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How America’s Far Right Nazifies Language — and What to Do about It
Today’s far-right nationalists and their political allies sure do know their modern European history.
They’ve successfully shut off millions from the real world with their extreme contempt for facts.
They’ve created an alternate world of false and salacious conspiracies.
They’ve persuaded their followers to believe that everything is possible and nothing is true.
They’ve conditioned millions to believe that the modern world threatens their very existence — exclusive of impending climate catastrophe, which they dismiss as a liberal hoax.
Is it possible that someone in the far right’s network has read Hannah Arendt cover to cover? The famed political philosopher and author of the 70-year-old classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism, summarized the strategies and consequences of the Nazis rise to power with the pithy observations paraphrased above (minus the climate reference).
That the Nazi propaganda playbook is again being consulted by those bent on their own form of white nationalism should come as no surprise. Why reinvent the Big Lie? Indeed, with the shouts of “Stop the Steal” still ringing across the land, consider these words from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf:
