Keep doing what you're doing Mike. The pointy heads who disagree with you don't comprehend the stark line between right and wrong. The systematic elimination of Native Americans was wrong, slavery was wrong, Jim Crow was wrong, The Holocaust was wrong, fascism is wrong, the genocide happening in Gaza is wrong, and I could go on and on. Anyone who tries to spin any of these wrongs as anything else is just saying they don't see it as wrong. There are gray areas in life, but things like this are black and white.
For all the commentary out there, yours is as even-handed as it gets IMO. Being too confrontational for a podcast that claims to be neutral means that they have indefensible arguments against what you have to say. Keep up the good work.
Tour de force. Not sure how you do this in a day. But as far as the reason for the Holocaust Museum’s possessiveness over the memory of Anne Frank, I suspect it is, as usual, Zionism. The sooner that Anne Frank is “allowed” to belong to the world, that much sooner will Israel and its supporters not be able to convincingly invoke the Holocaust to justify its present genocide. It’s as simple as that, and it’s not complicated.
Continue being the one who ruffles their tidy feathers....PLEASE. continue being too disruptive to be on their shows! I've asked others on socials who've criticized me for Hitler/Nazi comparisons: "So, we have to wait until he murders 6 million BEFORE we can call him Hitler?" The playbook is eerily the same. Read THE RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER by WW2 journalist W L Shirer.
Fantastic article. When the pandemic began in 2020 and we were all in lockdown, I gave my daughter (then a freshman in high school) a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank to read. I didn’t lead with “this is a book about the Holocaust”, I said “this is a book written by a girl your age who was cooped up in a house for years because what was happening outside was dangerous.” She read it and related deeply to Anne’s experiences with isolation…since then she has re-read it several times and drawn new understanding from it about how to remain human in terrible times. It is a universal story on so many levels and it’s exactly what we all need to be talking about right now. Walz is completely correct to connect Anne’s experience to what we are living through now.
I use the term NAZI because it is only 4 letters and it fits on a protest sign. I use the word NAZI because everybody knows what it means and people don't understand the word fascism. I use the word NAZI because NAZI's don't like to be called NAZI's.
Also, we have concentration camps now and executions in our streets and people are hiding. Terrible things are happening.
Context is so much of everything. In medicine, context is the milieu. In my focus as a medical oncologist, it is the tumor microenvironment (TME).
In the context of the Trump presidency, all of us are Jews. If you disagree with the insanity & inanity of Trump, his executive cabinet and the Republicans adherent to Trump- you are Jews. The Trump Administration is clearly fascist. One does not have to wear the clothing of Mussolini or that of the Third Reich, grow a mustache and speak German to be a "Hitler." We have as POTUS an American Hitler.
This cannot be waved off as confrontational; it is based on evidence of things seen. It is not a factoid, but a fact. It is not rumination, but reality.
Yes, Orwell said it simply: "All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others." What we are witness to in Minnesota and what we have seen elsewhere is Orwellian.
• Multiple violations of the Constitution,
• attempts to utterly destroy Democracy a la DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment),
• dismissal of those in the FDA, NCI, CDC that are life-long devoted scientists only to be replaced by the lunatic and ill-educated RFk Jr.
• Attacks on dedicated men and women that changed our lives for the better, like Tony Fauci. • • Separating children from their parents,
• raiding homes without warrants,
• collaborating with dictators,
• sharing top secret documents,
• amassing a billion dollars in wealth for himself while healthcare is both denied and in decline, • being convicted of felony crimes,
• inciting a riot to disrupt the legal transfer of the presidency after a national election,
• appealing to Russia to secure info on H. Clinton;
• threatening Zelensky to find dirt on Biden while Ukrainian aid is held in a typical "deal" or quid pro quo.
• lying to the citizenry and the world more than any POTUS in our history and by exponential degree
• sexual assault on at least one woman
• cavorting with known sex trafficker Epstein
• declaring to the world "I will be dictator on day one"
• appointing to his cabinet the worst of the worst; the most incredibly incompetent and lawless of any cabinet in the history of the US and probably of the world
• demeaning the public with his 4th grade vocabulary and his endless, verbal diarrhea about how great, brilliant, handsome, "He" is.
Has anyone made a list of the travesties to atrocities committed by Trump? I bet it would number over 200 items, if not more.
Good & Pretti are the latest two of many murdered in this country.
But look at ICE. Heavily armored with gas masks and shields, carrying pepper spray and who knows what other sprays. Armed with a revolver and/or military assault weapon. Look at the video of the ICE attacks on civilians, including Pretti's neighbor and Pretti himself. Ice, most male, with an average weight of 200 lbs, smacking a woman to the ground. Six men jumping on top of Pretti, a slim little man who probably weighed all of 150 lbs and had a tiny fraction of the muscle mass of the group thumping on him. And ten shots to his body. Rene Good shot in the head. Not Gestapo?
"But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks, I’m certainly going to assume that he IS a duck.”
If this is not Gestapo tactics, with a leader like Bovino, who could star in a Nazi movie and be a perfect fit for that part, then I do not know my head from my ass. If Trump is not acting like every fascist head of state, the same. He's a duck, a queer-bird, that is one sick SOB. And he was elected by the people of this country-- and that tells you about other areas of "want" or pathology that needs to be remedied if America is ever to attain a proper label as a legitimate democracy.
Fascism just does not just pop up- you need to have the seeds there for someone to then provide the soil to accommodate its growth. And that's a huge issue that is faced assuming we are able to cross the bridge called Trumpism, and enter into a post-Trump world.
We are all Jews; get over it. Sooner or later, the utterly evil in society will come after anyone who is different - as we all are.
Intellectual apologists and collaborators. "High minded" individuals that can't be bothered to be concerned about human suffering, everything is an abstract construct to be bloodlessly observed and deconstructed like a specimen under a microscope.. They are almost always men, in my observation. I hold these people in high contempt because they should know better. They have no love.
The German Nazis justified purifying their claimed homeland, then did so by removing Jews and Gypsies from it. (The mass extermination followed a half-dozen years after the initial removals and encouragements of self-deportation.)
The Israelis have justified purifying their claimed homeland in successive removals of Palestinian Muslims and Christians from it.
The Trumpists justify purifying their claimed homeland by removal of all immigrants from the global South.
Either every human tribe has the right to purify a homeland for itself, or none does. There's a slight difference, in that both the Germans and the Israelis have claims going back millennia whereas the Trumpist claim only goes back about four centuries. But if Israel is justified against the Palestinians, then Germany was justified against the Jews and Gypsies. The Trumpists being justified against people with origins in the global South is more tenuous.
There's a strong argument for nations, as without them the corporations would fully take over. But "homeland" ideologies so often lead to tragic evil. (My own stance is with the original Zionists: Israel should be an independent, secular state, not a religious one. Also, "Never again" means that, there's no "except when Jews or American Christian Nationalists do it.")
The separation of the Holocaust from comparison is not to protect the Jewish victims but to inoculate the rest of the World and history from its causes. It becomes a tumor extricated, cauterized, exterminated. Gone and buried in the center of the Earth.
It goes from people falling for scapegoating and persecution as a panacea from day to day ills to a unique mental illness, the horror dream of a Satanic madman. A populace entranced by his spell.
It became, for us, a reason to gloat about our moral superiority over the so-called Master Race. For the Germans it was proof that the passions were Evil and only mastery of the Will could conquer the evil inside. (A reverse Hume.)
The Holocaust became simultaneously the horrible thing that must never happen again while its defeat became the greatest triumph and justified American hegemony for the next 80 years.
People forgot what the allure of fascism was. It became the Wolf cry, the argument ad Hitler that ended political discussion. It became the thing so awful to compare anything no matter how horrible became taboo.
It became an abstract. It became a meme, Godwin’s Law. It was the topic of comedies, “Springtime for Hitler,” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”
"This is not sophistication. This is not moral seriousness. This is a machine for generating reasons not to act."
Yes. Those who manufacture and lubricate this machine are complicit in nurturing an environment that allows masked "officials" to continue to abuse and murder US citizens.
This essay is a significant part of the answer to the historical question, "How is it that good people could not see what was happening right in front of them. And why did they not act?"
Thank you for calling them all out. And the USHMM? Honest to fucking god, pull your heads out of your collective asses.
If memory can only be used after the catastrophe is complete, then it’s not memory, it’s decoration. The whole point of teaching Anne Frank is not to memorize the shape of the gas chambers, it’s to recognize the sound of the knock on the door while there’s still time to stop it.
Turning “never again” into a museum rule about when you’re allowed to be alarmed is how you guarantee it will always be too late. History isn’t a taxonomy exercise. It’s a warning system.
Keep doing what you're doing Mike. The pointy heads who disagree with you don't comprehend the stark line between right and wrong. The systematic elimination of Native Americans was wrong, slavery was wrong, Jim Crow was wrong, The Holocaust was wrong, fascism is wrong, the genocide happening in Gaza is wrong, and I could go on and on. Anyone who tries to spin any of these wrongs as anything else is just saying they don't see it as wrong. There are gray areas in life, but things like this are black and white.
See it. Name it. Fight it. So glad the smug cowards find you too confrontational.
For all the commentary out there, yours is as even-handed as it gets IMO. Being too confrontational for a podcast that claims to be neutral means that they have indefensible arguments against what you have to say. Keep up the good work.
Tour de force. Not sure how you do this in a day. But as far as the reason for the Holocaust Museum’s possessiveness over the memory of Anne Frank, I suspect it is, as usual, Zionism. The sooner that Anne Frank is “allowed” to belong to the world, that much sooner will Israel and its supporters not be able to convincingly invoke the Holocaust to justify its present genocide. It’s as simple as that, and it’s not complicated.
Continue being the one who ruffles their tidy feathers....PLEASE. continue being too disruptive to be on their shows! I've asked others on socials who've criticized me for Hitler/Nazi comparisons: "So, we have to wait until he murders 6 million BEFORE we can call him Hitler?" The playbook is eerily the same. Read THE RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER by WW2 journalist W L Shirer.
Fantastic article. When the pandemic began in 2020 and we were all in lockdown, I gave my daughter (then a freshman in high school) a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank to read. I didn’t lead with “this is a book about the Holocaust”, I said “this is a book written by a girl your age who was cooped up in a house for years because what was happening outside was dangerous.” She read it and related deeply to Anne’s experiences with isolation…since then she has re-read it several times and drawn new understanding from it about how to remain human in terrible times. It is a universal story on so many levels and it’s exactly what we all need to be talking about right now. Walz is completely correct to connect Anne’s experience to what we are living through now.
I use the term NAZI because it is only 4 letters and it fits on a protest sign. I use the word NAZI because everybody knows what it means and people don't understand the word fascism. I use the word NAZI because NAZI's don't like to be called NAZI's.
Also, we have concentration camps now and executions in our streets and people are hiding. Terrible things are happening.
Context is so much of everything. In medicine, context is the milieu. In my focus as a medical oncologist, it is the tumor microenvironment (TME).
In the context of the Trump presidency, all of us are Jews. If you disagree with the insanity & inanity of Trump, his executive cabinet and the Republicans adherent to Trump- you are Jews. The Trump Administration is clearly fascist. One does not have to wear the clothing of Mussolini or that of the Third Reich, grow a mustache and speak German to be a "Hitler." We have as POTUS an American Hitler.
This cannot be waved off as confrontational; it is based on evidence of things seen. It is not a factoid, but a fact. It is not rumination, but reality.
Yes, Orwell said it simply: "All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others." What we are witness to in Minnesota and what we have seen elsewhere is Orwellian.
• Multiple violations of the Constitution,
• attempts to utterly destroy Democracy a la DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment),
• dismissal of those in the FDA, NCI, CDC that are life-long devoted scientists only to be replaced by the lunatic and ill-educated RFk Jr.
• Attacks on dedicated men and women that changed our lives for the better, like Tony Fauci. • • Separating children from their parents,
• raiding homes without warrants,
• collaborating with dictators,
• sharing top secret documents,
• amassing a billion dollars in wealth for himself while healthcare is both denied and in decline, • being convicted of felony crimes,
• inciting a riot to disrupt the legal transfer of the presidency after a national election,
• appealing to Russia to secure info on H. Clinton;
• threatening Zelensky to find dirt on Biden while Ukrainian aid is held in a typical "deal" or quid pro quo.
• lying to the citizenry and the world more than any POTUS in our history and by exponential degree
• sexual assault on at least one woman
• cavorting with known sex trafficker Epstein
• declaring to the world "I will be dictator on day one"
• appointing to his cabinet the worst of the worst; the most incredibly incompetent and lawless of any cabinet in the history of the US and probably of the world
• demeaning the public with his 4th grade vocabulary and his endless, verbal diarrhea about how great, brilliant, handsome, "He" is.
Has anyone made a list of the travesties to atrocities committed by Trump? I bet it would number over 200 items, if not more.
Good & Pretti are the latest two of many murdered in this country.
But look at ICE. Heavily armored with gas masks and shields, carrying pepper spray and who knows what other sprays. Armed with a revolver and/or military assault weapon. Look at the video of the ICE attacks on civilians, including Pretti's neighbor and Pretti himself. Ice, most male, with an average weight of 200 lbs, smacking a woman to the ground. Six men jumping on top of Pretti, a slim little man who probably weighed all of 150 lbs and had a tiny fraction of the muscle mass of the group thumping on him. And ten shots to his body. Rene Good shot in the head. Not Gestapo?
"But when I see a bird that quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, has feathers and webbed feet and associates with ducks, I’m certainly going to assume that he IS a duck.”
If this is not Gestapo tactics, with a leader like Bovino, who could star in a Nazi movie and be a perfect fit for that part, then I do not know my head from my ass. If Trump is not acting like every fascist head of state, the same. He's a duck, a queer-bird, that is one sick SOB. And he was elected by the people of this country-- and that tells you about other areas of "want" or pathology that needs to be remedied if America is ever to attain a proper label as a legitimate democracy.
Fascism just does not just pop up- you need to have the seeds there for someone to then provide the soil to accommodate its growth. And that's a huge issue that is faced assuming we are able to cross the bridge called Trumpism, and enter into a post-Trump world.
We are all Jews; get over it. Sooner or later, the utterly evil in society will come after anyone who is different - as we all are.
Intellectual apologists and collaborators. "High minded" individuals that can't be bothered to be concerned about human suffering, everything is an abstract construct to be bloodlessly observed and deconstructed like a specimen under a microscope.. They are almost always men, in my observation. I hold these people in high contempt because they should know better. They have no love.
The comparison is exact:
The German Nazis justified purifying their claimed homeland, then did so by removing Jews and Gypsies from it. (The mass extermination followed a half-dozen years after the initial removals and encouragements of self-deportation.)
The Israelis have justified purifying their claimed homeland in successive removals of Palestinian Muslims and Christians from it.
The Trumpists justify purifying their claimed homeland by removal of all immigrants from the global South.
Either every human tribe has the right to purify a homeland for itself, or none does. There's a slight difference, in that both the Germans and the Israelis have claims going back millennia whereas the Trumpist claim only goes back about four centuries. But if Israel is justified against the Palestinians, then Germany was justified against the Jews and Gypsies. The Trumpists being justified against people with origins in the global South is more tenuous.
There's a strong argument for nations, as without them the corporations would fully take over. But "homeland" ideologies so often lead to tragic evil. (My own stance is with the original Zionists: Israel should be an independent, secular state, not a religious one. Also, "Never again" means that, there's no "except when Jews or American Christian Nationalists do it.")
The separation of the Holocaust from comparison is not to protect the Jewish victims but to inoculate the rest of the World and history from its causes. It becomes a tumor extricated, cauterized, exterminated. Gone and buried in the center of the Earth.
It goes from people falling for scapegoating and persecution as a panacea from day to day ills to a unique mental illness, the horror dream of a Satanic madman. A populace entranced by his spell.
It became, for us, a reason to gloat about our moral superiority over the so-called Master Race. For the Germans it was proof that the passions were Evil and only mastery of the Will could conquer the evil inside. (A reverse Hume.)
The Holocaust became simultaneously the horrible thing that must never happen again while its defeat became the greatest triumph and justified American hegemony for the next 80 years.
People forgot what the allure of fascism was. It became the Wolf cry, the argument ad Hitler that ended political discussion. It became the thing so awful to compare anything no matter how horrible became taboo.
It became an abstract. It became a meme, Godwin’s Law. It was the topic of comedies, “Springtime for Hitler,” and “Hogan’s Heroes.”
Excellent and inspiring. IMO the last word on it
"This is not sophistication. This is not moral seriousness. This is a machine for generating reasons not to act."
Yes. Those who manufacture and lubricate this machine are complicit in nurturing an environment that allows masked "officials" to continue to abuse and murder US citizens.
This essay is a significant part of the answer to the historical question, "How is it that good people could not see what was happening right in front of them. And why did they not act?"
Thank you for calling them all out. And the USHMM? Honest to fucking god, pull your heads out of your collective asses.
Great columns. Keep up the fight Mike!
If memory can only be used after the catastrophe is complete, then it’s not memory, it’s decoration. The whole point of teaching Anne Frank is not to memorize the shape of the gas chambers, it’s to recognize the sound of the knock on the door while there’s still time to stop it.
Turning “never again” into a museum rule about when you’re allowed to be alarmed is how you guarantee it will always be too late. History isn’t a taxonomy exercise. It’s a warning system.
"this is what happens when a state decides that a category of people are outside the protection of law."
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time."