'You're ignorant': Joe Biden's granddaughter 'curb stomps' billionaire investor's claims

David McAfee
April 5, 2024

A guard reportedly protecting Naomi Biden, granddaughter of US President Joe Biden, opened fire during an alleged car break-in(AFP)

President Joe Biden's granddaughter, Naomi Biden, went on a warpath on Friday.

Naomi Biden was responding to hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who earlier in the day falsely claimed that the president was ignoring American hostages taken by Hamas terrorists from Israel. Previously, Joe Biden himself had a tense interaction with Ackman when the hedge funder heckled the president.

"Who is this a------?" Biden asked at the time. “Look, I don't know who you are, wise-ass, but never disrespect the memory of my dead son!”

It started early Friday, when Ackman posted on X, "Can anyone think of another situation in history where Americans were taken hostage by terrorists and our President acted as if this has not occurred."

"I can’t think of one example in the last 181 days where [President] Biden has expressed concern for the American hostages that are still being held by Hamas. Does this make you feel safe as an American citizen?" the billionaire asked.

That prompted Naomi to bring some tough talk herself.

"Either you aren't paying attention or you're intentionally spreading disinformation. Either way, at best, you're ignorant. Thread below for just a few of the many examples," she wrote.

She then quoted her presidential grandfather, who said, "Today, we mark a devastating and tragic milestone-100 days of captivity for the more than 100 innocent people, including as many as 6 Americans, who are still held being hostage by Hamas in Gaza."

"For 100 days, they have existed in fear for their lives, not knowing what tomorrow will bring," the Biden quote continues. "For 100 days, their families have lived in agony, praying for the safe return of their loved ones. And for each of those 100 days, the hostages and their families have been at the forefront of my mind as my security team and I have worked non-stop trying to secure their freedom."

Naomi also included several other examples of similar Biden quotes.

Marc Bodnick, @MarcBodnick, said, "Naomi Biden curbstomping liar Bill Ackman" when he shared the thread.

Thousands of salmon escape truck crash into nearby river

Agence France-Presse
April 6, 2024 

Chinook salmon are threatened by the decades-long drought 

gripping the American West

 (JUSTIN SULLIVAN/AFP)

Tens of thousands of endangered salmon being transported by truck to a U.S. river miraculously survived a road crash by escaping into a nearby creek, officials said.

A large tanker vehicle transporting the young salmon -- or smolts -- was traveling in a mountainous area of the northwestern state of Oregon last week when it rolled on its side and skidded off the road.

The 53-foot-long truck ended up on its roof -- fortuitously for its slippery passengers, right next to a small creek.

"About 77,000 smolts made it into the creek when the tanker overturned," said the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in a statement.

The truck driver suffered only minor injuries.

Sadly, some 25,000 smolts were not so lucky in the March 29 accident. They did not reach the river, and their carcasses had to be recovered either in the tanker or on the stream bank, the department said.

Chinook salmon are threatened by the decades-long drought gripping the American West, aggravated by climate change.

The levels of many rivers have dropped, and their waters have grown warmer, while the construction of dams and canals have also imperilled salmon.

The tasty migratory fish are typically born in rivers, swim to the ocean where they reach maturity and can remain for several years, before returning to their native rivers to spawn and die.

Because drought-hit rivers with too little flow or unusually warm water can fatally disrupt that cycle, wildlife officials truck millions of hatchery-raised juvenile salmon to the sea each year.

Road transportation of salmon dates back to the 1980s, but has been ramped up in recent years, as the decline in salmon numbers has steepened.

Countless dams and canals constructed in the region's rivers, in order to support its cities and farms, have robbed salmon of 80 percent of the habitats in which they can spawn.

The smolts lost in last week's accident represent about 20 percent of the total that will be released into Oregon's Imnaha River this year, officials said.

The 77,000 fish that were catapulted into the Lookingglass Creek will likely return there in 2026 and 2027, and produce approximately 350-700 additional adults.

"This should not impact our ability to collect future brood stock or maintain full production goals in the future," said Andrew Gibbs, fish hatchery coordinator for Eastern Oregon.

Academic freedom declining globally, index finds

Agence France-Presse
April 4, 2024 

A university protest in Hungary, which had the lowest level of academic freedom in Europe, according to an annual index (AFP)

Just one in three people live a nation that guarantees the independence of universities and research, according to an annual index warning that academic freedom is declining worldwide, particularly in Russia, China and India.

Attacks on freedom of expression, interference at universities and the imprisonment of researchers are just some ways that "academic freedom globally is under threat," the index said.

The Academic Freedom Index -- based on input from more than 2,300 experts in 179 countries -- was published last month as part of a report on democracy by the V-Dem Institute at Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

It measures changes in higher education and research over the last half century by looking at five different indicators: freedom of research and teaching; of academic exchange; of academic and cultural expression; of institutional autonomy and campus integrity.

Katrin Kinzelbach, professor at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and one of the organizers of the index, told AFP that 171 states have ratified a human rights treaty which commits them to respect the freedom of scientific research.

But because of recent "significant deteriorations" in countries with large populations, "only every third person in the world today lives in a country where research and higher education enjoys a high degree of freedom," she said.

Accounting for the world's growing population, the proportion of people living in nations with academic freedom is comparable to 1973, she added.

"Now, 45.5 percent of the world's population -- 3.6 billion people -- live in 27 countries where academic freedom is completely restricted," the report said.

'From bad to worse'

Significant declines were particularly seen in India, China and Russia -- the first, second and ninth most populous nations -- which Kinzelbach called "clear examples of autocratisation".

"Academic freedom has fallen dramatically" in India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took power in 2014, she said.

Kinzelbach cited the example of British-Indian academic Nitasha Kaul, a politics professor at the UK's University of Westminster denied entry to India for a conference last month.

In Russia and China, "academic freedom was never great, and it has now deteriorated from bad to worse," Kinzelbach said.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the index found academic freedom had also fallen in the United States since 2019, which Kinzelbach called "a shock for many academics".

She emphasised both society and the political system in the US were "highly polarised".

"University campuses have become arenas where this polarisation unfolds," she said, calling for "calm, evidence-based debates on campus -- including about highly divisive issues."

Most European countries had very high academic freedom according to the index, with Hungary scoring the lowest rate followed by Poland.

However Kinzelbach said Poland's score will likely improve under the new government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

In a divided Europe, (SOCIALIST) Spain emerges as a champion of Palestinian statehood

Agence France-Presse
April 5, 2024 

Demonstrators hold a canvas with a detail of Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" and a giant Palestinian flag during a protest in the Basque city of San Sebastian on January 28, 2024. © Ander Gillenea, AFP

Spain’s Pedro Sanchez has been a staunch critic of Israel’s Gaza offensive since the start of the conflict, standing out in a cautious and divided Europe. He is now pushing his EU partners to recognize a Palestinian state and take concrete action over Israel’s conduct of the war.

As he wrapped up his latest tour of the Middle East in Doha on Thursday, Spain’s Pedro Sanchez had a message for his Israeli counterpart, delivered on Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based channel Binyamin Netanyahu has vowed to take off the airwaves.

The European Union should review its strategic relationship with Israel if it determines that Israel has breached humanitarian law in Gaza, said Spain's Socialist leader, expressing his “doubts” that Israel was in compliance with its international obligations.

Sanchez said his country had stopped selling weapons to Israel, and urged other nations to do the same, pointing to a broad shift in the West towards greater criticism of Israel's Gaza offensive, which was triggered by October 7 Hamas-led massacres in southern Israel.

The Spanish leader reiterated his call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for the international recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state with full membership in the United Nations, confirming Madrid would go ahead with plans to recognize Palistinian statehood.

While Sanchez did not give a timetable, his Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares confirmed on Wednesday that Madrid would recognize the State of Palestine before July.

“We need a real Palestinian state,” Albares said at a meeting with journalists in Brussels. “The Palestinian people must not be condemned to forever be refugees.”

Spats with Israel

Since the start of the war in Gaza, Spain’s Sanchez has emerged as one of the most forceful EU critics of Israel’s ferocious riposte, which has ravaged most of the Palestinian enclave and killed or maimed tens of thousands of its inhabitants.

In the weeks following Hamas's murderous October 7 rampage, as most Western countries including France offered unqualified support to Israel and its right to defend itself, Spain stood out in its insistence on a comprehensive solution to the decades-old Mideast conflict.

On a visit to Israel in November 23, Sanchez repeated his condemnation of the “terrible terrorist acts of Hamas”, saying he understood Israel’s “frustration and pain”. But he also told his Israeli counterpart that Israel must respect international law and end the “humanitarian catastrophe” in the Gaza Strip.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (right) pictured with his Israeli counterpart Binyamin Netanyahu (centre) and Belgium's Alexander De Croo in Jerusalem on November 23, 2023. © Borja Puig de la Bellacasa, AFP

“Any solution must be comprehensive. It’s in Israel’s interest to work for peace. And today peace means the establishment of a viable State of Palestine that includes the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem,” Sanchez told Netanyahu, a resolute opponent of Palestinian statehood.

After visiting a Kibbutz in southern Israel, where around 100 people were killed during the October 7 attack, Sanchez stopped at the Gaza Strip border and denounced what he called the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians, drawing an angry response from Israel which said the remarks gave terrorism a boost. Days later, as images of child victims and bombed-out buildings flooded social media, the Spanish leader said he had “serious doubts [Israel] is complying with international humanitarian law”, prompting Israel to recall its ambassador in Madrid.

In January, when most Western countries rushed to suspend their funding of UNRWA over Israeli allegations that some of its staff had a role in the October 7 attacks, Spain chose instead to triple its donations, citing the UN aid agency’s role in providing urgently needed aid to Gaza’s stricken civilian population.

The next month, as EU ministers failed to agree on a package of sanctions for violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Spain said it would press ahead with unilateral sanctions. It also asked Brussels to urgently review whether Israel is complying with its human rights obligations in the Gaza Strip, teaming up with the Irish government, another vocal critic of Israel’s military campaign.

Spain’s ‘shy’ diplomacy

Madrid’s vocal criticism of Israel has given unusual visibility to a country often seen as punching below its weight when it comes to shaping the EU’s foreign policy.

“Spain has often been a little shy when it comes to asserting itself as a key European player,” said Barah Mikail, a professor of international security and a Middle East expert at Saint Louis University’s Madrid campus.

“On the other hand, its strategic interests and its geographical and historical proximity to the Arab world mean there is plenty of potential for Spain to play a role in shaping a European policy that is orientated towards the Mediterranean,” Mikail added, noting that Spanish diplomacy had a history of activism on the Middle East conflict.

He pointed to the 1991 Madrid Conference, an attempt to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through multilateral negotiations, which was credited with paving the way for the Oslo Accords and a relative rapprochement between Israel and several Arab states.

Kelly Petillo, program manager for the Middle East and North Africa at the European Council for Foreign Affairs, suggested a form of “continuity” between Sanchez’s current stance and broader Spanish policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“I think historically the issue of Palestinian statehood sees bipartisan support in Spain,” Petillo explained. “When Palestine was recognised by the UN General Assembly as a non-member observer state (in 2012), this was voted positively by Spain, under a right-wing government coalition.”

She described the stance adopted by the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister who has been a persistent critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza, as “a product of this years-long Spanish tradition of political support for Palestine”.

Sympathy for Palestine

Two years after the UN vote elevating Palestine to observer status, the Spanish parliament passed a first, non-binding resolution to recognize Palestinian statehood, though Sanchez – then the opposition leader – maintained at the time that official recognition should only happen in concert with the rest of the European Union.

His decision to push for unilateral recognition reflects both the urgency of the crisis in Gaza and the shifting power dynamics within Spain’s left-wing coalition government, which includes autonomist parties as well as parties to the left of Sanchez’s Socialists.

“The coalition has pushed the Socialist Party towards less ambiguous and more progressive stances,” said Federico Lopez-Terra, an associate professor of Hispanic studies at Swansea University, who highlighted the growing polarisation at play in Spanish politics, in which “adopting middle-ground stances may not be seen as strategically viable”.

Traditionally, Spain’s left-wing voters are broadly sympathetic towards the Palestinians, Lopez-Terra noted. So are many voters in the autonomous regions whose support Sanchez relies on.

“Considering Spain's political history of plural nationalisms within the state, it's to be expected that regions with a history of active struggles for independence and self-determination will exhibit greater sympathy towards the Palestinian cause,” he explained.

On December 8, more than 3,000 people lined up to form a human mosaic reproducing the Palestinian flag in the Basque town of Guernica, the site of the first major bombing of a civilian population in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, later immortalized by Pablo Picasso’s famous painting.

Such protests have been commonplace throughout Spain, without eliciting the controversies witnessed in other European countries, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived as a more sensitive subject owing to historical and sociological factors.

Mikail said Sanchez’s vocal criticism of Israel had allowed him to appear in step with the Spanish public’s outrage at the bloodshed in Gaza – and to “deflect attention” away from domestic issues that have proved far more divisive, such as the amnesty promised to Catalan separatist leaders in exchange for their support in forming a government.

“This initiative aligns with his strategy of developing a strong international reputation, rather than solely focusing on internal affairs, which has proven very successful,” added Lopez-Terra.

Leadership role

Sanchez’s activism on the international stage has turned him into the de facto leader of a group of like-minded EU nations, which includes Belgium, Ireland, Malta and Slovenia. The latter three announced last month they would work with Spain towards recognition of a Palestinian state – a move Israel said would represent a “prize for terrorism”.

“The trouble for Sanchez is that he is pushing for Palestinian statehood at a time when he has no voice within the UN Security Council,” said Mikail, adding that the Spanish leader had failed to capitalise on Madrid’s recent six-month presidency of the EU to push his Middle East agenda as he battled to form a government after inconclusive elections.

“As a result, he is relying on Malta,” whose month-long presidency of the Security Council began on April 1,” Mikail added.

Malta’s UN ambassador Vanessa Frazier told reporters on Monday that the Security Council’s standing committee for new members, which includes all 15 council nations, was expected to meet behind closed doors to consider a new application for full Palestinian membership of the UN, submitted by 140 countries. However, the bid is certain to fail, the US having promised to veto such a move.

At the EU level, Sanchez has a key ally in Borrell, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, a prominent advocate of a two-state solution.

“Josep Borrell's clear and vocal stance on the issue has bolstered Spain's perceived leadership within the European context,” said Lopez-Terra. “Sanchez knows that he's finding continuity at the institutional level through Borrell,” added Mikail. “It allows him to claim he is not contradicting the EU’s general stance regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

In reality, however, the EU is far from aligned when it comes to recognizing a Palestinian state, Petillo cautioned.

“Some EU member states are far from recognizing a Palestinian state, like Germany, whereas others have expressed a willingness to do so but only once a ceasefire and hostage release, at the very least, are achieved,” she said. “So I would say the main difference between Spain and other willing EU member states lies in the sequencing and implementation of this measure.”

Should Spain and the likes of Ireland press ahead without waiting, “it would be a very significant political development, which however will not change much on the ground,” Petillo said, stressing that it would take more a concerted effort by the international community to obtain concrete results.

Israel’s decision on Friday to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, amid widespread outrage over a strike that killed seven aid workers this week, was a first result, Petillo added.

“If EU states and the US don’t create real consequences for Israel’s actions, little will change,” she said. “Luckily, we just heard that other humanitarian crossings (into Gaza) will open, which shows that pressure does work.”

An anonymous coder nearly hacked a big chunk of the internet. How worried should we be?
The Conversation
April 4, 2024 

Hacker over a screen with binary code. (Shutterstock)

Outside the world of open-source software, it’s likely few people would have heard about XZ Utils, a small but widely used tool for data compression in Linux systems. But late last week, security experts uncovered a serious and deliberate flaw that could leave networked Linux computers susceptible to malicious attacks.

The flaw has since been confirmed as a critical issue that could allow a knowledgeable hacker to gain control over vulnerable Linux systems. Because Linux is used throughout the world in email and web servers and application platforms, this vulnerability could have given the attacker silent access to vital information held on computers throughout the world – potentially including the device you’re using right now to read this.

Major software vulnerabilities, such as the SolarWinds hack and the Heartbleed bug, are nothing new – but this one is very different.

The XZ Utils hack attempt took advantage of the way open-source software development often works. Like many open-source projects, XZ Utils is a crucial and widely used tool – and it is maintained largely by a single volunteer, working in their spare time. This system has created huge benefits for the world in the form of free software, but it also carries unique risks.

Open source and XZ Utils

First of all, a brief refresher on open-source software. Most commercial software, such as the Windows operating system or the Instagram app, is “closed-source” – which means nobody except its creators can read or modify the source code. By contrast, with “open-source” software, the source code is openly available and people are free to do what they like with it.

Open-source software is very common, particularly in the “nuts and bolts” of software which consumers don’t see, and hugely valuable. One recent study estimated the total value of open source software in use today at US$8.8 trillion.

Until around two years ago, the XZ Utils project was maintained by a developer called Lasse Collin. Around that time, an account using the name Jia Tan submitted an improvement to the software.

Not long after, some previously unknown accounts popped up to report bugs and submit feature requests to Collin, putting pressure on him to take on a helper in maintaining the project. Jia Tan was the logical candidate.

Over the next two years, Jia Tan become more and more involved and, we now know, introduced a carefully hidden weapon into the software’s source code.

The revised code secretly alters another piece of software, a ubiquitous network security tool called OpenSSH, so that it passes malicious code to a target system. As a result, a specific intruder will be able to run any code they like on the target machine.

The latest version of XZ Utils, containing the backdoor, was set to be included in popular Linux distributions and rolled out across the world. However, it was caught just in time when a Microsoft engineer investigated some minor memory irregularities on his system.

A rapid response

What does this incident mean for open-source software? Well, despite initial appearances, it doesn’t mean open-source software is insecure, unreliable or untrustworthy.

Because all the code is available for public scrutiny, developers around the world could rapidly begin analysing the backdoor and the history of how it was implemented. These efforts could be documented, distributed and shared, and the specific malicious code fragments could be identified and removed.

A response on this scale would not have been possible with closed-source software.

An attacker would need to take a somewhat different approach to target a closed-source tool, perhaps by posing as a company employee for a long period and exploiting the weaknesses of the closed-source software production system (such as bureaucracy, hierarchy, unclear reporting lines and poor knowledge sharing).

However, if they did achieve such a backdoor in proprietary software, there would be no chance of large-scale, distributed code auditing.

Lessons to be learned

This case is a valuable opportunity to learn about weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a different sort.

First, it demonstrates the ease with which online relations between anonymous users and developers can become toxic. In fact, the attack depended on the normalization of these toxic interactions.

The social engineering part of the attack appears to have used anonymous “sockpuppet” accounts to guilt-trip and emotionally coerce the lead maintainer into accepting minor, seemingly innocuous code additions over a period of years, pressuring them to cede development control to Jia Tan.

One user account complained:
You ignore the many patches bit rotting away on this mailing list. Right now you choke your repo.

When the developer professed mental health issues, another account chided:
I am sorry about your mental health issues, but its important to be aware of your own limits.

Individually such comments might appear innocuous, but in concert become a mob.

We need to help developers and maintainers better understand the human aspects of coding, and the social relationships that affect, underpin or dictate how distributed code is produced. There is much work to be done, particularly to improve the recognition of the importance of mental health.

A second lesson is the importance of recognizing “obfuscation”, a process often used by hackers to make software code and processes difficult to understand or reverse-engineer. Many universities do not teach this as part of a standard software engineering course.

Third, some systems may still be running the dangerous versions of XZ Utils. Many popular smart devices (such as refrigerators, wearables and home automation tools) run on Linux. These devices often reach an age at which it is no longer financially viable for their manufacturers to update their software – meaning they do not receive patches for newly discovered security holes.

And finally, whoever is behind the attack – some have speculated it may be a state actor – has had free access to a variety of codebases over a two-year period, perpetrating a careful and patient deception. Even now, that adversary will be learning from how system administrators, Linux distribution producers and codebase maintainers are reacting to the attack.

Where to from here?

Code maintainers around the world are now thinking about their vulnerabilities at a strategic and tactical level. It is not only their code itself they will be worrying about, but also their code distribution mechanisms and software assembly processes.

My colleague David Lacey, who runs the not-for-profit cybersecurity organization IDCARE, often reminds me the situation facing cybersecurity professionals is well articulated by a statement from the IRA. In the wake of their unsuccessful bombing of the Brighton Grand Hotel in 1984, the terrorist organization chillingly claimed:
Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.


Sigi Goode, Professor of Information Systems, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

RFK Jr. sugar daddies exposed as MAGA-loving anti-vax extremists

Kathleen Culliton
April 5, 2024 

RAW STORY

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential nomination. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Supporters of former President Donald Trump are pumping money into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, according to a new report.

Steve and Tracy Slepcevic are the subject of an in-depth Mother Jones investigation into the gray political area between Kennedy and Trump where anti-vaccination, QAnon followers and Christian nationalists lurk.

According to the report, Kennedy attends Slepcevic-hosted fundraisers where tickets costs upwards of $2,700 and is selling signed copies of Tracy’s book — in which she claims autism can be cured — for $150.

But the couple also have strong ties to Trump, Mother Jones reports.

Among those who have promoted Slepcevic’s book are Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who faced charges of foreign lobbying crimes before receiving a pardon from the former president, and Stew Peters, whose pro-Nazi Rumble content has been monetized by Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

“Tracy is a regular on the far-right conspiracy circuit,” the report notes. “In November 2022, she joined the ReAwaken America tour as a speaker. This was a traveling road show that fused Christian nationalism, QAnonism, and MAGAism.”

Steve Slepcevic, according to the report, appears to have attended Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021 and said at a recent conference he’s worked with Turning Point USA, the conservative group led by Trump champion Charlie Kirk.

Neither Steve nor Tracy Slepcevic responded to Mother Jones’ multiple requests for comment.

Mother Jones asked the Kennedy campaign, among other questions, “how does the campaign feel about their ties to pro-Trump extremists?”

The campaign replied: “Your request for comment is under consideration and your deadline is noted. If the campaign has a response, we will let you know.”

Now we know how Hitler did it

Thom Hartmann
April 6, 2024

TRUTH OUT

Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Phoenix (Gage Skidmore)

LONG READ

The Nazis in America are now “out.” This morning, former Republican Joe Scarborough explicitly compared Trump and his followers to Hitler and his Brownshirts on national television. They’re here.

At the same time, America’s richest man is retweeting antisemitism, rightwing influencers and radio/TV hosts are blaming “Jews and liberals” for the “invasion” of “illegals” to “replace white people,” and the entire GOP is embracing candidates and legislators who encourage hate and call for violence.

Are there parallels between the MAGA takeover of the GOP and the Nazi takeover of the German right in the 1930s?

It began with a national humiliation: defeat in war. For Germany, it was WWI; for America it was two wars George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lied us into as part of their 2004 “wartime president” re-election strategy (which had worked so well for Nixon with Vietnam in 1972 and Reagan with Grenada in 1984).

Hitler fought in WWI but later blamed Germany’s defeat on the nation being “stabbed in the back” by liberal Jews, their fellow travelers, and incompetent German military leadership.

Trump cheered on Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but later lied and claimed he’d opposed the war. Both blamed the nation’s humiliation on the incompetence or evil of their political enemies.

The economic crisis caused by America’s Republican Great Depression had gone worldwide and Hitler used the gutting of the German middle class (made worse by the punishing Treaty of Versailles) as a campaign issue, promising to restore economic good times.


Trump pointed to the damage forty years of neoliberalism had done to the American middle class and promised to restore blue-collar prosperity. Hitler promised he would “make Germany great again”; Trump campaigned on the slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Both tried to overthrow their governments by violence and failed, Hitler in a Bavarian beer hall and Trump on January 6th. Both then turned to legal means to seize control of their nations.

Hitler’s scapegoats were Jews, gays, and liberals. “There are only two possibilities,” he told a Munich crowd in 1922. “Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew.”


He promised “I will get rid of the ‘communist vermin’,” “I will take care of the ‘enemy within’,” “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood,” and “One people, one nation, one leader.”

Trump’s scapegoats were Blacks, Muslims, immigrants, and liberals.

He said he will “root out” “communists … and radical left thugs that live like vermin”; he would destroy “the threat from within”; migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”; and that under Trump’s leadership America will become “One people, one family, one glorious nation.”


Hitler called the press the Lügenpresse or “lying press.” Trump quoted Stalin, calling our news agencies and reporters “the enemy of the people.”

Both exploited religion and religious believers. Hitler proclaimed a “New Christianity” for Germany and encouraged fundamentalist factions within both the Catholic and Protestant faiths.

Every member of the Germany army got a belt-buckle inscribed with Gott Mit Uns (God is with us).


Trump embraced rightwing Catholics and evangelical Protestants and, like the German churches in 1933, has been lionized by their leaders.

Hitler made alliances with other autocrats (Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo) and conspired with them to take over much of the planet. Trump disrespected our NATO and European allies and embraced the murderous dictator of Saudi Arabia, the psychopathic leader of Russia, and the absolute tyrant who runs North Korea.

Both Hitler and Trump had an “inciting incident” that became the touchstone for their rise to illegitimate levels of power.


For Hitler it was the burning of the German parliament building, the Reichstag, by a mentally ill Dutchman. For Trump it is his claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the martyrdom of his supporters after their attempted coup on January 6th.

Hitler embraced rightwing Bavarian street gangs and brawlers, organizing them into a volunteer militia who called themselves the Brownshirts (Hitler called them the Sturm Abeilung or Storm Division).

Trump embraces rightwing militia groups and motorcycle gangs, and implicitly praises his followers when they attack people like Paul Pelosi, election workers, and prosecutors and judges who are attempting to hold him accountable for his criminal behavior.


While Trump has mostly focused his public hate campaigns against racial and religious minorities, behind the scenes he and his administration had worked hand-in-glove with anti-gay fanatics like Mike Johnson to limit the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

His administration opposed the Equality Act, saying it would “undermine parental and conscience rights.” More than a third (36%) of his judicial nominees had previously expressed “bias and bigotry towards queer people.” His administration filed briefs in the landmark Bostock case before the Supreme Court, claiming that civil rights laws don’t protect LGBTQ+ people.

His Department of Health and Human Services ended Obama-era medical protections for queer people. His Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, took apart regulations protecting transgender kids in public schools. His HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, proposed new rules allowing shelters to turn away homeless queer people at a time when one-in-five homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+.


German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.

A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.

In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.


Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people — with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people — across German media.

German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.

Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was the first major Nazi book-burning and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: soon it spread to the libraries and public high schools.

The conservative elite of Germany, particularly Fritz Thyssen, Hjalmar Schacht, and Gustav Krupp were early supporters of Hitler, as he promised to crush the German labor movement and cut their taxes.

Without the support of rightwing billionaires funding Cambridge Analytica and Trump’s campaign he never would have won the electoral college in 2016.

Hitler couldn’t have risen to power without the support of the largest outlets in German media. Some treated him as “just another politician,” normalizing his fascist rhetoric. Others openly supported him.

After his failed beer hall putsch, he was legally banned from public speaking and mass rallies but, in 1930, German media mogul Alfred Hugenberg — a rightwing billionaire who owned two of the largest national newspapers and had considerable influence over radio — joined forces with Hitler and relentlessly promoted him, much like the Murdoch media empire and 1,500 billionaire-owned rightwing radio stations across the country helped bring Trump to power in 2016 and still promote him every day.

Hitler’s first major seizure of dictatorial power was his use of the Weimar law Article 48 which, during a time of crisis, empowered the nation’s leader to suspend due process and habeas corpus, turn the army’s guns on people deemed insurrectionists, and arrest people without charges or trial.

Its American equivalents are the State of Emergency Declaration and the Insurrection Act, both of which Trump has promised to invoke in his first days in office if he’s re-elected in 2024.

Once Hitler had seized full control of the German government, he set about changing the nation’s laws to replace democracy with autocracy. His enablers in the German Parliament passed the “Enabling Act” that gave Hitler’s cabinet the power to write and implement their own laws.

Trump promises to use the theoretical “unitary executive” powers rightwing groups claim the president holds, but has never used in our history, to have his new cabinet rewrite many of our nation’s laws.

Hitler followed the Enabling Act, six months later, with the Act for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which authorized him to gut the German Civil Service and replace career bureaucrats with toadies loyal exclusively to him. It was the end of any semblance of resistance to the Nazis or preservation of democracy within the new German government.

In his last three weeks in office, Trump issued an executive order called Schedule F that ended Civil Service protections for around 50,000 of America’s top government officials, including the senior levels of every federal agency, so he could replace them all with political appointees (Biden reversed it). The Heritage Foundation is reportedly now vetting over 50,000 people to fill these ranks if Trump is reelected and, as promised, reinstates Schedule F.

The last bastion of resistance to Hitler within the German government was the judiciary, and Hitler altered the German Civil Service Code in January 1937, giving his cabinet the power to remove any judges from office who were deemed “non-compliant” with “Nazi laws or principles.”

When Judge Jon Tigar of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Trump’s new rules barring people from receiving asylum in 2018, Trump attacked Tigar as “a disgrace” and “an Obama judge.” He added that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is “really something we have to take a look at because it’s not fair,” adding, “That’s not law. Every case that gets filed in the Ninth Circuit we get beaten.”

Because the German Supreme Court was still, from time to time, ruling against Hitler’s Gleichschaltung or Nazification of the German government and legal code, and he had no easy legal mechanism to pack the court or term-limit the justices, in 1934 he created an entirely new court to replace it, which he called the People’s Court.

Trump packed the US Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, many of whom are heavily beholden to oligarchs and industries aligned with Trump and the GOP. If they continue to go along with him — and there’s little to indicate they won’t — he won’t need to create a new court.

When Hitler took over the country in 1933, the military leadership was wary of him and his plans. While they shared many of his conservative views about social issues, most still held a strong loyalty to the German constitution.

It took him the better part of two years, with heavy support from his Brownshirts (who he’d by then integrated into the military) to purge the senior levels of the Army and replace them with Nazi loyalists.

The night before January 6th, newly-elected Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville joined Trump’s sons to help organize the coup planned for the next day. As the Alabama Political Reporter newspaper reported at the time:

“The night before the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville and the then-director of the Republican Attorneys General Association met with then-President Donald Trump’s sons and close advisers, according to a social media post by a Nebraska Republican who at the time was a Trump administration appointee.


“Charles W. Herbster, who was then the national chairman of the Agriculture and Rural Advisory Committee in Trump’s administration, in a Facebook post at 8:33 p.m. on Jan. 5 said that he was standing ‘in the private residence of the President at Trump International with the following patriots who are joining me in a battle for justice and truth.’ …
“Among the attendees, according to Herbster’s post, were Tuberville, former RAGA director Adam Piper, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, adviser Peter Navarro, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and 2016 deputy campaign manager David Bossie.”


Tuberville is now holding open the top ranks of the US military, presumably so if Trump is reelected he can pack our armed forces with people who won’t defy his orders when he demands they seize voting machines and fire live ammunition at the inevitable protestors.

When Hitler took power in 1933, he quickly began mass arrests of illegal immigrants, gypsies, union activists, liberal commentators and reporters, and (as noted earlier) queer people. To house this exploding prison population, he first took over a defunct munitions factory in Dachau; within a few years there were over a hundred of these camps where “criminals” were “concentrated and separated from society.” He called them concentration camps.

The New York Times reports that Trump is planning to “build huge camps to detain people,” and “to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget.”

How many people? “Millions” writes the Times. And not just immigrants: Trump is planning to send his enemies to them, too.

Will he succeed in getting around Congress? He did the last time, with money to build his wall taken from military housing.

So far, that’s as bad as it gets: what he has already promised. But these are early days.

Hitler was unbothered by the deaths of German citizens, and was enthusiastic about the deaths of those he considered his enemies.

On April 7, 2020 all three TV networks, The New York Times and The Washington Post lead with the breaking story that Black people were dying at about twice the rate of white people from Covid. The Times headline, for example, read: “Black Americans Bear the Brunt as Deaths Climb.”

A month earlier Trump had shut down the country, but when this report came out he and Kushner did an immediate turnabout, demanding that mostly minority “essential workers” get back to work.

As an “expert” member of Jared Kushner’s team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration’s PPE response noted to Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban:

“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”


It was, after all, exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there was an election coming in just a few months.

Trump even invoked the Defense Production Act and issued an Executive Order requiring mostly minority slaughterhouse and meatpacking employees go back to work. It led to a half-million unnecessary American deaths and to this day neither Trump nor Kushner has ever apologized.

In the final years of the Third Reich, Hitler authorized his “final solution to the Jewish problem” that included building death camps in countries outside Germany to methodically exterminate millions of people. These were different from the hundreds of prisons and concentration camps he’d built within Germany for “criminals and undesirables,” although at those camps people were often worked to death or slaughtered when the war started going south.

So far, Trump and his people haven’t suggested the need for death camps in America, although Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott seem particularly eager to see immigrants die either from razor wire or gunshot.

But, then, the Nazis never officially announced their external death camps either; like Bush’s criminal “black sites” overseas where hundreds of innocent Afghans and Iraqis were tortured, often to death, they figured they’d never be found out.

There are few Americans alive today who remember Hitler, and for most of us the details of his rise to power are lost to the mists of time. But Donald Trump is bringing it all back to us with a fresh, stark splash of reality.

When I lived in Germany I worked with several Germans who had been in the Hitler Youth. One met Hitler. Another, Armin Lehmann, became a dear friend over the years and wrote a book about his experience as the 16-year-old courier who handed Hitler the news the war was lost and stood outside Hitler’s bunker room as he committed suicide.

They were good people, children at the time really, and were (they’ve all died within the last two decades) haunted by their experience.

It can happen here.

We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope toward unaccountable fascism for several decades, and this coming year will stand at the threshold of an entirely new form of American government that could mean the end of the American experiment.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice for our democracy to rise or fall will be in our hands.

NOW READ: How Donald Trump is spreading a dangerous mental illness to his supporters

Angry God, omens, and 'Dark Brandon' - N.Y. quake gets wacky

Agence France-Presse
April 6, 2024 

The skyline of midtown Manhattan in New York City is seen from the United Nations headquarters in New York City, New York, U.S., July 20, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Was it God feeling angry? A dire portent? Or perhaps Joe Biden's superhero alter ego pursuing Donald Trump?

Many were reluctant to admit that the 4.8 magnitude earthquake rattling New York on Friday was just an unimpressive little shake.

This is New York after all.

And with a rare total eclipse set to blot out the sun up the eastern United States on Monday, some are already looking for answers.

"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come," Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene -- a noted conspiracy theorist even in normal times -- wrote on X.

"I pray that our country listens," she posted.

On the other side of the political spectrum, some spotted that the epicenter of the quake was close to Trump's New Jersey golf club in Bedminster.

The MeidasTouch group, which opposes Trump, highlighted the New Jersey map under a meme of "Dark Brandon" -- a version of Biden in which the 81-year-old president is depicted grinning with red laser beams shooting from his eyes.

Others poked fun at the doomsayers with a little doomsaying of their own.

"Old Gypsy woman: *turns over a tarot card that shows an Earthquake in NYC just days before a total solar eclipse*," wrote Robert McNees, described as a physicist, on X.

"Sources say that New Yorkers should expect a swarm of locusts following the earthquake, floods and eclipse. Rumblings of concern about plagues so soon before Passover," another poster on X wrote.

New York is also the US media capital, ensuring an unparalleled ratio between the number of journalists and relative lack of news to cover.


In the ensuing race for original headlines, perhaps The Guardian will be recorded as the winner, with: "US man was getting vasectomy as earthquake struck."

According to the article, he emerged from the experience as smoothly as everyone else in the city that never sleeps.

"It mostly felt like a speed bump," he told the outlet.

'Ivana rolling in her grave': Trump golf course at epicenter of quake spurs weird theories

Kathleen Culliton
April 5, 2024 

Trump seen in the rough atTrump National Golf Club Potomac Falls, Va., on Father's Day 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

The far-right gets a lot of credit for concocting conspiracy theories linked to the highest level of government, but an earthquake near former President Donald Trump's golf Friday gave Democrats a chance to shine.

Donald Trump’s National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Friday was at the epicenter of a magnitude 4.8 earthquake that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) warned was a message from God to "repent."

This spurred Trump biographer Tim O'Brien to reply, "Does MTG know the earthquake’s epicenter was a 12-minute drive from Trump’s Bedminster, NJ golf course?"

News spread fast that the golf course — among those Attorney General Letitia James considered seizing as Trump struggled to find a $464 million bond in his civil fraud trial — was at the heart of the day's quake.

"Now I'm not normally one of those Doomsday people," said X user the Real Thelma Johnson, "but with an Earthquake epicenter at Bedminster Golf Club, Lightning striking the Statue of Liberty, and the upcoming Eclipse... God is obviously very angry Donald Trump is not in jail."

The Bedminster golf course is also where Trump's ex-wife Ivana was laid to rest not too far from the main clubhouse, as one source told the New York Post upon her death in 2022.

"Relax, New Jersey," wrote X user Marc Goldstein. "That was no earthquake. It was just Ivana rolling over and knocking down a stack of classified documents."

X user @dreamwithfaith agreed, adding, "That was Ivana rolling over in her grave cause the classified documents are getting too heavy."

Trump has dominated the 2024 news cycle as he became the first former president to head to court on criminal charges — his New York City hush money case is slated to go to trial on April 15 — and become the professional focus of journalists across the nation.

One of those reporters, Anna Bower, was among the first to chart the earthquake's proximity to the Bedminster golf course.

"Is there any news this man doesn’t touch?" the Lawfare reporter demanded to know on Friday.

Replied Eric Columbus, a former appointee of former President Barack Obama, "On Monday he’ll blot out the sun."

'Girl you are insane': MTG slammed for claiming earthquake was sign from God

Kathleen Culliton
April 5, 2024 

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) at a news conference this month.

 (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

As Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) prayed Friday that America would heed God's warning that had been supposedly been delivered by a relatively minor earthquake, many other Americans prayed someone would tell her about science.

Greene issued a stern warning on social media Friday after a magnitude 4.8 earthquake rumbled east coast cities from Philadelphia to Boston and three days before a solar eclipse is slated to cross over the northern hemisphere.

"God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent," Greene declared. "Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens."

This is not the first time Greene (R-GA) has evoked God's name to express a political point. She once accused transgender people of "destroying God's creation" and last year claimed her savior flooded the music festival Burning Man.

Nor is this the first time Greene has offered a questionable take on natural events, having infamously blamed space lasers supposedly financed by the Rothschild family for California's wildfires.

This may be why Greene's comment Friday was not met with the reverence she might have anticipated.

"Girl you are insane," replied X user Jersey Craig.

X user @SundaeDivine replied with a pithy round-up of Greene gaffes that include mistaking Nazi secret police with cold Spanish soup and fruit-bearing arbors for cell-culture plates.

"It was the Jewish Space Lasers being controlled by the Gazpacho Police targeting the Peach Tree dishes on Capitol Hill," they replied.

Christopher Hale provided Greene with a friendly reminder of the complicated but precise astrophysical calculations that have rendered solar eclipses predictable for centuries.

"Bless your heart, Marjorie," Hale replied. "Eclipses have been predetermined since the dawn of creation. You are perhaps the dumbest person ever elected to the United States Congress."

Christopher Hyre had another interpretation of the message God meant to send Greene.

"Maybe God is telling you to do your job?" Hyre said. "Stop being a horrible person."

Keith Higgins had a historical question: "Did we just slide backward to the Dark Ages?"

Kristi Noem banned from Native American reservation because of 'gossip and lies'

Alex Henderson, 

AlterNet
April 5, 2024 

Republican presidential candidate and\u00a0former President Donald Trump greets South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem after she introduced him at the Monument Leaders Rally hosted by the South Dakota Republican Party on September 8, 2023, in Rapid City, S.D. Noem endorsed Trump during the event. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been barred from a Native American reservation because its residents accuse her of “gossip and lies,” according to a report.

Noem is reportedly on the shortlist to be a running mate for 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and has been a popular speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and MAGA Republicans view her as a staunch Trump loyalist.

But she has plenty of critics outside of MAGA circles, including Native Americans in her state.

According to Dakota News Now, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has banned Noem from its reservation. It was only two months ago, in February, that the Oglala Sioux Tribe announced a similar ban against her.

These bans come after some disparaging comments Noem made about Native American reservations during a town hall event on March 13.

Dakota News Nob reports, "Noem stated, at a Winner, (South Dakota) town hall on March 13, that she believes tribal leaders are 'personally benefiting' from drug cartels. At a town hall in Mitchell, she said tribal children 'don't have parents who show up and help them,' and tribal members 'have a tribal council or a president who focuses on a political agenda more than they care about actually helping somebody's life look better.'"

Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Ryman LeBeau said of Noem, "The South Dakota governor speaks gossip and lies about our Lakota students, their parents and our tribal councils. (The) SD governor's statements made on March 13, 2024 perpetuate stereotypes, misconceptions, which are inaccurate and untrue."

Billionaire who floated Trump's $175 million fraud bond says he 'didn't charge enough'

M.L. Nestel
April 5, 2024 

Donald Trump (Photo via AFP)

The billionaire white knight who swooped in to cover the $175 million surety civil fraud bond to assist Donald Trump is feeling a little buyer's remorse for assessing such bargain basement fees.

"We thought it would be an easy procedure that wouldn't involve other legal problems and it's not turning out that way," Hankey told Reuters, voicing his strain over the speed bumps his offering has encountered not disclosing the amount of fees charged. "We probably didn't charge enough."

On April 1, former President Donald Trump via billionaire Don Hankey, who owns the Knight Speciality Insurance Company (KSIC), reportedly met the obligation to secure the $175 million bond before the deadline while he fights the $464 million disgorgement ruling made by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.

It has since been “returned for correction."

Holding up the bond is the fact that Hankey's surety company, which isn't based in New York, has to show its financials have "sufficiently collateralized by identifiable assets."


Trump resubmitted the documents on Thursday with the proper information in hopes his bond would be accepted.

And Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who presided over the months-long fraud trial and ruled against the former president — has called for an April 22 hearing to deal with the bond snags.


The judge found the president's eponymous company The Trump Organization, along with his grown sons, Eric and Don Jr., along with former CFO Allen Weisselberg, committed fraud for years to hype up the value of real-estate portfolio assets to secure advantageous loan and deal terms.

Hankey didn't disclose the fee, but suggested KSIC chose a lower amount because initially the risk was low.

"We have been getting a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls," he said, adding he didn't regret jumping into the fray. "Maybe that's part of the reason he had trouble with other insurance companies."


Hankey told Reuters that he was taken aback by James scrutiny of the bond, saying he was "surprised they're coming down harder on our bond or looking for reasons to cause issues with our instrument."