Grandiosity is the word I used yesterday when describing the mental state of Steve Bannon, a buffoonish, bigoted media thug who’s now probably as powerful as anyone in the country. Feel free to shudder. Of course, in this way he resembles his boss, a seeming sociopath who will sacrifice anything, even American democracy itself, for victories to fill the emptiness inside. That tens of millions of Americans elected these fiends and their band of white nationalists, Islamophobes and anti-Semites, all because they wanted to “shake things up” or some other bullshit, may be the surest sign of twilight in the U.S.A. The evil they’ve collectively awakened won’t easily go away.
Two excerpts follow.
From Joseph Goldstein’s New York Times piece “Alt-Right Exults in Donald Trump’s Election With a Salute: ‘Heil Victory’”:
WASHINGTON — By the time Richard B. Spencer, the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement and the final speaker of the night, rose to address a gathering of his followers on Saturday, the crowd was restless.
In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.
But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”
As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.•
From David Gambacorta’s Philadelphia Magazine article “This All Seems Very Familiar, Say Philly Holocaust Survivors“:
I wondered what some of the survivors thought of the divisive rhetoric that fueled the rise of president-elect Donald Trump, the spate of hate crimes that has dominated the news in the week since he won the 2016 presidential election, and Trump’s decision to name Steve Bannon — the former chairman of Breitbart News, a platform for the alt-right movement that conservative radio host Glenn Beck described as “terrifying” for its white nationalist, antisemitic ethos — his chief strategist.
[George ] Sakheim immigrated to the U.S. in 1938, served in the 104th Infantry Division during World War II, and later worked as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. He didn’t hesitate to offer his opinion. “People aren’t going to want to hear it, but as [Trump] talked more and more, he sounded more and more like Hitler,” he said. “There’s that grandiosity, that self-importance, that feeling that he knows everything, that he knows more than the generals.”
Some will howl at such a comment and say it’s unfair to make that comparison, that this is all just sour grapes because Hillary Clinton didn’t win the damned election. Sakheim cautions that it’s too early to know what kind of shape Trump’s administration will take, what kinds of policies it will truly enact. He was encouraged by Trump’s more demure tone during an interview on 60 Minutes. But Sakheim and the ever-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors also lived through the history that you only vaguely paid attention to in school. They know what can happen when hate is allowed to thrive.•