GOP Strategist Compares Breitbart to Thuggish 1930s Paper Der Stürmer

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Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:04 pm

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GOP strategist Rick Wilson appeared on CNN’s CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello and had some very unfavorable comparisons to make between Breitbart and a notorious Nazi newspaper which was very popular during the Third Reich. According to Wilson, Breitbart is “acting like Der Stürmer in Germany in the 1930s more than actually a legitimate conservative media outlet.”

Just to give you an idea of what this means, above is a photo of a group of Germans reading a billboard in Worms, a German city located in the Rhineland, in 1933, which reads, “With the Stürmer against Judea.” The caption underneath reads, “The Jews are our misfortune.” This phrase was adopted from Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, an anti-Semitic German politician of the 19th century.

Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:

CAROL COSTELLO (HOST): Add Fox News’ Sean Hannity to the list of advisers for Mr. Donald Trump. He joins Breitbart News editor Steve Bannon as CEO of Trump’s campaign.

[…]

John, what do you make of Sean Hannity like I guess informally advising Trump’s campaign along with Breitbart’s editor? What should we make of that?

JOHN BRABENDER: Well, I think what it says is that Donald Trump realizes that he needs to listen to a broad group of people. And look, we know he listens to Rudy Giuliani. We know that he listens to a lot of other the presidential candidates. We know that he goes and does all these town hall meetings, basically. And so, I think it’s actually admirable that he’s not afraid to listen to people. And some don’t even always have the same view that he has. And I think that’s what you want as a president.

COSTELLO: Well, Rick, it almost seems like the conservative media is running Trump’s campaign.

RICK WILSON: Well, look, Trump is the human avatar of the Breitbart comments section: stupid, vulgar, racist, anti-Semitic, vile in almost every aspect. This is a guy who now has Steve Bannon around him, a guy who’s the architect of a news outlet, “news” outlet, that is incredibly racially divisive, that is incredibly intolerant. They have attacked on a consistent basis Muslims, and now Mormons. And they’re acting like Der Stürmer in Germany in the 1930s more than actually a legitimate conservative media outlet. So Bannon’s band of misfit toys is still going to be pumping out this kind of very vile propaganda. Steve is now the right hand of Donald Trump. And he plays to Trump’s worst instincts. He plays to the most divisive, nasty aspects of Trump’s personality.

This isn’t good for Trump’s cause, except among white nationalists. As historian Richard J. Evans (The Coming of the Third Reich, 2003) describes it,

“In 1923 [Julius] Streicher founded a sensational popular newspaper, The Stormer (Der Stürmer), which rapidly established itself as the place where screaming headlines introduced the most rabid attacks on Jews, full of sexual innuendo, racist caricatures, made-up accusations of ritual murder and titillating, semi-pornographic stories of Jewish men seducing innocent German girls. So extreme was the paper, and so obviously obsessive was its brutish-looking, shaven-headed editor, that Streicher never acquired a great deal of influence within the movement, whose leaders regarded him with some distaste, and the paper was even banned for a period under the Third Reich.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The whole distaste thing. And let’s face it: it wasn’t easy to offend a Nazi.

So yeah…

If Trump wants to be compared to Hitler, and his “movement” to the Nazi movement, he couldn’t be doing a better job of it. With this sort of media attention, it will take the Republican Party a long time to dig itself out of the Trump quagmire.

Top Photo: By Bundesarchiv, Bild 133-075 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5338071

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.