Hey America, do you want to elect Steve Bannon to be the real second in command? By Hal Brown, MSW

 

Today's blog was inspired by this article and others:

Here's the article about Bannon's plan from The New York Times (subscrpition):

Excerpt:

“Is every House committee controlled by Republicans using its subpoena power in every way it needs to right now?” he demanded. “Is every Republican D.A. starting every investigation they need to right now?”

“Every facet of Republican Party politics and power has to be used right now to go toe-to-toe with Marxism and beat these Communists,” Mr. Miller said, using the catchall slurs Trump allies routinely use against Democrats.

This is the article which quotes him as follows:

“There are dozens of ambitious backbencher state attorneys general and district attorneys who need to ‘seize the day’ and own this moment in history,” Mr. Bannon wrote.

This is a good plan for these state AGs. Doing what he suggests will garner them a lot of publicity and if Trump wins serve them well if they aspire to higher office.

This is from Axios:

Bannon told us Bragg could be targeted using the 14th Amendment (equal protection) and Fourth Amendment (outlawing unreasonable searches and seizures by the government) "plus scores of other" laws. Bannon told us he wants "investigations to include [Democrats'] media allies."

Axios points out that it isn't just Bannon who wants to prosecute and potential jail Trump's opponents. This is from their article:

What's next: Even before the election, House Republicans want to go after Bragg.

• House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday told Fox News Digital he's preparing an appropriations package that would "defund the lawfare activities" of state and federal prosecutors leading "politically sensitive investigations," including Bragg, special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis.
• Jordan called last week for Bragg and one of his courtroom prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, to testify June 13 before Jordan's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The topic: "the unprecedented political prosecution of President Trump."

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said this weekend on "Fox News Sunday" that the hearing's purpose "is to investigate what these prosecutors are doing at the state and federal level to use ... political retribution in the court system to go after political opponents, federal officials like Donald Trump."

• "And we're going to look at Special Counsel Jack Smith," Johnson added, referring to the Justice Department official leading two federal probes of Trump. "We have the funding streams. We have mechanisms to try to get control of that."

American voters must realize that there is probably noone the Donald Trump trusts more than Steve Bannon. They are kindred spirits in the malevolent psychopathy permeating their very essense.

If Bannon miraculously morhped into a young buxom babe I have no doubt he'd dump Melania and marry him. 

 

Trump: Religion is such a great thing... you wanna go to heaven. You just have to watch this YouTube. By Hal Brown, MSW

Asked about his own prayer life didn't answer. Instead he said that so many people come up to him and say "Sir, I pray for you every night."

This in his own twisted mind where everything is about Trump is what personal prayer means to him. It isn't him (aka as Trump) praying to God, it is others praying to God on his (aka Trump's) behalf. There is a certain torturous labyrinthinian sense to this reasoning. After all, why bother taking the time and making the effort to have a few moments of quiet connection with God when so many people are doing it for you?

Watch Joe Scarborough crack up and turn red in the face:

Somehow evangelicals who believe with unquestioned certainty that God exists and pays attention to their prayers are convinced that Trump also believes in God.

I have news for them. Trump is as hard-core an athiest as Ron "not afraid to burn in Hell" Reagan.

Full disclosure: I don't believe in God. When I was very young I did say my version of the well known nightly prayer. Mine went "now I lay me down to sleep, I pray to God my soul to keep and God bless Mommy and Daddy and Jenifer (my sister) and Grandpa and Bibby (my cat)." I don't remember if i said the "if I die before I wake I pray the Lord my Soul to take."

The last time I prayed was when I was an older child and was sitting on the toilet with severe stomach cramps and said out loud "please God if you make the pain stop I'll believe in you." Suffice to say the pain persisted. Maybe that was God's punishment for those who selfishly want His intervention for personal gain.



The Hitler – Trump comparison: George Santayana wrote that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, but what about those who remember history and WANT to repeat it? By Hal Brown, MSW Jun 3, 2024

 

The Hitler – Trump comparison: George Santayana wrote that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, but what about those who remember history and WANT to repeat it? By Hal Brown, MSW

Jun 3, 2024

 Hitler, Politics, Trump

The lead column (here) by Chauncey DeVega in Salon is a must read. That is, it ought to be read by everyone who cares about keeping the United States as a democracy. The quote “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” is accurately stated by American philosopher George Santayana as “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” in his work The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. Santayana’s philosophical works, including this quote, were influenced by his early life in Spain and his philosophical mentors at Harvard. The quote’s popularity may also be attributed to its use in William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. (Reference)

Chauncey DeVega begins his column this way:

Convicted felon Donald Trump recently shared a video on his Truth Social disinformation platform that celebrated the rise of a “unified” Trump Reich if he takes power as the country’s first dictator. The imagery, language, and narrative of the video evoke the rise of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. As is their tactic, Trump’s campaign claimed that sharing the “unified Reich” video was an “error.” They left the video on the Truth Social disinformation site for hours before deleting it.

The second paragraph makes a crucial point:

Hitler’s Third Reich was supposed to last at least 1,000 years. In reality, it only lasted 12 years. With World War II and the Holocaust, Hitler and the Nazis tried to turn Europe and the world into a necropolis — and they almost succeeded.

 

There are many “what ifs” which would have enabled Hitler to achieve his dream. Primarily, what if the Japanese hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor enabling FDR to get the United States into the war? There are Hitler’s military errors, especially Operation Barbarossa, his decision to open an eastern front and attack Russia. There are other factors which lead to the defeat of the Axis from the Allies obtaining the Enigma code machine to the D-Day deception with the fake army (reference) to the United States developing the atomic bomb before Germany did.

Hitler was a hero to millions of ordinary Germans. They supported him with the the same fervor minus the MAGA hats and ludicrous outfits that millions of Americans who support Trump wear.

Americans shouldnt need to be reminded what happened when a Machiavellian psychopathic dictator led or leads a country. We know about the Jews and others murdered in the Holocaust though appallingly there are some American who deny this happened and others who think it was a good thing or don’t particularly care. These bigots and anti-Semites should be reminded that World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. An estimated total of 70–85 million people perished, or about 3% of the estimated global population of 2.3 billion in 1940. That is what Hitler inflicted on his own country and the world.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Trump and Hitler is that the former aspires to govern his own country like a ruthless dictator and doesn’t have designs on conquering a continent.

DeVega concludes his column as follows:

The American people and their responsible leaders who believe in democracy have a choice to make. They can learn from history and stop the Age of Trump (Donald Trump the man is less of a problem than what he represents and has empowered) and the ascendance of American neofascism with its increasingly Hitlerian intent (which includes the violence, pain, and destruction) or they can pretend that somehow everything will magically be okay because somehow, in their minds at least, it always has been. Such individual, collective, and social immaturity is how we arrived at such a bad place and on the precipice of a Trump Reich.

 

Here’s the rub in this. There may not be enough American people who believe in democracy to stop Trump. There also many not be enough MAGA leaders who want to stop Trump even though they know there is at least a risk that he means what he says when he talks about wanting to run the country like a Hitler. Perhaps they don’t believe it when he says he will fire generals who don’t pass a loyalty test, jail his political enemies merely for being his enemies, make sure all federal agencies are purged of non-MAGA personnel (read about his plans for intelligence agencies), pull out of NATO, cozy up to Putin and other authoritarian leaders, deport “undesirables, and so on.

Trump could have his own Gestapo. You know he wants this! Instead of being run by Hermann Göring Stephen Miller could be in charge.

Trump’s denial that he ever said that Hillary Clinton should be “locked up” is in the news. What stood out to me aside from what his lapse in memory signifies about his cognition is that he also said that he could have locked her if if he wanted to. This demonstrates that he thinks that he as president would have the power to lock someone up without due process.

There may be just be enough voters who want the kind of country Trump promises or who are too ignorant to realize that a vote for him goes against their own self interest. For example, read my blog “Gays for Trump, and there’s something wrong with that.”

Related:

Read previous Stressline blogs

Reminder - Not all my blogs will be posted here.... my new website is at halbrown.org

 

The Trump/Hitler comparison. \ June 4, 2024

By Hal Brown, MSW

Read  this and my other Stressline blogs here.\

My blogs will no longer be published on halbrown.org

This blog has moved to a new address

 

This website is migrating

Due to a problem with this platform, Google Blogger, I have moved my blog to WordPress and given it a new address,  Stressline.org which you can read here.  If you don't find new blogs posted here please go to that address.

The new title of the blog is no longer halbrown.org. It is now Hal Brown's Stressline. Stressline is a term I used in the titles of two websites I published 20 years ago. I thought I'd resurrect the name since what is going on the world today is causing my friends and I a great amount of stress.

Wed, Oct 11 at 6:20 AM

This is a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and pop culture. Posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky. I’m a retired MSW clinical social worker/psychotherapist and mental health center director who was a cranberry farmer and a reserve police officer. I create images using software to illustrate my stories. If I don’t have anything original to say I try not to say anything at all.

About 20 years ago I had two Stressline websites, Cranberry Stressline and Police Stressline. Being Ocean Spray cranberry growers my wife and I started a website because we objected to poor management in the co-up we belonged to. Eventually we rallied like-minded growers and after a few years the end result was that the CEO was fired and the board of directors was replaced. This may have been the first blog (the word “blog” wasn’t even commonly used then) which had a major impact on a large company. Over the course of two years the website was featured in articles in The New York Times (read here, subscription) , Forbes, ABC News here, and local Massachusetts media.

Here’s my late wife Betty with the then CEO of Ocean Spray Tom Bullock on the front page of the Sunday NY Times business section:

The other website, Police Stressline (you can still read it here) came about because I was a reserve police officer who, as a therapist, had many police officers as clients. At the time if you did a web search for police stress it came up as the number one website on the subject and articles I posted there were republished in print police magazines.

Both websites can be found on the WayBack machine.

In 2012 I started a personal blog on Google Blogger (before Google bought it the platform was just called Blogger). Until six years ago it consisted mostly of photo essays. All of those blogs can be seen at https://www.halbrown.org.

For some reason I can no long post new stories on Google Blogger so I have started a new blog here on WordPress. For those not familiar with WordPress, it hosts almost half of all websites including the official White House website and the sites of major newspapers.

I resurrected the name Stressline because these days the state of the country is causing me, not that I need to explain why if you’re a liberal like I am, a lot of stress.