Periodically I dip a toe into the toxic waters of the far right, or the alt-right, or whatever you want to call it. I’ll sometimes take a look at Laura Ingraham’s site or scout out the latest Breitbart headlines, and even (horrors!) peek at The Gateway Pundit or WorldNetDaily. And I do run across Rush Limbaugh sometimes. (The estimable Allahpundit over at HotAir had an article a day or two ago in which there was a clip of Rush bemoaning Trump’s “cave” over the wall. Pretty entertaining.)
I don’t descend so far as to read or listen to Alex Jones, but I do sometimes read what Michael Savage is saying, or whining. (“Weiner the whiner” is my nickname for him. I can’t stand to listen to him, so I read the transcript excerpts that are posted on his newsletter.) Savage/Weiner claims credit for Trump’s victory, by the way, as the “Godfather of Trumpmania.” I’d be careful about saying that, Michael! (Think I’ll call him by his first name so as to do away with the double last names. Yes, his real name is Michael Alan Weiner. Perfectly respectable name, so I don’t know why he felt the need to change it.)
Last Friday I decided to see what he was up to and was rewarded by the gem that I’m linking to at the end of this post. I refuse to post it directly on my Facebook page, so you have to at least scroll down through my commentary to get to it. Here’s the essence, boiled down into numbered points:
1. Gen. John Kelly, Homeland Security, Secretary had said in a speech at George Washington University that the risk of a terrorist attack on the US was as great today as it was on 9/11. This is one of those sort-of-true-but-squishy statements that people make when they’re trying to be dramatic. How would you even measure such a thing? It’s certainly true that there are any number of extremists/terrorists of many stripes, including Islamic ones, beavering away with plots, and that various law-enforcement agencies are aware of them and keeping an eye on them.
2. Michael wants to know why we’re just a-sitting here, waiting for those nasty people to blow us up. Here are some quotes:
“Terrorists were coming across the border, flying in, walking in, shipping in, coming through Mexico, coming through Canada, coming in through airports.”
“What sane nation doesn’t say we have probable cause and put them into preventative detention?”
“Why shouldn’t it be a manhunt right now with the DHS and the FBI? Why should they have the constitutional rights? Tell me why. Are they even citizens?”
“Would you sit and wait for the Nazis to kill someone before rounding them up?”
3. To bolster his case, he tells a story about how the Germans and/or the Nazis infiltrated America during World War II. Here’s his version of the story:
They brought Germans in who looked like Americans. They spoke English. They came in little submarines off the coast of Long Island and New Jersey. And they came here to blow up trains and bridges and tunnels.
Well, they were hunted down and they were caught.
Yes, Michael—there were eight of them. Eight. And they were easily caught before they did any damage. But as far as you’re concerned, this story says that every Nazi in America should have been rounded up. Hmmm. There were quite a few of those, I’m afraid.
4. Radical Islam is worse that Nazism because it’s “steeped in religion.”
Make believe we’re at war with Hitler’s Germany.
Only in this case we’re at war with an entity worse than Hitler’s Germany. It’s called radical Islam.
The reason I say it’s worse than Hitler and Hitler’s Naziism is because it’s steeped in religion, and they use religion as a weapon. They use religion as a Trojan horse to get away with their vile hatred of our way of life.
I guess the estimable Michael isn’t aware of the religious roots of Nazism, in particular its relationship to the occult and Norse mythology.
If you read Michael’s entire article carefully, you’ll see that he starts out with one real fact: Gen. Kelly’s statement about the risk of terrorism in the US. And he ends with one real fact: the story about the WWII German saboteurs. But in between it’s just a farrago of nonsense, a way of riling up his readers. “Yeah, right! Why don’t we round them up?” If he had a rally, the crowd could chant that slogan: “Round them up! Round them up!” Since there are no more Trump rallies at which to chant “Lock her u! Lock her up!” maybe this could be the new battle cry. Law enforcement should just go ahead and detain anyone who seems suspicious, I guess.
And he never addresses the issue of the group that we did round up and put in internment camps: Japanese citizens, whose country of origin (but not country of citizenship, at least for most of them) had, indeed, attacked the US directly. But I guess mentioning that stain on our country’s honor would hit a little too close to home. I have a feeling, though, that if the estimable Michael had been writing his estimable newsletters in 1941 he’d have been saying, “Why are we waiting for those Japs to strike us again? Why don’t we round them up?”
The philosophy is exactly the same, my friends.
I had to go to some trouble (as did my husband) to find the Savage Nation post that I reference above. When I used a regular Google search the page came up as an “Error 404—no page found.” Hmmm, I thought. I know I read this. I found a link to it on another blog, and it also came up with the error message. So, undeterred, I got Jim to use his computer skills to find it. You’ll see that the heading at the top of the article you get from the first link says it’s a “Google cached” page. Nothing is ever really deleted on the Web! The second link is the one that’s embedded in the article itself, which I’m leaving in so that you can see that I’m telling the truth: Michael tried to delete this post. Or somebody did.
You can read a short article about the German saboteurs here:
“World War II: German Saboteurs Invade America in 1942”