No Morning Jolt Thursday or Friday; have a blessed Thanksgiving! New Kasich Web Video: Donald Trump Is Pretty Much a Nazi, Right?
Yeesh. John Kasich's campaign takes its biggest shot at Donald Trump, featuring a former U.S. prisoner of war, Ret. Colonel Thomas Moe, adapting a famous quote about the Nazis, and applying it to Trump. 
You might not care if Donald Trump says Muslims should register with their government, because you're not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump says he's going to round up all the Hispanic immigrants, because you're not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump says it's okay to rough up black protesters, because you're not one. And you might not care if Donald Trump wants to suppress journalists, because you're not one. But think about this: If he keeps going, and he actually becomes president, he might just get around to you. And you better hope there's someone left to help you. Pastor Martin Niemoller's poem has many variations, but the most famous one is this: First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. "Governor Kasich, Mike Godwin is on line one!" See what you've done, Governor Kasich? Now you've got me, Trump hater extraordinaire, forced to defend Trump from charges of crypto-Nazism. We still don't know whether Donald Trump really wants Muslims to register with the government. He's never directly proposed it. He's given a half-distracted, loosely-worded affirmative answer to a reporter when it was first brought up by the reporter. Every time he's asked since, he gives an answer about Syrian refugees. Chances are this is a deliberate strategy. When the media writes denunciatory headlines about his comments, Trump wins over the support of the Americans who think a national registry of Muslims would be a good idea. But he also has plausible deniability, as he's never actually proposed it or explicitly said he supported it. Mr. Moe himself engages frustrating verbal slipperiness, claiming Trump says he's "going to round up all the Hispanic immigrants" when he's done nothing of the sort. He's proposed rounding up illegal immigrants of every race, creed, and color. We deport illegal immigrants every year and deported roughly 400,000 in 2012 -- a policy that is Constitutional, legal, and morally justifiable. Trump is proposing an expansion of existing law -- nothing Nazi-ish about that. Moe charges, "Donald Trump says it's okay to rough up black protesters." Here's Trump's comment: "Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing," Trump said on the Fox News Channel on Sunday morning. "I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble." Moe is most accurate here; the crowd reacted thuggishly to the protester, piling on and throwing punches. Ideally, when somebody starts heckling a speaker and creating a disturbance, event security will quickly and firmly remove him. Unfortunately, #BlackLivesMatter protesters who attempt to use the heckler's veto don't make for particularly sympathetic figures. But does anyone think the crowd would have listened politely to a white heckler or protester? Moe unfairly attributes a racist hatred to the motivations of Trump and the protesters. "Donald Trump wants to suppress journalists." I presume Moe is referring to this: Lewandowski threatened to pull the press credentials of a CNN reporter, Noah Gray, last week after Gray sought to leave the press pen during a Trump campaign appearance in Worcester, Mass. Gray, an "embed" for the network who has covered Trump for months, recorded Lewandowski's threat to "blacklist" him and posted it online. Reporters clashed again with Lewandowski and Trump press secretary Hope Hicks on Friday at an event in Spartanburg, S.C. When the journalists tried to interview voters before Trump's speech, they were ordered to return to the press pen, under threat of losing their credentials. They later defied an order by Hicks to remain in the press area, a small area bordered by bicycle rack-like barriers, while Trump greeted supporters on a rope line afterward. Limiting press access to crowds of supporters is bad policy, but hardly fascistic -- or if it is, I recall attending George W. Bush events in 2000 and Hillary Clinton events in 2007 that similarly limited press access to a limited area. The Clinton Global Initiative follows reporters into the bathrooms and waits outside the stall to make sure they don't sneak off. We can argue about whether Trump and his style are good for American politics, but it's not like he's appearing ex nihilio, out of nothing. If you fear the country is sliding into a fascistic direction, cast your gaze wider. We've seen our government jail a filmmaker after blaming terrorist attacks on him; one party push for a constitutional limit on political speech around elections; an NSA metadata collection program that ignores the Fourth Amendment; political targeting from the INS; promotion of the elimination of due process on college campuses, and now, the promotion of eliminating the constitutional rights of Americans on "terror watch lists" -- lists that have no judicial review, no appeal, and give little sense of how an American ends up on it, and even less idea of how to get off it if you're wrongfully accused. In his 2012 State of the Union Address, after touting the U.S. military, Obama declared, "Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach." Inspiring as that may sound at first glance, the country as a whole is not a military unit, obeying orders from their commanders. New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman publicly wishes that we could be "China for a day" so our leaders could "authorize the right solutions." If you really fear the leader of an angry mob roughing up reporters, suppressing all dissent, and making far-reaching, unrealistic demands that their ideology rule everywhere . . . don't look to a Trump rally. Look to a college campus. 
A not-so-phantom menace. Speaking of Nazis… The Man in the High Castle: The Elaborate, Visionary Feel-Bad Hit of the Year Sometime today if everything works out, we'll have a new edition of the pop culture podcast out, discussing the sudden proliferation of Thanksgiving "how to survive your family members who have the audacity to have a different political opinion than you" guides; Turkey Day traditions, the American Music Awards, and finally, the new enormously buzz-generating offering television series from Amazon Studios, The Man in the High Castle. I've watched three episodes so far. Let's begin by stipulating in the most glaring way possible, this show is not for everyone. The show is about life and resistance in a world where the allies lost World War II and Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have carved up the conquered remains of the United States. A lot of people will find the concept too dark, too horrible, too depressing, and too chilling to watch. Allow me to set the tone with the single most horrifying line -- out of many contenders -- in the three episodes I watched. Obergruppenführer John Smith: What about the man I apprehended? Nazi Underling: A Semite, sir, known as 'Doc.' Born Jason Meyer. Parents exterminated Cincinnati Camp, May 17, 1951. Yes, The Man in the High Castle doesn't just depict a world where the Nazis won and conquered America; the Nazis won, and the Holocaust continued on American soil unabated, and the Final Solution appears to have become more or less final. In these three episodes, we meet five characters who are considered Jewish under Nazi law. (By today's standards of Jewish law/tradition, at least four of these characters wouldn't be considered Jewish.) By the end of episode three, all of them have suffered terrible fates. In a previous edition of the Jolt, I noted that Game of Thrones' sudden deaths for heroic characters helped establish a tone of high stakes and big, dramatic risks; happy endings were not only not guaranteed, they aren't to be expected in these stories. In the world of TMITC, any of our heroic characters could get caught and be executed -- or simply run afoul of any of the malevolent figures lurking in a world where life is cheap, compassion is rare, and level-headed, rational couples wonder if there's any good reason to bring a child into the world. If the show's setting and story are so depressing, why are people raving about it? The creators put extraordinary detail into the set design, props, and little details in the story and setting. Offhand remarks reveal so much about this dramatically different world. Few people have heard of Huckleberry Finn. Nazi America has a cross-country "Autobahn." There's a "V.A. Day." A character fearfully speculates, "When Goebbels or Himmler takes over, this time, they won't just flatten D.C. with the H-bomb." Bibles are banned in both Nazi and Japanese-controlled territories. The Reichsmark and Yen are the respective currencies; a Dragnet–style cop show called "Reich Patrol" is on television. There's no rock-and-roll on the radio and the cars have none of the flair of the real-life era. The show constantly shows us familiar sights and settings with disturbing twists, such as Times Square at night: 
The New York skyline is obviously dramatically altered . . . we haven't seen the Empire State Building yet, making me suspect that the towering SS headquarters skyscraper and the altered Statue of Liberty dominate the skyline: 
The Nazis invented the Concorde, or something like it, a few years before our reality: 
In between the Nazi-controlled East and the Japanese-controlled West Coast, in the Rocky Mountains, is a largely lawless no-man's-land where the last pockets of free Americans live -- and where African-Americans, the mentally disabled, and Jews have run. In the background, we see U.S. government posters from the war. 
Three episodes in, there's no discernable heavy-handed moralizing about today's politics. So far, some smug politically correct undergrad who wants to argue "America of the 1960s wasn't so different from Nazi Germany" will be disappointed; almost all of the Americans we see hate their rulers but most feel powerless to change things. But there are occasional glimpses of Americans getting a little too comfortable with the new regime. In the first episode, one of our protagonists is stopped by a Swastika-clad state trooper, and notices ashes falling from the sky. Driver: What is that? Cop: Oh, that's the hospital. Driver: The hospital? Cop: Yeah, Tuesdays, they burn cripples, the terminally ill. Drag on the state. Good thing our real-life society doesn't believe in terminating those with Downs Syndrome and . . . oh, wait, never mind, it does. By this point, you're either saying, "This sounds fascinating, I want to watch" or you're saying, "This sounds like a nightmare, keep it far from my television screen." Michael Graham watched ahead all the way to the end of the season and found the final episode was so depressing, he wanted to fling himself off of a high castle. ADDENDA: Sorry for such a Nazi-heavy final Jolt before Thanksgiving. Monday we'll be back with some Cyber Monday Christmas/Hannukah/Whatever You Celebrate gift ideas, and it won't just be one book listed over and over. | 
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