Tony Hinchcliffe spreads racism, Trump spreads fascism in vulgar rhetoric

On By Littum

NEW YORK – And in the end, all that was proven was that these people can’t even be fascists with any dignity. In February 1939, when World War II had already begun at the Marco Polo Bridge two years earlier (though no one knew it at the time), and seven months before the Wehrmacht rolled into Poland, there was a famous rally in the old Madison Square Garden. in concert with the German-American Bund and the isolationist America First crowd. The latter was insignificant. It was a Nazi meeting.

And what a sight it was. There was a thirty-foot tall portrait of the birther, George Washington, framed by swastikas. (“The first American fascist,” declared Bund leader Fritz Kuhn). There was a drum and bugle corps. There was thunder and lightning from the podium. There were twenty-two thousand people who gave the Nazi salute on cue. And as a backhanded tribute, outside the Garden, a hundred thousand counter-demonstrators gathered ready to throw hands at the Nazis. One of them, a plumber named Isadore Greenbaum, actually made it to the stage, interrupted Kuhn’s speech, and was beaten within an inch of his life by the OD, Kuhn’s equivalent of Hitler’s SS. Greenbaum survived his assault but was arrested for disorderly conduct. There was a sense of the epic, both inside and outside the garden. You could feel the world turning to darkness.

On Sunday, in what is now Madison Square Garden, there was Hulk Hogan, in a pink feather boa.

There was Dr. Phil, who droned on and on about the former president* not being a thug. There was Rudy Giuliani, half beside himself, ranting about how the Democratic ticket was “with the terrorists” before perhaps going backstage to ask Robert Kennedy Jr. if he could plop down on his couch for a few days. There was Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives, who talked about Republican respect for the rule of law, while the candidate later talked about how he and Johnson “had a little secret” that he would tell us about after the election. This could be pure bluff, or it could be the opening round of a Republican attempt to ratf*ck the certification process. In both cases, the former president* put Johnson on the hook for good.

In 1939 there was Fritz Kuhn who, amid thunderous applause, upset President “Rosenfelt” and Governor Thomas “Jewey”. In 2024, a podcast comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe told the audience that there was an island of garbage floating in the ocean called “Puerto Rico”, to laughter and the instant infamy that is the highest form. of street cred in the MAGA movement. In 1939, at the end of Kuhn’s speech, twenty thousand people chanted, “Free America!” In 2024, 19,000 people cheered when the soulless husk that was Tucker Carlson told them that Kamala Harris would be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ ex-California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

I am not minimizing the danger associated with next Tuesday’s election. I lived through a Trump administration*. I would prefer not to have to live through the live-action adventure Trump unchained. But Lord, these people are not only reckless, they are comical lightweights, right up to their Dear Leader. They are burlesque authoritarians. The 1939 rally was a Wagnerian opera in a world on the brink of war. This was a grand version of a drive-time radio talk show where Joe worries on the car phone about his son coming home from third grade as his daughter. In 1939, the Garden was filled with Americans pledging their allegiance to a leader half a world away who was already building his concentration camps. This was a gathering of Americans who have been frightened by scarecrows. In Robert Bolt’s play A man for all seasonsThomas More is grilled by Thomas Cromwell on some false accusations, and More tells Cromwell that the accusations “are terrors to children, Master Secretary. Not to me.” And then he leaves, having won the argument. At the end of the play, of course, they cut his head off.

I made a mistake. I decided not to apply for press credentials and give the former president* another chance to call me an enemy of the people. I sat in for general admission seating. I wanted to be one of the people. This of course led to me being inundated with emails and texts begging me for money and offering me a golden MAGA hat for my trouble. But I figured it was a small price to pay for a chance to join the gang, at least for a day. So I reported, as instructed, at noon on Sunday, to join the line to enter, which was also known as Thirty-third Street.

In three hours we had moved about four blocks. I had entertaining conversations with a number of the people. I spent five or ten minutes discussing Ray Epps with a tall man standing next to me. (Ray Epps is the gardener in Arizona, who the faithful believed to be the FBI provocateur which prompted the violence on January 6, 2021. Epps was convicted of disorderly conduct and got a year’s probation for his trouble, but these people never got away.) We were all briefly entertained by a Kim Jong-un look-alike — hello , it’s a living – who worked on the pavement outside a clothing store. I spent some time chatting with Thomas and Peter, two Dubliners staying with Peter’s uncle in New Jersey who flew over just to be part of the fun.

Along Thirty-third Street there are a number of bars with an Irish theme: Celtic Rail, Stout and Feile. Celtic Rail is located where McAnn’s, a classic Manhattan dive bar, used to stand. In 1976, a group of us who had worked for Congressman Mo Udall’s presidential campaign came down to New York for the Democratic National Convention. Of course we couldn’t get in so we went to McAnn’s to watch Mo’s speech in support of nominee Jimmy Carter.

“Out on Boot Hill in Tombstone,” Mo began, “there’s a grave marker that says – ‘JOHNSON – DID HIS FAST.’ I guess that was the story of the Udall campaign. We gave it our all. We hit hard. We talked about the tough choices we faced. And we had some close conversations and some overtime, and our money was cut off. We had more obituaries than Lazarus … but the big blue ribbon never came. We tried to be kind and generous, and we weren’t afraid to laugh at ourselves.”

Of all my political memories, that was my favorite. As I stood in the still mass of people on Sunday, in front of what used to be McAnn’s, I watched as people slowly left the queue and filtered into the Celtic Rail because the other two bars, the Stout and the Feile, had adopted a policy of keep out all patrons wearing any form of campaign paraphernalia. (Esquire was unable to reach management at either bar to confirm this policy.) The Feile was packed with people watching Sunday’s Formula 1 race. (How does a place become a Formula 1 bar? It’s a mystery.) Brian, working the door, explained the no-gear policy. “It’s based on the old adage ‘Never talk politics or religion in the bar.'” Given that my linemates were wearing Trump shoes, Trump flags and a jacket with colorful images of the former president*, not to mention say dozens of variations of the MAGA hat, this was a sensible policy I saw Brian politely toss these folks.

Celtic Rail was the only place on the block that didn’t seem to follow a no-gear policy, and it quickly filled up with people who had given up on the line. There was a steady stream of them down the sidewalk away from the Garden. Finally, around 3:30, the police came down the line and told people that the garden was full and no one else would be allowed in. The line melted away like April snow. Before the former president* even spoke, the police were removing the barriers and the largest crowd in the area was in front of Macy’s on Thirty-fourth Street, which is packed for Christmas.

The former president*s speech was hate radio on scan. He would stick to the teleprompter he otherwise denied using and then take off on familiar flights. It was mendacity consigned to ugly, endless cliché, embedded in our politics for the foreseeable future. It was actually not the banality of evil, but rather the evil of banality. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

What brought me up short, however, was the exchange between the former president* and Moses talking about their “little secret.” This was new. This was startling. This was a moment of authentic danger. It drew some laughs from the crowd, but it was a deeper threat than anything else Fritz Kuhn threw out to his enslaved crowd. Despite their imperial stupidity, the Nazis in 1939 were not the threat to the mechanisms of democracy that this one small passage in the former president*s speech was. The wink and nod toward the ultimate in ratf*cking was more relaxing than all the “Sieg Heils” that drove Isadore Greenbaum toward the stage. Fritz Kuhn had all the decoration, but the former president*, surrounded by the grotesques of ridiculous dictatorships, has already written the script and everyone knows their part.