Former President Trump Shot, Two Dead, at Rally in Pennsylvania

[TexasTiger 14,069]

2 hours ago, Cardin Drake said:

Melania's statement:

Former First Lady Melania Trump has issued a poignant statement about her “generous and caring” husband, President Donald J. Trump, following his miraculous escape from an assassination attempt last night in Pennsylvania.

“I am thinking of you, now, my fellow Americans,” Mrs. Trump opened.

“We have always been a unique union. America, the fabric of our gentle nation is tattered, but our courage and common sense must ascend and bring us back together as one.

“When I watched that violent bullet strike my husband, Donald, I realized my life, and Barron’s life, were on the brink of devastating change. I am grateful to the brave Secret Service agents and law enforcement officials who risked their own lives to protect my husband.

“To the families of the innocent victims who are now suffering from this heinous act, I humbly offer my sincerest sympathy. Your need to summon your inner strength for such a terrible reason saddens me.

“A monster who recognized my husband as an inhuman political machine attempted to ring out Donald’s passion – his laughter, ingenuity, love of music, and inspiration. The core facets of my husband’s life – his human side – were buried below the political machine. Donald, the generous and caring man who I have been with through the best of times and the worst of times.

“Let us not forget that differing opinions, policy, and political games are inferior to love. Our personal, structural, and life commitment – until death – is at serious risk. Political concepts are simple when compared to us, human beings.

“We are all humans, and fundamentally, instinctively, we want to help one another. American politics are only one vehicle that can uplift our communities. Love, compassion, kindness and empathy are necessities.

“And let us remember that when the time comes to look beyond the left and the right, beyond the red and the blue, we all come from families with the passion to fight for a better life together, while we are here, in this earthly realm.

“Dawn is here again. Let us reunite. Now. This morning, ascend above the hate, the vitriol, and the simple-minded ideas that ignite
violence. We all want a world where respect is paramount, family is first, and love transcends.

“We can realize this world again. Each of us must demand to get it back. We must insist that respect fills the cornerstone of our relationships, again.

“I am thinking of you, my fellow Americans. The winds of change have arrived. For those of you who cry in support, I thank you. I
commend those of you who have reached out beyond the political divide – thank you for remembering that every single politician is a man or a woman with a loving family.”

Well, it’s someone’s statement.

[I_M4_AU 8,888]

30 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

Not all are, but watching the rally attendees being interviewed after, the stereotype was formed for a reason. 

Here is an interview that I believe does not serve your stereotype:

 

 

 

[HAYinthemiddleoftheBARN 277]

https://youtu.be/Xiq1pj3xwxk?si=1cpMeO25vtGK6OU0

[HAYinthemiddleoftheBARN 277]

1 minute ago, HAYinthemiddleoftheBARN said:

https://youtu.be/Xiq1pj3xwxk?si=1cpMeO25vtGK6OU0

Interesting video 

[homersapien 12,172]

7 hours ago, Hay Field 101 said:

you do you. Bet you cant stop there. Prove me wrong. 

Easy:

Trump’s Rhetoric of Blood

From the start of Trump’s political career, I was alarmed. To be sure, he had dabbled in public racism earlier, but it was when he announced his candidacy in 2015, and made his first campaign speech, that I became very concerned. As described in this talk that I gave in Mexico in 2019 (and in other publications and presentations), the style of Trump’s rhetoric—the precise sequence of emotionally-loaded themes—seemed to be a page taken right out of the Nazi playbook.

To be clear, I never thought that Trump was directly influenced by Nazi speech. It seemed much more likely, I thought, that, like Hitler himself, Trump had a gut instinct for the kind of language that plays on the public’s deepest fears, resentments, and aspirations. I held onto this assessment even when I learned that Trump’s former spouse Ivanka told her lawyer that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

But now I’m not so sure….

I’m not so sure because the former president used expressions in recent speeches that are specifically and unmistakably redolent of Nazi rhetoric.

In a video interview posted on the conservative website National Pulse on September 27, Trump had this to say about undocumented immigrants entering the United States:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have (emphasis added).”

A week later, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan remarked on X that Trump’s reference to blood poisoning was a “straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.” Hasan was right.

The theme of racial blood-poisoning¹, and the idea that racial outsiders are vectors of deadly, contagious disease, was a mainstay of Nazi (and neo-Nazi) discourse.

Hitler described the mixing of racially pure Germans with non-Germans as a “poisoning.” The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “poisons the blood of others” and described them as “international poisoners”and expressed the view, as summarized by Felicity Rash in her book The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that “it was inevitable that these ‘lower’ beings would try to poison the ‘higher’ Aryans or to develop a parasitic dependency upon them.” According to Hitler, this poses an existential threat because “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Because blood-poisoning caused Germany to become diseased at the instigation of Jews, and the Marxists under their control, Hitler characterized Jews and Marxists as a “plague” or “epidemic” that is “worse than the Black Death of olden times.”

In fact, we can find such references in My New Order—the book that Trump allegedly kept near his bedside.

“Insofar as we devote ourselves to the care of our own blood—that blood which has been entrusted to us by destiny—we are at the same time doing our best to safeguard other peoples from diseases that spring from race to race, from people to people.”

On the same day that the National Pulse interview was aired, Trump gave a speech in Michigan, near Detroit, courting the political favor of non-union automobile manufacturing workers. The speech is loaded with fascist-style rhetoric. He described Joe Biden as a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar image, as vultures are scavengers, not predators, but it was rhetorically well-chosen, combining denigration of Biden’s age with a bird associated with death, disgust, and decay. “Under Biden,” Trump claimed, “instead of economic nationalism you have ultra-left-wing globalism.” The term “globalists” (and it’s cognate “globalism”) is a far-right dog-whistle referring to the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. It is a semantic descendant of the Nazis’ term “rootless cosmopolitans” which targeted Jews and their Marxist fellow travelers.

The vulture, Biden, is also a vampire who has “backed every single blood-sucking attack on US auto workers.” References to vampirism and parasitism—ultimately derived from the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jewish people consumed the blood of Christian children² —were standard Nazi rhetorical fare. As Rash summarizes, when Hitler wrote about Jews,

Blood sucking creatures, parasites, and microscopic organisms appear in a number of guises, and are obviously intended to provoke revulsion in the reader….Hitler readily adopted images of parasitism, claiming that the Jewish parasite had to be destroyed if the host were too survive.

After his speech in Michigan, Trump granted an interview to Newsmax during which, when asked about migrants crossing our border from Mexico, he responded that Democrats are “Marxists, communists, fascists” who are allowing border crossings that are “killing our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.” Again, the poisoning and destruction of blood is a distinctively Nazi trope.

I am not suggesting that Trump is a Nazi, or that he embraces an anti-Semitic ideology. Rather, I am suggesting that in light of his specific choice of imagery, the claim that he is influenced by Nazi rhetoric should not be dismissed out of hand.

David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity. This post originally appeared on his Substack.

1. See Chapter Three of my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization for a discussion of the role of “blood” in racial discourse. ↩︎
2. See, for example, Masha Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. ↩︎

https://dangerousspeech.org/tag/donald-trump/

 

Need more?

Edited July 15 by homersapien

[Cardin Drake 2,074]

1 minute ago, homersapien said:

Easy:

Trump’s Rhetoric of Blood

From the start of Trump’s political career, I was alarmed. To be sure, he had dabbled in public racism earlier, but it was when he announced his candidacy in 2015, and made his first campaign speech, that I became very concerned. As described in this talk that I gave in Mexico in 2019 (and in other publications and presentations), the style of Trump’s rhetoric—the precise sequence of emotionally-loaded themes—seemed to be a page taken right out of the Nazi playbook.

To be clear, I never thought that Trump was directly influenced by Nazi speech. It seemed much more likely, I thought, that, like Hitler himself, Trump had a gut instinct for the kind of language that plays on the public’s deepest fears, resentments, and aspirations. I held onto this assessment even when I learned that Trump’s former spouse Ivanka told her lawyer that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

But now I’m not so sure….

I’m not so sure because the former president used expressions in recent speeches that are specifically and unmistakably redolent of Nazi rhetoric.

In a video interview posted on the conservative website National Pulse on September 27, Trump had this to say about undocumented immigrants entering the United States:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have (emphasis added).”

A week later, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan remarked on X that Trump’s reference to blood poisoning was a “straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.” Hasan was right.

The theme of racial blood-poisoning¹, and the idea that racial outsiders are vectors of deadly, contagious disease, was a mainstay of Nazi (and neo-Nazi) discourse.

Hitler described the mixing of racially pure Germans with non-Germans as a “poisoning.” The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “poisons the blood of others” and described them as “international poisoners”and expressed the view, as summarized by Felicity Rash in her book The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that “it was inevitable that these ‘lower’ beings would try to poison the ‘higher’ Aryans or to develop a parasitic dependency upon them.” According to Hitler, this poses an existential threat because “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Because blood-poisoning caused Germany to become diseased at the instigation of Jews, and the Marxists under their control, Hitler characterized Jews and Marxists as a “plague” or “epidemic” that is “worse than the Black Death of olden times.”

In fact, we can find such references in My New Order—the book that Trump allegedly kept near his bedside.

“Insofar as we devote ourselves to the care of our own blood—that blood which has been entrusted to us by destiny—we are at the same time doing our best to safeguard other peoples from diseases that spring from race to race, from people to people.”

On the same day that the National Pulse interview was aired, Trump gave a speech in Michigan, near Detroit, courting the political favor of non-union automobile manufacturing workers. The speech is loaded with fascist-style rhetoric. He described Joe Biden as a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar image, as vultures are scavengers, not predators, but it was rhetorically well-chosen, combining denigration of Biden’s age with a bird associated with death, disgust, and decay. “Under Biden,” Trump claimed, “instead of economic nationalism you have ultra-left-wing globalism.” The term “globalists” (and it’s cognate “globalism”) is a far-right dog-whistle referring to the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. It is a semantic descendant of the Nazis’ term “rootless cosmopolitans” which targeted Jews and their Marxist fellow travelers.

The vulture, Biden, is also a vampire who has “backed every single blood-sucking attack on US auto workers.” References to vampirism and parasitism—ultimately derived from the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jewish people consumed the blood of Christian children² —were standard Nazi rhetorical fare. As Rash summarizes, when Hitler wrote about Jews,

Blood sucking creatures, parasites, and microscopic organisms appear in a number of guises, and are obviously intended to provoke revulsion in the reader….Hitler readily adopted images of parasitism, claiming that the Jewish parasite had to be destroyed if the host were too survive.

After his speech in Michigan, Trump granted an interview to Newsmax during which, when asked about migrants crossing our border from Mexico, he responded that Democrats are “Marxists, communists, fascists” who are allowing border crossings that are “killing our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.” Again, the poisoning and destruction of blood is a distinctively Nazi trope.

I am not suggesting that Trump is a Nazi, or that he embraces an anti-Semitic ideology. Rather, I am suggesting that in light of his specific choice of imagery, the claim that he is influenced by Nazi rhetoric should not be dismissed out of hand.

David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity. This post originally appeared on his Substack.

1. See Chapter Three of my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization for a discussion of the role of “blood” in racial discourse. ↩︎
2. See, for example, Masha Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. ↩︎

 

Need more?

You getting paid by the word, or what?

[AUDub 11,784]

I’m gonna wait for this guys manifesto and any sort of correspondence like his Discord before I deign to weigh in on motive. 

[homersapien 12,172]

2 minutes ago, Cardin Drake said:

You getting paid by the word, or what?

No, just responding to a challenge.

And it could have been a lot longer.

Edited July 14 by homersapien

[Cardin Drake 2,074]

10 minutes ago, homersapien said:

 

And it could have been a lot longer.

That's what your girlfriend said too... 

[homersapien 12,172]

3 hours ago, auburnatl1 said:

It’s great for smack talk banter. But in my experience calling someone stupid may feel good (with the inevitable well, you’re even more stupid retort) but rarely results in anything actually getting done.

Not to pile on (since I basically agree with you) but,

 

[DKW 86 7,866]

1 hour ago, HAYinthemiddleoftheBARN said:

The shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks, even though registered as Republican, has a posted video stating his hatred for Republicans and Donald Trump. I believe his views, like many people, are a product of main stream media. I believe he took the poopy pants "bullseye" speech way too far. 

He had to have known it was a suicide mission...but obviously this 20 year old kid didn't think about the consequences of his actions. 

God's Angels are protecting Donald Trump for a reason. 

I bet he "registered to vote in a Republican primary" to vote against someone.

Edited July 14 by DKW 86

[DKW 86 7,866]

45 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Easy:

Trump’s Rhetoric of Blood

From the start of Trump’s political career, I was alarmed. To be sure, he had dabbled in public racism earlier, but it was when he announced his candidacy in 2015, and made his first campaign speech, that I became very concerned. As described in this talk that I gave in Mexico in 2019 (and in other publications and presentations), the style of Trump’s rhetoric—the precise sequence of emotionally-loaded themes—seemed to be a page taken right out of the Nazi playbook.

To be clear, I never thought that Trump was directly influenced by Nazi speech. It seemed much more likely, I thought, that, like Hitler himself, Trump had a gut instinct for the kind of language that plays on the public’s deepest fears, resentments, and aspirations. I held onto this assessment even when I learned that Trump’s former spouse Ivanka told her lawyer that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

But now I’m not so sure….

I’m not so sure because the former president used expressions in recent speeches that are specifically and unmistakably redolent of Nazi rhetoric.

In a video interview posted on the conservative website National Pulse on September 27, Trump had this to say about undocumented immigrants entering the United States:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have (emphasis added).”

A week later, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan remarked on X that Trump’s reference to blood poisoning was a “straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.” Hasan was right.

The theme of racial blood-poisoning¹, and the idea that racial outsiders are vectors of deadly, contagious disease, was a mainstay of Nazi (and neo-Nazi) discourse.

Hitler described the mixing of racially pure Germans with non-Germans as a “poisoning.” The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “poisons the blood of others” and described them as “international poisoners”and expressed the view, as summarized by Felicity Rash in her book The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that “it was inevitable that these ‘lower’ beings would try to poison the ‘higher’ Aryans or to develop a parasitic dependency upon them.” According to Hitler, this poses an existential threat because “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Because blood-poisoning caused Germany to become diseased at the instigation of Jews, and the Marxists under their control, Hitler characterized Jews and Marxists as a “plague” or “epidemic” that is “worse than the Black Death of olden times.”

In fact, we can find such references in My New Order—the book that Trump allegedly kept near his bedside.

“Insofar as we devote ourselves to the care of our own blood—that blood which has been entrusted to us by destiny—we are at the same time doing our best to safeguard other peoples from diseases that spring from race to race, from people to people.”

On the same day that the National Pulse interview was aired, Trump gave a speech in Michigan, near Detroit, courting the political favor of non-union automobile manufacturing workers. The speech is loaded with fascist-style rhetoric. He described Joe Biden as a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar image, as vultures are scavengers, not predators, but it was rhetorically well-chosen, combining denigration of Biden’s age with a bird associated with death, disgust, and decay. “Under Biden,” Trump claimed, “instead of economic nationalism you have ultra-left-wing globalism.” The term “globalists” (and it’s cognate “globalism”) is a far-right dog-whistle referring to the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. It is a semantic descendant of the Nazis’ term “rootless cosmopolitans” which targeted Jews and their Marxist fellow travelers.

The vulture, Biden, is also a vampire who has “backed every single blood-sucking attack on US auto workers.” References to vampirism and parasitism—ultimately derived from the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jewish people consumed the blood of Christian children² —were standard Nazi rhetorical fare. As Rash summarizes, when Hitler wrote about Jews,

Blood sucking creatures, parasites, and microscopic organisms appear in a number of guises, and are obviously intended to provoke revulsion in the reader….Hitler readily adopted images of parasitism, claiming that the Jewish parasite had to be destroyed if the host were too survive.

After his speech in Michigan, Trump granted an interview to Newsmax during which, when asked about migrants crossing our border from Mexico, he responded that Democrats are “Marxists, communists, fascists” who are allowing border crossings that are “killing our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.” Again, the poisoning and destruction of blood is a distinctively Nazi trope.

I am not suggesting that Trump is a Nazi, or that he embraces an anti-Semitic ideology. Rather, I am suggesting that in light of his specific choice of imagery, the claim that he is influenced by Nazi rhetoric should not be dismissed out of hand.

David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity. This post originally appeared on his Substack.

1. See Chapter Three of my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization for a discussion of the role of “blood” in racial discourse. ↩︎
2. See, for example, Masha Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. ↩︎

 

Need more?

Aaaaahhh the long awaited driveby psychoanalysis from someone not ever having interviewed the subject. I am sure we will get a dozen or so more of these vastly unresearched, mind-reading fishing trips from homie as per usual for an election year.

[homersapien 12,172]

1 hour ago, Cardin Drake said:

That's what your girlfriend said too... 

Girth provides a sense of fullness whereas length focuses on depth. Although length may be aesthetically impressive, girth is where it's at. In a survey taken by Men's Health, 70% of women preferred girth to length whereas only 18% of respondents said that length was most important to them.

https://asweatlife.com/2023/04/girth-vs-length/

[Cardin Drake 2,074]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

Girth provides a sense of fullness whereas length focuses on depth. Although length may be aesthetically impressive, girth is where it's at. In a survey taken by Men's Health, 70% of women preferred girth to length whereas only 18% of respondents said that length was most important to them.

https://asweatlife.com/2023/04/girth-vs-length/

Well, that's all well and good but I was talking about time. 

Edited July 14 by Cardin Drake

[IronMan70 3,321]

 

Photo of assassin just before he fired the shots.

 

 

 

How the turn of the head saved Trump.

The flight time of the bullet was 0.34 of a second.

God is in the details..

 

 

[GoAU 1,690]

5 hours ago, TexasTiger said:

 

Completely unacceptable.  However comparing someone in the crowd to what the actual politicians are saying isn’t exactly the same now is it?

[GoAU 1,690]

4 hours ago, homersapien said:

Well granted, it wasn't produced by Trump's campaign - or even the Republican Party per se' - but the ties are pretty extensive.  The whole thing is predicated on Trump's election (thus the name).  The Heritage Foundation is responsible for it and Trump followed their recommendations for every supreme court judge he selected.

Trump is probably not likely to pursue every single action it recommends as there would be lots of blow back.  But if (God forbid) there is a Republican house and senate, there's really nothing stopping him.  The SCOTUS is already on board. 

So forgive me for just assuming Trump wouldn't do it.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/project-2025-what-is-it-who-is-behind-it-how-is-it-connected-trump-2024-07-12/

Project 2025: What is it? Who is behind it? How is it connected to Trump?

So, regardless of what Trump himself said, just because you THINK it might be plausible is good enough to connect those dots….   Right….:smh:

[TexasTiger 14,069]

28 minutes ago, IronMan70 said:

 

Photo of assassin just before he fired the shots.

 

 

 

How the turn of the head saved Trump.

The flight time of the bullet was 0.34 of a second.

God is in the details..

 

 

Interesting, but there’s another detail folks seem to be forgetting:

[TexasTiger 14,069]

9 minutes ago, GoAU said:

Completely unacceptable.  However comparing someone in the crowd to what the actual politicians are saying isn’t exactly the same now is it?

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-north-carolina-senator-takes-back-comment-that-a-picture-of-hillary-clinton-should-have-a-bullseye-on-it-2016-10?amp
 

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-second-amendment-people-hillary-clinton-justices-2016-8

[Hay Field 101 650]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

Easy:

Trump’s Rhetoric of Blood

From the start of Trump’s political career, I was alarmed. To be sure, he had dabbled in public racism earlier, but it was when he announced his candidacy in 2015, and made his first campaign speech, that I became very concerned. As described in this talk that I gave in Mexico in 2019 (and in other publications and presentations), the style of Trump’s rhetoric—the precise sequence of emotionally-loaded themes—seemed to be a page taken right out of the Nazi playbook.

To be clear, I never thought that Trump was directly influenced by Nazi speech. It seemed much more likely, I thought, that, like Hitler himself, Trump had a gut instinct for the kind of language that plays on the public’s deepest fears, resentments, and aspirations. I held onto this assessment even when I learned that Trump’s former spouse Ivanka told her lawyer that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

But now I’m not so sure….

I’m not so sure because the former president used expressions in recent speeches that are specifically and unmistakably redolent of Nazi rhetoric.

In a video interview posted on the conservative website National Pulse on September 27, Trump had this to say about undocumented immigrants entering the United States:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have (emphasis added).”

A week later, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan remarked on X that Trump’s reference to blood poisoning was a “straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.” Hasan was right.

The theme of racial blood-poisoning¹, and the idea that racial outsiders are vectors of deadly, contagious disease, was a mainstay of Nazi (and neo-Nazi) discourse.

Hitler described the mixing of racially pure Germans with non-Germans as a “poisoning.” The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “poisons the blood of others” and described them as “international poisoners”and expressed the view, as summarized by Felicity Rash in her book The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that “it was inevitable that these ‘lower’ beings would try to poison the ‘higher’ Aryans or to develop a parasitic dependency upon them.” According to Hitler, this poses an existential threat because “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Because blood-poisoning caused Germany to become diseased at the instigation of Jews, and the Marxists under their control, Hitler characterized Jews and Marxists as a “plague” or “epidemic” that is “worse than the Black Death of olden times.”

In fact, we can find such references in My New Order—the book that Trump allegedly kept near his bedside.

“Insofar as we devote ourselves to the care of our own blood—that blood which has been entrusted to us by destiny—we are at the same time doing our best to safeguard other peoples from diseases that spring from race to race, from people to people.”

On the same day that the National Pulse interview was aired, Trump gave a speech in Michigan, near Detroit, courting the political favor of non-union automobile manufacturing workers. The speech is loaded with fascist-style rhetoric. He described Joe Biden as a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar image, as vultures are scavengers, not predators, but it was rhetorically well-chosen, combining denigration of Biden’s age with a bird associated with death, disgust, and decay. “Under Biden,” Trump claimed, “instead of economic nationalism you have ultra-left-wing globalism.” The term “globalists” (and it’s cognate “globalism”) is a far-right dog-whistle referring to the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. It is a semantic descendant of the Nazis’ term “rootless cosmopolitans” which targeted Jews and their Marxist fellow travelers.

The vulture, Biden, is also a vampire who has “backed every single blood-sucking attack on US auto workers.” References to vampirism and parasitism—ultimately derived from the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jewish people consumed the blood of Christian children² —were standard Nazi rhetorical fare. As Rash summarizes, when Hitler wrote about Jews,

Blood sucking creatures, parasites, and microscopic organisms appear in a number of guises, and are obviously intended to provoke revulsion in the reader….Hitler readily adopted images of parasitism, claiming that the Jewish parasite had to be destroyed if the host were too survive.

After his speech in Michigan, Trump granted an interview to Newsmax during which, when asked about migrants crossing our border from Mexico, he responded that Democrats are “Marxists, communists, fascists” who are allowing border crossings that are “killing our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.” Again, the poisoning and destruction of blood is a distinctively Nazi trope.

I am not suggesting that Trump is a Nazi, or that he embraces an anti-Semitic ideology. Rather, I am suggesting that in light of his specific choice of imagery, the claim that he is influenced by Nazi rhetoric should not be dismissed out of hand.

David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity. This post originally appeared on his Substack.

1. See Chapter Three of my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization for a discussion of the role of “blood” in racial discourse. ↩︎
2. See, for example, Masha Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. ↩︎

 

Need more?

No Sir I just wanted you to prove my point. 

[GoAU 1,690]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

Easy:

Trump’s Rhetoric of Blood

From the start of Trump’s political career, I was alarmed. To be sure, he had dabbled in public racism earlier, but it was when he announced his candidacy in 2015, and made his first campaign speech, that I became very concerned. As described in this talk that I gave in Mexico in 2019 (and in other publications and presentations), the style of Trump’s rhetoric—the precise sequence of emotionally-loaded themes—seemed to be a page taken right out of the Nazi playbook.

To be clear, I never thought that Trump was directly influenced by Nazi speech. It seemed much more likely, I thought, that, like Hitler himself, Trump had a gut instinct for the kind of language that plays on the public’s deepest fears, resentments, and aspirations. I held onto this assessment even when I learned that Trump’s former spouse Ivanka told her lawyer that he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches near his bed.

But now I’m not so sure….

I’m not so sure because the former president used expressions in recent speeches that are specifically and unmistakably redolent of Nazi rhetoric.

In a video interview posted on the conservative website National Pulse on September 27, Trump had this to say about undocumented immigrants entering the United States:

“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have (emphasis added).”

A week later, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan remarked on X that Trump’s reference to blood poisoning was a “straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.” Hasan was right.

The theme of racial blood-poisoning¹, and the idea that racial outsiders are vectors of deadly, contagious disease, was a mainstay of Nazi (and neo-Nazi) discourse.

Hitler described the mixing of racially pure Germans with non-Germans as a “poisoning.” The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “poisons the blood of others” and described them as “international poisoners”and expressed the view, as summarized by Felicity Rash in her book The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that “it was inevitable that these ‘lower’ beings would try to poison the ‘higher’ Aryans or to develop a parasitic dependency upon them.” According to Hitler, this poses an existential threat because “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Because blood-poisoning caused Germany to become diseased at the instigation of Jews, and the Marxists under their control, Hitler characterized Jews and Marxists as a “plague” or “epidemic” that is “worse than the Black Death of olden times.”

In fact, we can find such references in My New Order—the book that Trump allegedly kept near his bedside.

“Insofar as we devote ourselves to the care of our own blood—that blood which has been entrusted to us by destiny—we are at the same time doing our best to safeguard other peoples from diseases that spring from race to race, from people to people.”

On the same day that the National Pulse interview was aired, Trump gave a speech in Michigan, near Detroit, courting the political favor of non-union automobile manufacturing workers. The speech is loaded with fascist-style rhetoric. He described Joe Biden as a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar image, as vultures are scavengers, not predators, but it was rhetorically well-chosen, combining denigration of Biden’s age with a bird associated with death, disgust, and decay. “Under Biden,” Trump claimed, “instead of economic nationalism you have ultra-left-wing globalism.” The term “globalists” (and it’s cognate “globalism”) is a far-right dog-whistle referring to the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. It is a semantic descendant of the Nazis’ term “rootless cosmopolitans” which targeted Jews and their Marxist fellow travelers.

The vulture, Biden, is also a vampire who has “backed every single blood-sucking attack on US auto workers.” References to vampirism and parasitism—ultimately derived from the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jewish people consumed the blood of Christian children² —were standard Nazi rhetorical fare. As Rash summarizes, when Hitler wrote about Jews,

Blood sucking creatures, parasites, and microscopic organisms appear in a number of guises, and are obviously intended to provoke revulsion in the reader….Hitler readily adopted images of parasitism, claiming that the Jewish parasite had to be destroyed if the host were too survive.

After his speech in Michigan, Trump granted an interview to Newsmax during which, when asked about migrants crossing our border from Mexico, he responded that Democrats are “Marxists, communists, fascists” who are allowing border crossings that are “killing our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.” Again, the poisoning and destruction of blood is a distinctively Nazi trope.

I am not suggesting that Trump is a Nazi, or that he embraces an anti-Semitic ideology. Rather, I am suggesting that in light of his specific choice of imagery, the claim that he is influenced by Nazi rhetoric should not be dismissed out of hand.

David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity. This post originally appeared on his Substack.

1. See Chapter Three of my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization for a discussion of the role of “blood” in racial discourse. ↩︎
2. See, for example, Masha Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. ↩︎

 

Need more?

You quote an article comparing Trump to Nazis in the second paragraph to use as an example of Trumps speech?   I didn’t read past that…...  

25 minutes ago, TexasTiger said:

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-north-carolina-senator-takes-back-comment-that-a-picture-of-hillary-clinton-should-have-a-bullseye-on-it-2016-10?amp
 

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-second-amendment-people-hillary-clinton-justices-2016-8

You have posted two articles from 2016?   I can post more examples of Dem rhetoric in the last two weeks….

[TexasTiger 14,069]

21 minutes ago, GoAU said:

You quote an article comparing Trump to Nazis in the second paragraph to use as an example of Trumps speech?   I didn’t read past that…...  

You have posted two articles from 2016?   I can post more examples of Dem rhetoric in the last two weeks….

You have to stretch that rhetoric to make your claim . These are to the point. And I wasn’t looking, just recalled the history. I have an excellent memory for an old man.😉

[JMWATS 253]

6 hours ago, WillMunny said:

Lee Harvey Oswald had a shorter distance (90 yards as opposed to the 150 yards in this case), but Oswald's target was moving and was obscured by an oak tree between shots.  Yet he hit two of three.

This 20-year-old kid probably had no training except fooling around at the local shooting range.

Oswald and Charles Whitman were Marine Corps trained.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 14 by JMWATS

[WillMunny 1,524]

Today at 3:48 PM CDT

David Artavia

What we know about the shooter's past: From nursing home job to being a loner in school

Former classmates and colleagues of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who authorities suspect opened fire at the Trump rally on Saturday, are sharing their experiences with the suspected gunman.

"He would sit alone at lunch. He was just the outcast," 21-year-old Jason Kohler, who said he attended high school with Crooks, told NBC News. "It's honestly kind of sad."

“I want to say he was a loner more because he was quiet, but he was just bullied. He was bullied so much. So much,” Kohler added. “He was just made fun of, I guess, for the way he dressed or his appearance.”

Crooks worked as a dietary aid at Bethel Park Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation, the Associated Press reported. The nursing home's administrator, Marcie Grimm, said that Crooks had a clean background when she hired him, adding that she was “shocked and saddened to learn of his involvement.”

Michael Dudjak, 20, who said he attended school with Crooks most of his life, described the suspected shooter as being reserved and “on his own a lot.”

"It's definitely terrifying for someone you went to school with to commit such a heinous act,” Dudjak told NBC News. “That's the craziest thing about it when it entered my brain. You were in the same class as this person two years ago."

ABC News reported that Crooks was rejected from his high school’s rifle club and asked not to return. Former high school classmate Jameson Myers claimed, “he was asked not to come back because how bad of a shot he was. It was considered, like dangerous.”

One Bethel Park High graduate, Sarah D’Angelo, told the Wall Street Journal that Crooks “never outwardly spoke about his political views or how much he hated Trump or anything.”

During his senior year in 2022, Crooks was among several high schoolers given an award for math and science, according to local outlet Tribune-Review at the time.

[WillMunny 1,524]

Today at 3:02 PM CDT

Natalie Rahhal

Local police officer reportedly tried to confront Crooks on the roof

Shortly before the shooting began, rally attendees reportedly alerted law enforcement to a man climbing onto a nearby roof and an officer attempted to confront the gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks. According to the Associated Press:

One local police officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and Crooks quickly took a shot toward Trump, and that’s when Secret Service snipers shot him, said the officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Click here to read the full article.