided voters don’t like either candidate. The more despicable stuff spewing from trumpf and those that surround him, I think the the more likely those voters will either not vote or will vote for Harris/Walz. I read an article yesterday that said independent voters are breaking 2/3 to 1/3 for Harris. Hopefully the same will apply to undecideds.
Jeff Tiedrich painted the picture of the trumpf/vance ticket pretty well:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jefftiedrich/p/donald-trumps-nazi-hate-rally-was
20Some more numbers.
I just heard a news clip on the PBS NewsHour from the lesser half of the TFFG ticket, JD Vance, in which he was bragging about how TFFG’s rally in Madison Square Garden had packed in more than 100,000 people to listen to the SOB. ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND!
Desperately trying to counter the steadily greater numbers of attendees at any Harris and Walz campaign events.
Well, there’s just a little problem with that.
MSG only holds about 20,000 people total, for any kind of event!
Rethuglikkkans, the lyingest sonsabitches ever seen in American history.
(capacity of the current MSG):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Square_Garden
“Capacity
Boxing/MMA: 20,789
Concerts: 20,000
Basketball: 19,812[3]
Pro wrestling: 18,500
Ice hockey: 18,006[3]
Field size
21820,000 sq ft (76,000 m2)”
Anyone want to guess if the media called trumpf on his lie about having the biggest crowd? I haven’t seen it. I was interested in two editorials in the Oregonian this morning. One was a WA Po writer and the other was an LA Times editorial writer that both outlined why TFFG is not qualified to be president in very specific terms. Wonder how Bezos and the LA Times owner are taking their own writers doing what they wouldn’t do?
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