Dark Shadows: Republicans Take Antisemitism our for a Spin

In the past few days, both Donald Trump and Rand Paul have suggested that anarchists and BLM radicals are being paid to fly from city to city to cause unrest in America. Think about that. They said that blacks and anarchists and socialists are being paid to cause mayhem in the streets.

Employed. Paid. Around the nation.

This all arose after Senator Paul was heckled while departing the RNC at the White House last week. A bunch of protesters surrounded him and his companion. There was a little bit of jostling. If you watch the video you see a cop with a bike shove a bunch of protesters, one of whom appears to push him back. All in all, it was loud and potentially unnerving, but there was no violence.

Now, however, Paul has it in his mind that he was targeted by organized thugs. Here is his quote: “I believe there are going to be people who are involved with the attack on us that actually were paid to come here, are not from Washington, D.C., and are sort of paid to be anarchists. This is disturbing because really, if you’re inciting a riot that’s a crime, but if you’re paying someone to incite a riot that person needs to go to jail as well.”

The syntax of that sentence: “I believe there are going to be people involved in the attack on us” doesn’t scan. He is speculating that in the future there might be people involved in an attack that happened in the past, but . . . whatever. He’s clearly making shit up, but what he is making up is chilling. He is saying that there are hidden interests who are paying activists to be violent. He also called on the FBI to arrest those demonstrators, suggesting that law enforcement should find out “who paid for your bill? How did you get here on a plane and staying in a fancy hotel and yet you’re acting like a criminal?”

That shit is kkkrazy.

Donald Trump, for his part, picked up this line of “reasoning” yesterday at his presser and then again in his off-the-rails interview with Laura Reifen . . . Ingraham. Laura Ingraham.

Ingraham, always the Good German, asked the President a fascistically leading question: “Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings?” she asked. “Is it former Obama people?”

Trump responded by going even crazier than she expected: He said, “People that you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows. People that –”

Sensing the thin-ice he was skating out upon, Ingraham tossed him a lifeline, saying, “What does that mean? That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Dark shadows. What is that?”

I’m sure she expected him to take the hint and back off to the safer ground of simply blaming “Obama people,” but he dove right in.

“There are people that are on the streets, there are people that are controlling the streets.”

Oh, really, Mr. President. There are unnamed, unknown-to-the-public puppet-masters orchestrating unrest. Using . . . say . . . ‘the muscle’ of certain communities of color against . . . say . . . the rest of us?

Hmmmm . . . where have I heard that before?

But the conversation got stranger still. Trump then picked up the insane paid-anarchists-on-planes line from Rand Paul’s earlier interview.

He said, “We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend. And in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs, wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that.”

When asked for details, the President went dark, saying that it was “under investigation.”

WTF?

The idea that two prominent Republican politicians are publicly toying with the notion that there is a secret cabal of moneyed shadow-dwellers who are funneling cash to radical organizations that foment civic disorder, while also puppet-mastering a weak and feckless opposition campaign that promised to ravage the nation with anarchy and socialism if it wins isn’t “Nazi-like.”

It is, quite literally, Nazi.

Journalists who don’t push both Trump and Paul down to the mat immediately, forcing them to either recant this insanity — or to say the quiet part out loud — to say EXACTLY who are the puppet masters — are simply not doing their jobs and they are failing the nation at its darkest hour.

This rhetoric is insanely dangerous to let go, yet out of some odd sense of propriety, most political reporters just won’t dig in.

They should. They must. They must do so right now.

And the next week might provide an opportunity. I’m fully expecting that the release of Michael Cohen’s book will contain plenty of references to Trump’s casual racism and ubiquitous antisemitism when the cameras are off. That might just provide an inroad if any real writer can get an interview with the Tangerine Tyrant.

But they shouldn’t wait that long with Rand Paul. Rather, they should remember that young Rand grew up at his father’s crazy knee — and his daddy — despite the adoration he receives from the Libertarian crowd, was a dyed-in-the-wool racist and anti-Semite.

Here, reporters, I’ll do the first bit of the background work for you: In 2008, writing for The New Republic, James Kirchick did a deep dive into a newsletter that Ron Paul — the senator’s dad — published for years and years and years. Kirchick concluded, rightly so, that the content of the articles in Paul’s newsletter revealed “decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing — but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.”

Apparently, the apple didn’t rot far from the tree. Rand Paul is no libertarian. He’s a fascist.

We all kinda knew that going into this election season that things were going to get heated, but this shocks even me. The whole of the Republican Party — which has remained utterly silent in light of these new developments — has shown a willingness to follow their leaders into the darkest shadows of our collective history. I shake my head again to try and not see this, but it still remains:

Two leading Republicans — including the President — have stated that they believe a cabal of nefarious, wealthy, and evil interests are hiding in the shadows of the American elite, while funding the rise of anarchists, socialist, and black radicals who will destroy the nation. This shit is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is Hitler talk.

No one is coming to save us. We’ve got to do it ourselves. We, as a civilization, are again in the borderlands that divide the shadows and the light. One way is freedom, the other way lie the camps.

63 days to go.