An encyclopedia definition of “fifth column: “The agents..may work in an army, political party…Their activities include..economic subversion, propaganda, agitation..and even assassination, terror, and revolt.”
Consider the following article from Patricia Roberts-Miller in the March 1 ,2019, Washington Spectator ; “Deconstructing Trump>’ These excerpts:
“What surprises a lot of people is why Trump’s perpetual and perhaps compulsive inaccuracy and dishonesty don’t undercut his credibility with his fans…Trump uses demagoguery, and it works because we’re in a culture in which demagoguery is the normal way for people to argue….
“..the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke identified Hitler’s main rhetorical strategies….and argued that Hitler’s rhetorical effectiveness came from his relentless repetition of what Burke called the “bastardization of religious forms of thought…..
“What Burke identified wasn’t just how Hitler rhetoric worked, but more broadly, how demagoguery works and is rewarded. Demagoguery displaces policy argumentation with praise of “us” and condemnation of “them,” and it is a prevalent now as it was in Weimar Germany.
“Trump relies on the same rhetoric, and that’s why it should be no surprise that conservative Christians would support Trump. Conservative Christian German overwhelmingly supported Hitler..and conservative Christian Americans previously supported slavery, segregation, and lynching.
As Burke noted, Hitler projected all of his, and all of Germans’ flaws, unto the people of Jewish faith or ethnicity. The famous quote from “Mein Kampf,” that it is better to tell a big lie, and stick to it, is something Hitler accuses Jews of doing, even as he is doing exactly that……Demagoguery depends on the notion that everything can be reduced to “us” versus “them.”………
“Burke argued that Hitler bastardized the principle of inborn dignity by asserting that such dignity was born only to certain people. That same bastardization surfaces in the notion of Christianity being racially determined and is behind the the rhetoric of Christian identity, conservative Christian defenses of slavery and segregation, and the kind of right-leaning Christian groups that support Trump.”…..
In fact it’s fairly easy to look at Trump’s rhetoric and find parallels with the rhetorical strategies of demagoguery that Burke identified. Trump repeats the same points, regardless of whether they’ve been debunked; intermittently claims that faith in him is all we need; promotes economic policies that have never worked, but if you believe in the will, should work; materializes evil in Democrats..; projects his own failings onto his enemies…; insists on the entitlement of his in-group to everything; and promises to make America great again….
What matters about Trump..isn’t actually that he uses demagoguery. What matters is that his rise to power was fueled by a demagoguery that reflected the racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and authoritarian values of the GOP – values that previously had surfaced only in dog whistles…the GOP media machine didn’t condemn him for it. They justified it, promoted it, and repeated it. *******************!!!!!!!!**********
“I spend a sad amount of time in anti-liberal media zones, and it’s striking to see how talking points seamlessly disseminate from Trump through his water-carrying friends at Fox and the hate media to the various Facebook pages and sub-Reddit threads in social media…What is clear is that Trump can count on a supportive media machine that will justify anything he does.”
“What happens in a culture of demagoguery is that people think in zero-sum terms about politics: whether our country ends up with a good policy matters less than ensuring the winner is “us”[our faction] – or at least we can make them lose…That is the objective of Trump’s rhetoric and the rhetoric of his loyal media.”
***For perspective, consider this: “Vanity Fair’s” 1990 report that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, “told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, “My New Order,” which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”
*****For perspective, consider this from “A Warning,” by ‘Anonymous’ – a Trump White House “political”, page 202: “Trump revels in the herd-like behavior of his followers. He uses his social media presence to inflame public debates and to dispatch supporters to attack politicians who’ve criticized him…”
…..page 197: “..pandering to common prejudices…When he does, the ‘false’ part gets ignored by his followers because of their confirmation bias. The ‘information’ part gets absorbed. They are willing to march lockstep if what he says validates what they already believe.” ****************!!!!!!************
With Justice For All 