Republicans and their Rightist allies have repeatedly compared President Barack Obama and other Democrats to Adolf Hitler. But their propaganda campaign draws heavily on the Nazi leader’s own advice.  

In Mein Kampf, Hitler laid out his formula for successful propaganda: “All effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials.

“Those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotypical formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”

Adolf Hitler

Among the slanders Right-wingers hurl at Democrats:

“Liberals,” “radicals, “bankrupting,” “treason,” subversion,” “slander,” “terrorism,” “betrayal,” “catastrophe,” “shattering the American dream,” “leftists,” “Communists,” “government takeover,” “socialism,” “power grab,” “secularism,” “environmentalism.”

In recent years, the GOP has targeted gays and lesbians as America’s subversive enemies. 

These attacks have come as thinly disguised as efforts to “restore religious freedom.”.

On March 26, 2015, Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

This allows any individual or corporation to cite its religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party.

Thus, a bakery that doesn’t want to make a cake to be used at a gay wedding or a restaurant that doesn’t want to serve lesbian patrons can legally refuse to do so.

The bill seems modeled on a proposed law that the Republican House and Senate in Arizona sent to Governor Jan Brewer in 2014.

Under threat of a nationwide boycott of Arizona if the bill became law, Brewer vetoed it.

Republicans have introduced similar “right-to-discriminate” legislation in other states as well:

• In Kansas, Republican lawmakers voted to exempt individuals from providing any service that was “contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.”
• That bill passed the state’s House chamber on February 11, 2014, triggering national backlash. It stalled in the Senate and didn’t advance beyond that body.
• In January, 2014, South Dakota Republicans introduced a bill to let businesses refuse to serve same-sex couples on the grounds that “businesses are private and that their views on sexual orientation are protected to the same extent as the views of private citizens.”
• The South Dakota bill—which was killed in February, 2014—would have made it illegal for a gay person to file a lawsuit charging discrimination.

Republicans claim they want to “get the government off the backs of the people.” But their fixation on regulating the sexual lives of Americans ensures government intrusions of the most intimate kind.

Since 9/11, Republicans have warned that Muslims are trying to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on America.

Ironically, Right-wing legislators, in elevating religion above the secular law, may have laid the legal foundations for making that possible.

What will happen when some Muslims claim their right—guaranteed in Islamic religious law—to have as many as four wives?

And when they claim that the “religious freedom” laws protect that right?

Republicans have defended such legislation by equating gays with child predators.

In fact, the Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute states that 90% of child molesters target children in their network of family and friends, and the majority are heterosexual men married to women.

Yet Republicans and their Rightist allies have refused to condemn such heterosexual—and Right-wing—child molesters as Dennis Hastert and Josh Duggar.

Josh Duggar, the “all-American” child molester

On May 21, 2015, responding to press leaks, Duggar resigned as director of the Family Research Council, a Right-wing organization dedicated to fighting sexually-oriented issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion and pornography.

In 2002-3, as a 14-15 year-old, Duggar had fondled the breasts and vaginas of five underage girls—four of whom were his own sisters.

Before Duggar was forced to admit his scandalous depravities, he had hobnobbed with many influential Right-wingers, including: 

• Senator Rafael “Ted” Cruz;
• Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush;
• Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee;
• Texas Governor Rick Perry.

On December 8, 2021, a federal jury found Duggar guilty of receipt of child pornography and possession of child pornography. He drew a sentence of more than 12 years of imprisonment and was ordered to pay fines and special assessments of $50,100.

And on October 28, 2015, Hastert—Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 to 2007—pleaded guilty to structuring money transactions in a way to avoid requirements to report where the money was going.

Dennis Hastert

The reason: To conceal the truth about his past as a child molester. Hastert had abused four young boys when he was their high school wrestling coach. One was only 14 years old.

Despite such setbacks, the politics of “smear and fear” have been good to Republicans—and their Right-wing allies.  

The Republican “base” refuses to learn that those who portray themselves as morally superior are:

1. Hypocrites, who are in effect saying: “Do as I say, not as I do,” or
2. Fanatics, who intend to force their version of morality on others.

So long as millions of hate-filled Right-wingers support the endless succession of “two minute hates,” Republicans will continue to target an endless series of victims.

The good news: As blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and others become a significant political force, Republicans will stop attacking them and court them for votes.

The bad news: Republicans will move on to find other still-helpless scapegoats for America’s troubles.

“We mock you. We mock your fear. We want your fear. It’s going to be accountability. We are taking apart the administrative state. We’re going to destroy the deep state, and we’re going to hold everybody responsible that put this republic in the situation its in today.   

“Accountability, responsibility. And that will come with authority. The authority of Donald J. Trump as the 47th president of the United States.”

The speaker was Steve Bannon, former Trump campaign manager and White House advisor. And he was issuing a warning to everyone who didn’t enthusiastically accept Donald Trump as his Once and Future Fuhrer. 

Steve Rannon 

Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Threats of violence have become common among Republicans since 2015, when Trump first ran for President. And they continue to cast a shadow over the 2024 Presidential campaign.

On March 16, 2016, Trump warned Republicans that if he didn’t win the GOP nomination in July, his supporters would literally riot: “I think you’d have riots. I think you would see problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.” 

An NBC reporter summed it up as: “The message to Republicans was clear: ‘Nice convention you got there, shame if something happened to it.’”

Eight years later, on March 16, 2024, Trump made a similar threat: “Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole—that’s gonna be the least of it….If this election isn’t won, I’m not sure that you’ll ever have another election in this country.”

Donald Trump

On  August 9, 2016, Trump told a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary [Clinton] wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her [Supreme Court] judges, nothing you can do folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

This was Trump’s “dog-whistle” attempt to incite the assassination of Hillary Clinton—and it was so seen by responsible authorities: “Well, let me say if someone else said that outside of the hall, he’d be in the back of a police wagon now, with the Secret Service questioning him,” said Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA). 

In Cincinnati, a Trump supporter threatened to forcibly remove Clinton from the White House if she won the race: “If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,”

Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take….I would do whatever I can for my country.”

In a June 19, 2015 editorial, Rolling Stone writer Jeb Lund had noted: 

“The Republican Party has weaponized its supporters, made violence a virtue and, with almost every pronouncement for 50 years, given them an enemy politicized, racialized and indivisible.

“Movement conservatives have fetishized a tendentious and ahistorical reading of the Second Amendment to the point that the Constitution itself somehow paradoxically ‘legitimizes’ an armed insurrection against the government created by it.

“This is no longer an argument about whether one party’s beliefs are beneficial or harmful, but an attitude that labels leftism so antithetical to the American idea that empowering it on any level is an act of usurpation.”

Consider:

On January 8, 2011, Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head while meeting with constituents outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona. After a miraculous recovery, she continues to struggle with language and has lost 50% of her vision in both eyes.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

She vowed to return to her former Congressional duties, but was forced to resign for health reasons in 2012.

Giffords was only one victim of a shooting spree that claimed the lives of six people and left 13 others wounded.

Also killed was Arizona’s chief U.S. District judge, John Roll, who had just stopped by to see his friend Giffords after celebrating Mass.

Although the actual shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was immediately arrested, those who fanned the flames of political violence that consumed 19 people that day have remained unpunished.

Consider the circumstances behind the shootings:

John Roll is Arizona’s chief federal judge.  Appointed in 2006, he wins acclaim as a respected jurist and leader who pushes to beef up the court’s strained bench to handle a growing number of border crime-related cases.

In 2009, he becomes a target for threats after allowing a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit by illegal aliens to proceed against a local rancher. The case arouses the fury of local talk radio hosts, who encourage their audiences to threaten Roll’s life.

In one afternoon, Roll logs more than 200 threatening phone calls. Callers threaten the judge and his family. They post personal information about Roll online.

Roll and his wife are placed under fulltime protection by deputy U.S. marshals. Roll finds living under security “unnerving and invasive.”

Authorities identify four men believed responsible for the threats. But Roll declines to press charges on the advice of the Marshals Service.