‘The Atlantic’ Gets Desperate: Trump Like ‘Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini’
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The Atlantic, a left-wing magazine infamous for the “suckers and losers” hoax, has published a lead story warning readers that former President Donald Trump is greatly to be feared: he sounds like “Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.”
The article claims:
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
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This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”
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These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.
The Atlantic claimed in 2020 that Trump had referred to veterans as “suckers and losers,” a false claim that was refuted by a large number of sources, including anti-Trump ones. The reference to “bloodbath” is another hoax.
The author of the article above, Anne Applebaum, was one of the first people to formulate the “Russia collusion” hoax, even before the votes were counted in 2016. As Breitbart News noted at the time, Applebaum spun “a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims Russia is hacking the U.S. election to ensure that Donald Trump wins.”
Breitbart News warned at the time: “[T]he conspiracy theory could serve another purpose: a Plan B in case Trump actually wins. … [Hillary] Clinton and her aides are creating an excuse for failure — one that could, as Applebaum suggests, be used to challenge the result if she loses.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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