Der Führer Donald Trump Wishes Horst Wessel, er, Ashli Babbitt A Happy Birthday

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Earlier this year, I pointed out that Donald Trump is stealing a page from the Nazi propaganda playbook in trying to make Ashli Babbitt, a domestic terrorist killed while trying to storm House chamber on January 6, into a martyr for his Big Lie MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection:

Heather Digby Parton points out that the Hitler admiring Donald Trump is still using Adolph’s playbook. Trump cranks it up at CPAC: Why raising the spectacle of right-wing madness right now is so scary:

Every revolutionary movement needs a martyr and it appears that the MAGA revolution has finally found one for itself.

Ashli Babbit, the Jan. 6th insurrectionist who was shot by a security guard as she climbed through a broken window just a few feet away from members of Congress, is Donald Trump’s Horst Wessel, the German brownshirt who was murdered in 1930 and turned into a martyr by the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Trump himself is making the case for Babbit, having mentioned her in every appearance he’s made in the last week.

The article Digby cites, by Matthew Rozsa, Ashli Babbitt as the 21st-century Horst Wessel: Symbolic martyr to the fascist cause:

Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old QAnon supporter and Trump superfan who was killed in the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, is already far more famous in death than she ever was in life. Her fate reminded me of a famous 1963 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” “He’s Alive,” in which Adolf Hitler’s ghost (Curt Conway) returns from the grave to teach a young neo-Nazi named Peter Vollmer (Dennis Hopper) how to manipulate a crowd. Hitler explains that exploiting the death of an obscure follower transforms that individual into a heroic martyr. “This is an act of friendship,” says the spectral Führer. “We are allowing him to serve the cause.”

Whether or not Donald Trump and his movement think they are doing Babbitt a favor by lionizing after her death, she has clearly become a sacrifice to the ex-president’s ego and glory.

[T]he video of her shooting, which makes clear that Babbitt and other members of the mob were literally trying to break into the House chamber and attack members of Congress, is swept under the rug. That’s without even mentioning the obvious fact that Babbitt died in service of the bogus cause of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has sided with Vladimir Putin in questioning Babbitt’s shooting. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, the leading insurrectionist in Congress, has staged a spectacular performance of outrage over her death.

[T]here’s a disturbing historical echo behind Trump and his supporters’ effort to manipulate Babbitt’s death this way, an echo also clearly referenced in Rod Serling’s script for the “Twilight Zone” episode. That would be the case of Horst Wessel, who became for Hitler and the Nazi Party what Babbitt may now be for the Trump.

Born in the German city of Bielefeld in 1907, Wessel was a law school dropout who joined the SA or “brownshirts,” the Nazi Party’s paramilitary organization, during the waning days of the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s. He was perhaps more like a member of the contemporary Proud Boys or Oath Keepers; we still don’t know how deeply Ashli Babbitt was involved with right-wing extremism. At any rate, Wessel impressed future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, helped organize the Nazi youth movement in Vienna and staged or led numerous violent street clashes in Berlin with Communists — the antifa of their day, more or less. Wessel fancied himself as a tough guy and sought out situations where he could act out his macho impulses. Given that, his death almost had elements of farce. After a dispute with his Communist landlady — which was likely over unpaid rent, not politics — Wessel was shot on the street by two other Communists on Jan. 14, 1930. He died in a hospital a few weeks later, three years before the Nazis took power in Germany.

Wessel looks like a distinctly mediocre individual in the historical rear-view mirror, but the Nazis transformed his life and death into legend. In a campaign approved by Hitler and led by Goebbels, Nazi propaganda outlets depicted him as a hero. His funeral procession was viewed by 30,000 people who lined the streets of Berlin. He become the subject of a major motion picture and was honored by numerous monuments and books. A song Wessel had written for the SA the year before he died, later universally known as the “Horst Wessel Song,” became an unofficial anthem of the Third Reich: According to a 1934 law, every German citizen had to give the “Hitler greeting” upon hearing it.

As far as we know, Ashli Babbitt didn’t write a song and had no previous history of right-wing violence. But like Wessel, she cannot be described as a peaceful protester or even an overzealous advocate for a dubious cause. She died in a violent attack against democracy, as part of the first serious effort in American history to overturn an election by force. She died based on the lies of a would-be authoritarian dictator, the first American president to resist leaving office after losing an election.

According to a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that her husband, real-estate mogul Donald Trump, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

“Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed … Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist,” Marie Brenner wrote.

In the Vanity Fair article, Ivana Trump told a friend that her husband’s cousin, John Walter “clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,” when visiting Trump’s office.

Read the entire Vanity Fair interview.

Hitler fanboy “Orange Julius Caesar” clearly learned from reading “der führer’s” speeches how he turned Horst Wessel into a martyr for Nazi fascism.

Trump is doing it again. Business Insider reports, In a video, Trump wished Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt a happy birthday and called for a ‘fair and nonpartisan’ investigation into her death:

Former President Donald Trump recorded a video where he wished the Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt a happy birthday and called for a new investigation into her death.

The video was played on Sunday at a rally held by family and supporters in Freeport, Texas, according to a broadcast from News2Share’s Ford Fischer, who confirmed to Insider that he attended and filmed the rally.

Babbitt, an Air Force veteran and endorser of QAnon conspiracy theories, was shot by a US Capitol Police officer when she and other rioters tried to enter a door that led to the House of Representatives on January 6, which Trump described in the video as a “horrible day.”

“Together, we grieve her terrible loss,” Trump said. “There was no reason Ashli should’ve lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family. So on this solemn occasion, as we celebrate her life, we renew our call for a fair and nonpartisan investigation into the death of Ashli Babbitt.”

In case you were wondering where this Air Force veteran who disgraced the uniform of the United States went wrong in life, this rotten fruit did not fall far from the poisonous tree, her parents.

Wait for it … Arizona’s lead insurrectionist Congressman, Paul Gosar also made an appearance.

The Justice Department conducted an investigation into Babbitt’s death and concluded in April that the unnamed Capitol Police officer who fatally shot her acted in self-defense and the defense of other officers and members of Congress.

The officer was formally exonerated in August, a Capitol Police memo obtained by NBC News said.

The slow-motion MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection is continuing and ongoing. The Trump personality cult represents our greatest national security threat.

“Orange Julius Caesar” held one of his Nuremberg-style rallies in Iowa this weekend, where his cult members openly talked of a civil war coming. Trump Supporter Threatens Civil War As Chuck Todd Wonders If Democracy Is In Peril:

Outside of Donald Trump’s Iowa rally, his supporters were talking about civil war, but Chuck Todd is questioning whether democracy is in peril.

Video:

The Trump supporter [Lori Levi, a pro-Trump merchandise vendor aka “grifter”] told MSNBC, “ I think the Republicans about as weak as they can possibly be in congress. You have maybe six that are worth their salt, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and two or three others. The rest of them are just the same as the Democrats. They’ve been there too long. They’re establishment. They don’t care about the American people because they’re in their elite little tower. We’re just sick of it, you know. We’re not going to take it anymore. I see a civil war coming. I do. I see civil war coming.”

“A civil war coming, that’s what she said and that is a sentiment that we are hearing people here on the ground at today’s Trump rally,” said NBC reporter Gary Grumbach.

Trump is attracting people who hate their own government and are telling anyone who will listen that they are very interested in civil war.

Meanwhile, Chuck Todd wonders if it is “alarmist” to ask if democracy is at risk [what a fucking idiot].

The Corporate Media Is Treating The Threat To Democracy Like A Partisan Political Issue.

The corporate media only knows how to appeal to Republicans by blaming both sides. Chuck Todd’s questions were absurd. The Capitol attack was more than enough proof that there are millions of Americans who are willing to destroy democracy in Trump’s name.

This is not a both sides do it situation.

One party wants to destroy democracy, and they are being helped by a corporate media that is all too happy to play dumb.

The MAGA/QAnon cult is the Party of The Mob, radicalized and increasingly violent and thuggish. Domestic terrorists who are our greatest national security threat.




1 thought on “Der Führer Donald Trump Wishes Horst Wessel, er, Ashli Babbitt A Happy Birthday”

  1. The Washington Post reports on the international fascist white Christian Nationalist movement. “The GOP alliance with Europe’s far-right deepens”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/10/12/republican-alliance-europe-far-right/

    Toward the end of last month, a major right-wing summit in Hungary had a conspicuous guest. Former vice president Mike Pence joined Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and a coterie of other illiberal, nationalist leaders from the continent in a two-day conference in Budapest on “family values” and demographics. The forum, which began in 2015, is one of the spaces where Orban champions his brand of Christian nationalism — raging against Western liberalism, non-European migration and LGBTQ culture.

    [P]ence was happy to play his part. “We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself,” he said, echoing fears over the “erosion of the nuclear family, marked by declining marriage rates, rising divorce, widespread abortion and plummeting birthrates.” He used his moment in Budapest to cheer on the U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative majority may eventually overturn federal protections around abortion rights.

    The former vice president is hardly alone in seeing Hungary as a source of encouragement in a broader ideological battle gripping the West. Prominent conservative American commentators, chiefly Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have had audiences in Budapest with Orban, who ranks as one of the E.U.’s longest-ruling leaders. Next year, Budapest will host an iteration of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the main annual gathering of the American right.

    (There is much more about this international cabal of white Christian Nationalists).

    Mike Pence’s trip to Hungary is history rhyming to Charles Lindbergh and his wife visiting Nazi Germany as honored guests of the Third Reich in 1936. “Germany and the America First movement”, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Lindbergh/Germany-and-the-America-First-movement

    [T]he Lindberghs traveled to Germany, where they were treated as honoured guests of the Third Reich. Charles visited centres of military aviation, where he assessed the pace of Germany’s rearmament, while Anne was fêted in Berlin. Lindbergh praised the Luftwaffe’s fighter and bomber designs, and he asserted that “Europe, and the entire world, is fortunate that a Nazi Germany lies, at present, between Communistic Russia and a demoralized France.”

    Lindbergh returned to Germany in October 1938, and Hermann Göring decorated him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle.

    [In] an essay for Reader’s Digest in November 1939, Lindbergh cautioned against “a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race,” and he further pleaded, “let us not commit racial suicide by internal conflict.” Lindbergh was not the only person advocating for American isolationism based on notions of white supremacy, nor was he unique in suggesting that Jews were the single group most interested in involving the United States in the war in Europe. Anti-Semitic radio preacher Charles Coughlin embraced Lindbergh’s message, and Lindbergh’s public statements would serve as a prime impetus for the creation of the America First Committee in 1940. The group, which boasted a membership of 800,000, opposed American aid to the Allies and counted Lindbergh as its most prominent spokesperson.

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