Republican Party Base Is Racist, Anti-Semitic and Fundamentalist

Baraboo, Wisconsin youth offers display of community pride

Updated: See also Jonah Raskin: A California Jew in a Time of Anti-Semitism, in CounterPunch.

Madison, Wisconsin — News out of Baraboo High School that students gave a NAZI salute posing for a Prom picture should surprise noone.

The same racist minds can be found in DeForest, Wisconsin with a police force stacked with bigots.

Or, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin with City Hall similarly full of white malignant bureaucrats and too-many corrupt, racist cops.

They vote Republican. They're white and proud of it. And racists are everywhere here. See S. Ani Mukherji in the Boston Review.

Small-town Wisconsin and rural USA are the vanguard for the White Party, the Republican Party, and criminal, hateful and violent conduct is given a free pass.

If you are a racist, Christian fundamentalist who works against Jews, Muslims and atheists, Trump and the White Party have a home for you.

You can be attorney general.

Where America is going is unclear:

Matthew Whitaker said that non-Christians should not be judges?
That concept was embodied in Germany’s “Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” Law of 1933.
Whitaker needs to go — now!https://t.co/uwWEQh0F7n via @HolocaustMuseum

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) November 13, 2018

Time to speak out.

Notes ThinkProgress this morning:

In the United States as in other countries, those old demons include Nazis and other variations of white nationalists, modern iterations of whom strongly support nationalist leaders like Trump and whom Trump has praised in return. When white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville last year, for instance — one of them even murdering a counter-protester by driving into a crowd with his car — Trump insisted there were 'very fine people' on both sides of the demonstration. 

We know where Baraboo, Wisconsin stands, where the Republican Party stands.
---
A book to read for the Hitler youth of small-town America:

Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).

Mayer, an American Jewish writer who had gone to Germany in the 1930s, made friends with 10 people, all of whom were members of the NAZI Party. He found them courteous, funny, genuine human beings whom he called "friends."

They were also fools and certainly were guilty.
---
From Milton Mayer:

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." ...