Slow-Motion Coup: Trump's Fake Electors Scheme

As November approaches, and we Americans again participate in the democratic election of our leaders, this year especially we should make ourselves aware of the weaknesses in the U.S. system for presidential election, which is more and more steeped in controversy. For those who don’t follow American politics or haven’t given their old civics lessons much thought in a while, we use the Electoral College for the election of U.S. presidents. This “college” is not a place but a process in which political parties in every state select intermediaries, usually loyal party representatives, who in a later election process will be certain to cast their votes for the candidates nominated by their party. Then, in the general election, everyday citizen voters cast their ballots, but even though on the paper ballots they seem to be voting directly for candidates, really their vote is just for the slate of electors who have pledged to vote for the selected candidates. Is that confusing? Let me try to put it more simply. When we vote for President, our votes are basically only counted as a vote of party preference. Though the names of presidential electors usually don’t appear on the ballots, that’s who we’re actually voting for. So when a party’s chosen electors vote in the general election, they are actually voting for themselves to be their state’s electors. No, it still sounds confusing, and that’s probably because it is, and rather needlessly so, with layers upon layers of election processes preventing genuine direct democracy. Just as in presidential primaries the people may vote for a preferred candidate, but who a party nominates is really determined by party delegates, so too we vote for the ticket we support, but it is electors who really choose the winner. After the general election votes are tallied, the actual presidential election begins. Whichever party got the most votes for their ticket in a given state then has their slate of electors officially appointed by the governor, and those electors gather to cast their official electoral votes. It is those votes that are afterward counted by Congress to certify election results. This was the proceeding that Trump and his supporters attempted to prevent in their siege of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The electoral college system draws criticism for many reasons. Perhaps the most prominent is that it is seen as a tool of minority rule, since increasingly in 21st century elections, the electoral vote and the popular vote have been at odds, allowing for candidates to take office even when fewer Americans voted for them. Thus it is seen by many as a tool for the undermining of democracy, and because of it, Pew research has shown that most Americans would prefer a direct popular vote. Related points of criticism have to do with the apportionment of electors favoring low-population swing states. In fact, during the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton and others favored the direct election of presidents but were forced to compromise with smaller states and slave states, who feared having no voting power, by giving all states a minimum of three electors regardless of population and by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person when calculating population, despite their being barred from participating in elections. Other issues taken with the Electoral College system are that it operates in most states as first-past-the-post voting, the party who achieves not a majority but a plurality thereafter able cast all the state’s electoral votes. This in effect ensures our two-party system, preventing the success of third-party candidates. Instead of this winner-take-all system, some call for more proportional representation in the electoral college, while others call for its abolishment altogether, in favor of a direct election, as many Founding Fathers preferred. But the most pressing concern about the Electoral College this election year has got to be that it is a system clearly vulnerable to manipulation. And it has always been acknowledged to be flawed and subject to exploitation. This is chiefly because of the threat of so-called “faithless electors,” or electors chosen by their parties, whose slate is duly appointed by their governors, who thereafter vote against their party’s wishes and against the will of all who voted for their party’s ticket in the general election, thereby subverting democracy entirely. This has been a problem from the beginning. In the 1796, election, when the jobs of President and Vice President were determined separately according to the electoral vote, 18 faithless electors pledged to the John Adams ticket chose not to vote for his running mate as Vice-President, as a result making John Adams’s rival, Thomas Jefferson, his vice president. And in the election of 1800, one elector from New York named Anthony Lispenard demanded to be allowed to cast his vote secretly. With Thomas Jefferson and his running-mate Aaron Burr extremely close in electoral votes, he intended to pull a little coup and install Burr as President, and Jefferson as Vice President instead of the other way round. While faithless electors have been a continual problem in the Electoral College, especially as secret ballots became the rule in some states, it rarely affects the outcome of elections, and most states have by now made their electors accountable by making it convention for electors to vote orally and by passing laws that will void the votes of faithless electors and in some cases levy fines and penalties. However, with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, a different flaw in the Electoral College is now in the spotlight, a separate threat to democracy that every voter should understand.

In this blog and podcast, I often try to give historical context and insight into modern events. Sometimes that means focusing on more recent history. For example, former president Donald Trump’s refusal to accept election results and to instead engage in baseless conspiracy mongering was well-established long before he ever achieved the highest office in the U.S. Back in 2012, when President Obama was reelected, he insisted on Twitter that the election was a “total sham” and therefore that the U.S. was “not a democracy.” Likewise, while running for office in 2016, on numerous occasions he claimed that the American election process was “rigged” against him and even, in a stunning and unprecedented incident during a debate, refused to pledge that he would accept the election results. In the face of backlash, he clarified that he wanted to “reserve my right to contest or file a legal challenge in the case of a questionable result.” And he made it clear that, in his view, the only unquestionable result was “if I win.” During his 2020 reelection campaign, he again repeatedly suggested that the system was “rigged,” and that its rigging would be the only explanation if he lost. Indeed, Trump’s bagman, Roger Stone, and his former Rasputin, Steve Bannon, were already spinning up their Stop the Steal campaign even before election day. The slogan had been used in 2016 as well and then mothballed after Election Day, since they certainly didn’t want to continue suggesting an election was stolen if their man won it. But in the days and weeks following election day 2020, as Trump refused to concede the clear results of the election, the Trump team’s earnest efforts to overturn the results of an election he lost took definite shape. He pressured his Justice Department to investigate baseless claims of widespread election fraud in order to legitimize them, but his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, who had previously been a yes-man, declared there was no evidence of it. He launched numerous lawsuits alleging fraud in various states, all of which were thrown out for lack of evidence. And then he turned to extra-legal efforts, as detailed in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent indictment. He pressured Republican elections officials in key swing states to “find” him additional votes, to fraudulently decertify official election results, and to forge phony certificates of ascertainment in order to appoint new slates of fake electors that had been selected because of their loyalty and willingness to cast their electoral vote for Trump even though he had not won their state. And these efforts were pursued with the hard deadline of January 6th in mind, for Trump and his inner circle believed the election was not over until the electoral votes were certified, regardless of who the citizens had voted into office. After all, the popular vote doesn’t count. Trump didn’t win a majority in 2016 and didn’t need it. In the end, he finally resorted to pressuring Republican lawmakers not to certify the electoral votes, suggesting they could throw it to a congressional vote just by asserting that Vice President Pence had the authority to reject election results just because. In the end, all these efforts failed to overturn the election results, but they succeeded in instilling a fundamental distrust in our democratic processes among many. And though the efforts failed then, that doesn’t mean that they were abandoned. There is reason to believe that Trump’s backers never stopped their steal, that they have continued preparations in the same vein, streamlining their apparatus for election-stealing as they look forward to a time when they may make further attempts to overturn lawful election results.

Apologists claim that their fake electors strategy was all perfectly legal. Their notion is that state legislatures and/or officials could simply supersede their will over that of the electorate when there is evidence of fraud, which remember, Trump’s own Justice Department and every court that considered it said there was none. In emails, the electoral votes cast by these new electors were even called “fake,” though afterward it was suggested that “’alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes.” The hope was not even so much that these fake votes would be counted, but rather that discord would be sown, and in the chaos and confusion among lawmakers trying to certify electoral votes on January 6th, the result would be that Congress would send the whole mess to the Supreme Court, which Trump has packed with partisans who would effectively install him again as President. In defense of the idea, a precedent was cited from the election of 1960. That year, there was a very close race between JFK and Richard Nixon, and there were rumors then as well of Democrats benefitting from voter fraud. This happened to be the first time that Hawaii, which had just recently achieved statehood, participated in a presidential election. Nixon was favored to win Hawaii at first, as the Republican party had long dominated the islands, but Democrats had gained ground recently, and early totals suggested a Kennedy upset. When the election was instead called for Nixon, it was discovered there had been tabulation errors, and a circuit court judge ordered an official recount. While this recount was being conducted, two slates of electors were put together, one by each party. The governor certified the Republican electors, since Nixon was the winner until such time as the recount proved otherwise. However, the Democratic slate of electors also gathered to cast their votes, and they too signed elector certificates that asserted a Kennedy victory, in the event that the recount reversed the election results. As it turned out, that is exactly what happened, and the governor decertified the Republican elector slate, certifying the Democratic electors instead. There are some huge differences between what happened in 1960 and what Trump tried to pull. First, the two Hawaiian electoral vote certificates were created because of an official recount, due to clear evidence of tabulation errors. In 2020, the fake elector certificates created by Trump supporters used the exact same language as was used in 1960, but omitted any mention of the result pending an ongoing recount. Without this legitimate reason for an alternate certificate, it was simply a fraudulent attempt to steal electoral votes. Also, Hawaii was one state, whereas in 2020, this was tried in seven states, never on the basis of clear tabulation errors and an official recount but rather on proven misinformation. In Hawaii, in 1960, there were not accusations of fraud. The claims of fraud in that election had to do with Illinois, where there was a recount. In Hawaii, it was a pretty straightforward case of trying to make sure they got it right, and when the recount changed the result, the governor promptly certified the new Democratic elector slate. Moreover, when the contradictory certificates were sent to Washington, the loser in the election, Nixon, who was at the time Vice President and therefore presided over the certification of the election results, dutifully accepted only the Democratic elector certificate, which was certified. And in fact, Nixon even made clear that the incident should not be viewed as a precedent for any similar irregularities with alternate elector slates in the future.

At what was hoped would be a victory celebration, Nixon offered a concession when the night went Kennedy’s way, but his was a conditional concession, holding out hope that his supporters’ disputes of the election results would alter them.

While Richard Nixon did perform the duties of his office that January, many of his Republican supporters had been encouraging him to reject the election results ever since Kennedy’s win in November. It had been a very close race. When presidential races are too close to call, I’ve heard people complain that it didn’t used to be this way, that we always knew who our new President was by the time the evening news aired. That is not true, though. In 1960, the results were not official until midday the next day, and even then, Nixon did not concede until three days after the election. Rumors had already begun to circulate before election day that Kennedy was benefiting from fraud. When Kennedy took Illinois, it was believed by some Republicans that Chicago’s corrupt mayor, Richard Daley, who dominated the city with his political machine, had stolen the state’s electoral votes for Kennedy. Academic studies of election irregularities in Chicago have since determined that while there may have been miscounting, there was no widespread fraud, Nixon would never have taken the state, and even if he had, Illinois alone would not have won him the race. But Nixon supporters had already started alleging far more massive fraud than just in Illinois. A journalist friend of Nixon’s wrote a series of articles that enflamed the rumors of Illinois fraud and suggested fraud in Texas as well, which drew further press attention to the rumors. Then the Republican party chairman pushed for recounts in 11 states. They even attempted lawsuits, but as in 2020, their suits were tossed out by federal judges or otherwise came to nothing. Nixon distanced himself from the Republican party’s efforts to dispute the election results, fearing he would look like a “sore loser,” and in later years he would claim that even President Eisenhower had urged him to contest the election but he had honorably refused, not wanting to “tear the country apart.” In reality, it appears to have been the opposite, with Ike withdrawing support for the dispute and Nixon pushing privately for a continued aggressive effort to challenge the results while publicly conceding defeat. Eisenhower may have represented the more moderate wing of the Republican Party in his refusal to have any part of these efforts, but even then the party was supported by those on the far right with more radical and even explicitly fascist tendencies.

Some of the major supporters of this effort to overturn the results of the 1960 election were hardline white supremacists. There was Willis Carto, whose Liberty Lobby had become more and more influential on American conservative politics, and who, in his organization’s publication, “The Liberty Letter,” read by many a moderate Republican, claimed the election had been rigged, that it had been stolen from Nixon, but that there was unequivocal proof of election fraud but that corrupt Democrats had suppressed it and the only thing that could stop Kennedy from stealing the presidency would be for those on the right to rise up before the electoral votes were counted in January. As I spoke about in a recent patron exclusive, which even non-patrons can purchase on Patreon now, Willis Carto was a dyed-in-wool antisemite, an apostle of the American Nazi Francis Parker Yockey. He had published Yockey’s neo-Nazi manifesto, Imperium, which was called “America’s Mein Kampf,” and he would go on to found the Institute for Historical Review, a pseudo-academic think tank dedicated to Holocaust denialism. Likewise, the Republican efforts to contest the election were trumpeted by Gerald L. K. Smith, a populist preacher, who undertook what he himself called a “campaign of pressure” on elected officials, “to persuade at least four Southern Governors to assert their leadership in this crisis moment,” meaning that he was trying to convince them to toss their election results, to essentially appoint fake electors. Smith too was more than just a conservative activist. He had risen to demagoguery in Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth campaign during the Depression, but then promptly turned to the right, seizing anti-communism as his cause. His turn to the far right came in the late thirties. He supported a white supremacist candidate running against Roosevelt, he joined William Dudley Pelley’s pro-Nazi Silver Shirts, and then he co-opted the America First Committee’s name to found the America First Party, an explicitly fascist organization under whose auspices he had run for president. By the time of his efforts to overturn the 1960 election, his organization was called the Christian Nationalist Crusade, and it was mostly known for opposing desegregation and circulating antisemitic literature, like Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the old Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax. What we can see in 1960 is that Trump’s approach to baselessly contesting election results in 2020, from the claims of fraud to the pressuring of state officials to the insistence on supporters needing to rise up before electoral votes were tallied in January, were taken from an old playbook, one that had always been spearheaded by the Republican Party’s ultra-right wing base, over whom literal Nazis held sway.

Gerald L.K. Smith, the openly fascist preacher who pressured governors to cook up fake electors on behalf of Nixon.

And this fascist gameplan for the overturning of election results and installation of a losing candidate as the new U.S. President did not appear fully formed in 1960. It was not dreamed up on the spot by desperate partisans who believed misinformation about election fraud. No, it seems to have already been in the works in the 1950s, as a gambit that might help the far right install another demagogue into the White House: Joseph McCarthy. As has been pointed out by many a political analyst, if we were to search American history for a figure comparable to Donald Trump, the most apt comparison to be made is with McCarthy, whose reprehensible brand of politics justified its own “-ism,” just as now many, including myself, refer to MAGA as Trumpism, since his party is no longer recognizable. McCarthy entered national politics when he successfully beat out a popular Republican senator from Wisconsin, Bob La Follette, by portraying his rival as a Washington insider. La Follette was a vocal anti-communist at the time, and McCarthy, an opportunist politician, would seize on that as his cause célèbres. This is, of course, how McCarthy is remembered, but McCarthyism was more than this. McCarthy animated a rabid base among Republicans who believed he alone could be trusted in the corrupt swamp of Washington, and he did this through conspiracy-mongering. He sounded an alarm about Communist infiltration of the country, as most know, but also about Communists deeply embedded within the U.S. government, his own sort of Deep State conspiracy claim. He was disliked by his colleagues in Congress as a showboat, a loudmouth grandstander, but most came to fear him, for when McCarthy was crossed, he leveled baseless allegations against his fellow congressmen that tended to ruin their careers or even resorted to blackmailing them. More than one of those who moved against him ended up committing suicide because of it. While many in the Republican party regarded McCarthy as a reckless demagogue, and they recognized that he was a clear danger, because of his broad support among their base, they were afraid to cross him, and his grandstanding and conspiracy-mongering only grew bigger and wilder, boosted by press coverage even when that coverage was not favorable. As one biographer, Larry Tye, notes, McCarthy recognized “that there was no worse a penalty for a big lie than for a little one, but that only the big ones drew a crowd,” so he went big, claiming that he had verified lists of “card-carrying” Communists who had infiltrated the State Department and the federal government, though he never made a single credible accusation or produced any reliable evidence. Instead, he sought further media attention and power by conducting baseless witch hunts that turned Americans against each other and ruined the lives of countless individuals. In the end, the tide turned, public opinion of him shifted, and his congressional colleagues arranged a formal censure of his lying and flouting of congressional rules. Despite the needle moving on public perception of him, his base continued to support him, no matter what. According to a quotation by pioneering pollster George Gallup, “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him,” which sure sounds like Trump’s own claim that he could shoot someone and not lose any followers. And indeed, McCarthy’s supporters marched on the capitol that day, hoping to intimidate the senators who intended to censure their demagogue. As part of the theatrics of this protest at the Capitol, McCarthy supporters sent bundles of petitions opposing the censure to Capitol Hill in an armored truck, directing the armed guards tasked with delivering the petitions to brandish their firearms as they unloaded and presented them, a show of force that afterward prompted a Senator to call for an investigation of the guards and the group responsible.

Any who are interested in hearing more about Senator McCarthy and understanding how McCarthyism stands as a clear predecessor of Trumpism should go and listen to the second season of Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, which delves deeply into this topic, tracing the history of far-right extremism in mainstream American politics and showing what happened in the past when its influence on sitting members of Congress was exposed. In season two, she makes clear the obvious parallels between McCarthy and Trump. There is first the obvious, that Joseph McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, who would later serve as Richard Nixon’s personal advisor, mentored Donald Trump in the ‘80s. But beyond this very concrete connection, there are the likenesses, which should be apparent to anyone who sees clearly. McCarthy galvanized a rabid base through conspiracism and claims of a “threat from within”; he lied incessantly, and his followers nevertheless trusted him and him alone; he turned all political discourse toxic, and even those in his party felt powerless to rein him in; and when his downfall was imminent, his supporters marched on the Capitol in hopes of obstructing Congress and preventing the ruin of their idol. Disturbingly, just as Trump has support from and disquieting connections to neo-Nazis, as I have recently discussed, so too McCarthy had clear if clandestine contacts among fascist organizations and Nazis in the U.S. One of the first times that McCarthy tried to make a name for himself by spreading lies and disrupting official proceedings was during his first term, when as an observer on an investigatory subcommittee looking into a Nazi massacre of U.S. POWs, he brought disorder to the investigation, interrupting to spread proven lies about the Nazi soldiers being mistreated and claiming that their prosecution was driven by revenge. This was known Nazi propaganda that was used throughout the Nuremberg trials. Some thought McCarthy was just grandstanding, but others believed he was motivated by antisemitism and a genuine sympathy for Nazis. There were reports that he frequently used antisemitic slurs and that he was known to hold up a copy of Mein Kampf and say, “That’s the way to do it.” A year after he acted as a Nazi apologist in that subcommittee, he accepted an invitation to speak at a Christian Nationalist Party event by known fascist Gerald L.K. Smith, the very same man who a decade later would try to pressure governors to appoint fake electors for Richard Nixon. Francis Parker Yockey, author of America’s Mein Kampf, Imperium, who as a former Nazi agent had himself worked to defend Nazis in the Nuremberg trials and was then a fugitive from justice, was also slated to speak at the event and delivered a fiery rant there about “white Christian Germans” being being railroaded in sham trials, because “Jews control the world today.” McCarthy pulled out of the event because of criticism in the press, but his people would later reach out to fugitive Nazi spy Francis Parker Yockey and hire him to ghostwrite a speech for McCarthy. That same year, McCarthy launched a smear campaign against Anna Rosenberg, a Jewish woman appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense. His ally in that campaign was a prominent Ku Klux Klansman, and their opposition to her appointment focused mostly on her being a “Jewess” and therefore harboring “Socialistic ideas.”

Willis Carto, the neo-Nazi propagandist and Holocaust denier who first tried to get demagogue Joseph McCarthy nominated for president by the Republican Party, and later spread lies about widespread election fraud in the 1960 election and tried to foment an ultra-right wing uprising ahead of the early January certification of election results in order to see Nixon fraudulently installed as the Chief Executive.

While all of this may seem utterly disqualifying for McCarthy, it did not stop the rise of his political star. His congressional colleagues may have viewed him as a defender of Nazis and a man without ethics, but his base viewed him as a defender of America against a Communist enemy within, and the extreme right, who still wanted a fascist leader for America and received McCarthy’s signals of sympathy for Nazism very clearly, thought that he could be their man. In 1956, as the Republican National Convention approached, a campaign was organized to hijack the Republican party and install the demagogue Joseph McCarthy as their presidential nominee. Eisenhower was already the presumptive nominee, but the plan was to distribute anti-Eisenhower pamphlets and circulate petitions at the convention, convert enough delegates to the cause, and flip the party to McCarthy. Some conservatives in the media even feared they could do it, one of them writing, “McCarthy will have no compunctions at all about wrecking the Republican Party if this seems to serve his purposes.… His supporters have the true mark of the fanatic. They are not interested in facts. The endless exposure of McCarthy’s endless untruths do not affect them…. Serious observers on Capitol Hill take seriously the possibility that McCarthy could ride to national power on the wreckage of the Republican Party.” Among those who spearheaded the effort at the convention was Willis Carto, Yockey’s neo-Nazi apostle, who would, just 4 years later, rouse the Republican electorate with baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 1960 election, encouraging them to rise up and prevent the peaceful transfer of power in January. In the end, of course, the effort to hijack the party for McCarthy failed and Eisenhower was nominated, but regardless, the far-right machine behind McCarthy was intent on getting him into the White House by hook or by crook. If he could not take over the Republican Party, then maybe they could get him into power as a third-party candidate. While it would be virtually impossible by fair and legal means to overcome the difficulties that a third-party candidate faces in our electoral system, they had a plan to sidestep those hurdles. A group of former America First Committee members, who had worked with Nazi sympathizers and Nazi agents to keep America out of the war, and including one former congressman implicated in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944, in which sitting congressmen stood trial for actively and knowingly spreading Nazi propaganda, cooked up a plot in 1956 to get McCarthy elected president by concocting fake elector slates. One conservative radio figure, Clarence Manion, described the plot this way: “We can get our wish by qualifying a slate of American presidential elector candidates in our respective states. In a number of states, patriots are already far advanced on these necessary prerequisites.” You may recognize this as the very same plot that Nixon supporters pursued in 1960 and as the same scheme that Trump himself recently employed in his efforts to overturn the lawful election results of 2020. In the end, this effort died because Joseph McCarthy himself suddenly died a few months later from hepatitis, likely worsened by his abuse of alcohol. McCarthyism died with him, becoming just a disgraceful chapter in American politics that nearly everyone, Democrat or Republican, now regards in a negative light. And this is what we should all hope will be the fate of Trumpism, that it will be relegated to the history books as nothing more than a shameful moment in American history that we overcame.

If we are to trace the roots of Trump’s fake elector scheme back through history, though, we must look to its earliest appearance, in the contested election of 1876, which prompted legislation a decade later to ensure no such elector slate shenanigans would ever again disrupt the proper certification of election results. The election of 1876 was the most contentious in U.S. history, threatening to throw the country back into Civil War and resolving only with an unprecedented compromise that would effectively end Reconstruction in the South. If you want to hear more about this unwritten political agreement, check out my episode from 2020, The Smoke-Filled Room. For our topic, we only need to understand the situation that Congress found itself in when convening to count electoral votes. The candidate Rutherford Hayes needed the electoral votes from South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida to win, whereas his opponent, Samuel Tilden, needed only the electoral votes of one of those states to win. In Florida, Tilden’s electors were certified by the state’s attorney general, but Hayes’s electors claimed to also be certified by the canvassing board. In Louisiana, the result of the gubernatorial election was still in question, and two competing governors were both claiming to have certified different slates of electors. Then in South Carolina, though Hayes’s electors were duly certified by the governor, Tilden’s electors sent a certificate with their votes, falsely claiming to be “duly and legally appointed by and for the State of South Carolina.” It would later be revealed that the Tilden campaign was actively bribing Southern election officials to change the results. It was all such a mess that Congress had to convene a special bipartisan Electoral Commission to sift through everything, and amid the chaos, a new and completely fake slate of Tilden electors from Vermont, which had been indisputably won by Hayes, submitted votes to Congress after the deadline, claiming without any pretense of evidence to be the official electors. Tilden was clearly gaming the system, but the fact was that he had a strong case for winning Florida, which would have given him the presidency. In the end, Congress’s backroom compromise, which put Hayes in the White House instead, was widely viewed as a miscarriage of democracy. Ten years later, the Electoral Count Act was passed that left it up to each individual state to resolve their own disputes in certifying results.

The Electoral Commission of 1877

One hundred and forty-four years later, these flaws in our electoral system remained. While the law of the land left it up to state officials to determine results and certify electors, Trump’s machinations show that a candidate might still corruptly pressure a state official to change results, as was done back in the 19th century. In the wake of January 6th, when Trump pressured his Vice-President to reject electoral votes, another law was passed, the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, which among other things clarified what a Vice-President actually does when counting electoral votes, making clear that their role is “solely ministerial,” with no power to accept or reject or otherwise resolve disputes. This change, while a good thing, really does nothing to address the threat of continued malfeasance when it comes to fake elector plots. And Trump now appears poised to exploit these loopholes again in 2024. According to Associated Press reporting, in several battleground states, including Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, Trump’s fake electors, who have proven themselves willing to pervert the will of the people, have wormed their way into positions of power, assuming roles as election officials and sitting on election commissions. These are the state positions that hold so much power when it comes to counting or miscounting votes, choosing what electors to certify, and essentially determining what votes are counted by Congress. And what is especially disturbing is that Trump has started to indicate that voting won’t actually matter in this election, stating over and over in his stump speeches, “We don’t need votes.” During this campaign, Trump has repeatedly insisted that he doesn’t need people to vote for him in order to win. As I have said before, I am not typically one to engage in accusations of conspiracy, but when corrupt efforts to subvert democracy are so clear, exposed by investigative journalists and special counsel investigations, when the wrongdoing is so blatant, and when those involved telegraph so openly their intentions to continue, we should all acknowledge it and sound the alarm. I very much worry that, even if Trump suffers an undeniable loss in November, as he did in 2020, the believers of his Big Lie of election fraud, who have already proven themselves willful participants in his Slow-Motion Coup, will abuse their power on the state level, resulting in the certification of the wrong electoral votes. I further worry about the appearance of competing fake electoral vote certificates in Congress this January, because even if Kamala Harris is only following the proper orders and procedures in her role as Vice President by counting only the duly certified votes, it may be claimed by Republican Senators that she is favoring votes for her. With enough Republican senators signing objections, it is not unlikely that the election results could then depend on the outcome of cases in state courts and could be sent to the Supreme Court, as was the case in 2000, with Bush v. Gore, and this packed Supreme Court bench has proven itself more than willing to cater their interpretations of law to suit conservative whims. It is a dire prediction, and one I greatly hope does not come to pass. But whether or not such a constitutional crisis does occur in this election, the takeaway here is that, to safeguard democracy, the electoral college needs to be carefully reformed, or done away with altogether in favor of the popular vote.

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This election year, remember, once election day is done and the votes are counted, there is one candidate who will readily accept defeat, but there is another who will fight tooth and nail to overturn their loss. We cannot let a loser cheat their way to victory.

Further Reading

Cheney, Kyle. “See the 1960 Electoral College Certificates that the False Trump Electors Say Justify Their Gambit.” Politico, 7 Feb. 2022, www.politico.com/news/2022/02/07/1960-electoral-college-certificates-false-trump-electors-00006186.

Foley, Edward B. “A Historical Perspective on Alternate Electors: Lessons from Hayes-Tiden.” Just Security, 7 July 2022, www.justsecurity.org/82233/a-historical-perspective-on-alternate-electors-lessons-from-hayes-tiden/.

Goodman, Ryan, et al. “Comprehensive Timeline on False Electors Scheme in 2020 Presidential Election.” Just Security, 15 May 2024, www.justsecurity.org/81939/timeline-false-electors/.

Kallina, Edmund F. “Was Nixon Cheated in 1960? Tracing the Vote-Fraud Legend.” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 138-40. Sage Journals, doi.org/10.1177/107769908506200123.

Kallina, Edmund F. “Was the 1960 Presidential Election Stolen? The Case of Illinois.” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 1, 1985, pp. 113–18. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27550168.

Maddow, Rachel, and Mike Yarvitz. “Mobilized.” Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, season 2, MSNBC, 5 Aug. 2024, podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rachel-maddow-presents-ultra/id1647910854.

Mostrom, Anthony. “The Fascist and the Preacher: Gerald L. K. Smith and Francis Parker Yockey in Cold War–Era Los Angeles.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 13 May 2017, lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-fascist-and-the-preacher-gerald-l-k-smith-and-francis-parker-yockey-in-cold-war-era-los-angeles/.

Robertson, Nick. “What’s Happening with Trump’s ‘Fake Electors’ in 7 States He Lost.” The Hill, 4 Aug. 2023, thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4138124-trumps-fake-electors-7-states-he-lost/.

Stern, Gabe. “Some Trump Fake Electors from 2020 Haven’t Faded Away. They Have Roles in How the 2024 Race Is Run.” Associated Press, 18 Dec. 2023, apnews.com/article/nevada-fake-electors-trump-78893192392d3301d5cca8c1bb55bcb3.

Tye, Larry. “When Senator Joe McCarthy Defended Nazis.” Smithsonian Magazine, July 2020, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/senator-mccarthys-nazi-problem-180975174/.

The Looming Threat of Fascism - Part Two: The Beer Hall Putsch

There is a saying, attributed to Maya Angelou, that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them the first time. Former president Donald Trump has shown Americans and the world time and time again who he is. Long before there was ever a question of whether he viewed himself as above the law in the role of president, and even before many had come to recognize that the support for his candidacy was a cult of personality, Trump made it all abundantly clear when in January 2016, at the outset of his campaign, he stated to his adoring fans at a rally, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters,” and his supporters laughed and told him they loved him. While in office, he defended neo-Nazi violence at Charlottesville, and shortly afterward, a video emerged that showed members of his “alt-right” supporters, at a Washington, D.C., conference, giving Nazi salutes to celebrate his election, shouting, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Considering how much neo-Nazis openly love the guy and believe he fights for them and their cause, he has long been suspected of courting their support, if not of being a white supremacist himself. Apologists will argue that he was simply trying to be even-handed and fair in his assessment of Charlottesville, and that he cannot help the fact that neo-Nazis like him. He has, after all, condemned them when asked, if only vaguely, seemingly begrudgingly, and coyly. However, he continually gives the public honest reason to suspect he has Nazi sympathies. For example, earlier this year, Trump posted a 30-second video on his social media account that featured fake newspaper headlines about the economy booming and the border being closed following a hypothetical landslide victory for Trump in 2024. A blurry newspaper headline in the background featured the words “INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED... DRIVEN BY THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH.” Understandably, the Biden campaign seized the opportunity to point out that that “this is Hitler’s language – not America’s.” The Trump campaign took the video down and explained that it was posted by a staffer who hadn’t seen the language in the background, and Trump had been too busy to approve the video himself because—wait for it—he was in court, defending himself in one of his numerous criminal trials. In fairness, it does appear that it could have been a genuine mistake. As it afterward turned out, the video in question appears to have been created using the “newspaper vintage history headlines promo” template on a stock video website called Envato Elements. If that is the case, and the headline was automatically included as part of a design template, it’s hard to blame the Trump campaign for anything other than negligence and being cheap. However, I visited Envato and examined the video template myself, and it appears that all the background headlines default to Lorem ipsum, the Latin placeholder text. That means the headlines must have actually been added by the staffer in question. The text appears to have come from a Wikipedia entry on World War I, so the Reich in question was not Hitler’s, but nevertheless, it does seem that the staffer purposely populated this text into the template. Still, can we only fault the staffer and Trump’s organization with cutting corners and sloppiness? We might argue this, but it is exceedingly strange that this was not even the first time that such an incident occurred. And this is something you don’t hear the media talking much about. In July of 2015, when Donald Trump was already spinning up a presidential campaign for the following year, he posted an image to Twitter that featured his face superimposed over the waving American flag, in the stripes of which could be discerned images of U.S. currency, the White House, and soldiers. The problem was, those soldiers wore Nazi uniforms. It was a stock photo of actors, but they were indeed wearing Waffen-SS uniforms. In that case too, Trump blamed a staffer, saying that he was away on business in, get this, Charlottesville, Virginia, and was therefore too busy to approve the post personally. What’s interesting, I think, is not just that Nazi imagery and language keeps getting posted onto his social media, but that in each case it just happens to be someone else’s fault, though the implication remains that otherwise, if it weren’t for other obligations, he usually does personally oversee anything posted to his account. It begins to make one wonder if these incidents might actually have been not just oversights but actual Nazi Easter eggs meant to function as dog whistles. After a certain point, his courting of the neo-Nazi vote cannot be denied. After all, in 2022, he had a cozy little dinner with openly white supremacist pundit Nick Fuentes, along with Kanye West, who was then right in the middle of his Hitler-admiring era. Can we possibly write this all off, as Trump supporters who are still not quite pro-Nazi tend to do, as mere unsavory politics? Is Trump only playing a game, trying to please even constituents he doesn’t himself agree with? Wouldn’t we need examples of Trump actually expressing admiration of Hitler himself to suggest he was a Nazi sympathizer? Certainly we have ample examples of Trump praising dictators and wanting to imitate their successes. In the face of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, he praised Putin as “smart” and “genius.” Previously, he had spoken about how well they got along, which comes as no surprise in the face of all the evidence that Putin’s regime had a hand in getting him elected. He spoke glowingly of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, saying of their correspondence, “We fell in love.” He calls Turkish President Recep Erdogan and Chinese President Xi Jinping friends and admires their strength, specifically admiring that Xi Jinping is a “strong man,” which is essentially a synonym for a militaristic autocrat. In fact, after meeting Xi Jinping, he told Republican donors that he found the idea of serving as president for life very appealing, saying coyly, “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot someday.” As for his thoughts on Hitler, we have only second-hand reports. In interviews conducted by Jim Sciutto for his book, The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War, Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, said that Trump expressed a wish that his generals would be more loyal, more like Hitler’s generals. Kelly pointed out that German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times, and when Kelly reportedly pointed out that Trump should not want to be a commander like Hitler, Trump allegedly said, “Well, but Hitler did some good things.” Trump’s alleged admiration of Hitler was only apparently only for his rebuilding of the German economy, but considering everything else, his admiration of dictators, his desire to rule as an authoritarian himself, and his demands for absolute loyalty, we can certainly presume that he also admired Hitler’s strongman approach to leadership, at the very least. In this way, Trump is certainly like Hitler, for when Hitler tried to seize power, he did so following the fascist playbook of Mussolini, who had preceded him. Like Hitler, Trump too appears to be inspired by his authoritarian contemporaries.

Georges Sorel, French philosopher and radical identified by some as a proto-fascist.

As I said in part one of this series, making comparisons of contemporary politicians to Hitler and their movements to Nazism is not fallacious, it does not trivialize the Holocaust, if there are ample grounds for such a comparison, and Trumpism has given us plenty of that. It has been the view of some historians and politicians, especially during the heyday of Fascism, that it is a misnomer to refer to anything other than Mussolini’s regime as fascist. For example, when on February 6th, 1934, a far-right league of veterans’ organizations organized what appeared to many to be an insurrection, called by some a French March on Rome, it was viewed on the left as a fascist coup, while others at the time and since have argued it could not be, despite its similarities, because Fascism was a purely Italian historic phenomenon. Today, however, fascism, as a common noun with a lowercase first letter, is generally understood to refer not only to Mussolini’s regime but also to any regime or movement with a similar philosophy or comparable characteristics. A fascist government is autocratic, led by a dictator, and opposition is suppressed. Hitler and Nazism are almost universally accepted as a textbook example of a fascist regime, and not just because he was inspired by and later in league with the original fascist, Mussolini. Some, especially those on the right who resent being reminded that fascism arose from their end of the political spectrum, continually try to suggest that fascism is a leftist phenomenon. They draw attention to the fact that Mussolini was formerly a Socialist, even though his Blackshirts specifically targeted Socialists for violence. They point to the word “socialism” in the name of the Nazi Party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, but it is the scholarly consensus that this name was adopted simply to give the party a broad appeal, with the words National and German appealing to nationalists and Socialist and Workers appealing to those on the left. In reality, Hitler’s was a far-right movement, opposed to liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism, and pluralism. While those who spearhead fascist movements may sometimes emerge from the left, they invariably have turned to the right, and this is true even of the pre-Mussolini roots of fascism. Some trace fascism to Georges Sorel, a French syndicalist and proponent of violence for the overthrow of capitalism who, when he came to view general strikes as failing to overthrow democracy, which in his view was aristocratic, he and his followers moved to the far-right, becoming more nationalist. So it seems fascism often arises among those dissatisfied with the far-left. It is, however, distinctly a position of the right, focused usually on suppressing the left. Having already compared Trumpism to Mussolini’s brand of fascism, it is useful, then, to also compare it to that other fascist movement that followed on the heels of Mussolini’s. But there is resistance to this. In the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Trump, the violence was blamed on those in the media or on the left who have claimed that Trump is “literally Hitler.” I understand this idea, since of course, there is a well-known thought experiment about whether a time traveler would be ethically justified in murdering Hitler as an infant. The concept goes all the way back to science fiction stories published during World War II, and it has even shown up in Marvel’s Avengers and Deadpool films. It is such a common idea that the likelihood of it coming up in conversations about time travel has come to be called “Godwin’s law of time travel.” To be abundantly clear, Trump is NOT “literally” Hitler, and neither am I nor really anyone suggesting he is. Political violence is wrong and must not ever be condoned. Nevertheless, comparisons of Trump to Hitler cannot be off limits. We must not be bullied into ignoring potential parallels if we hope to learn from history. And the simple fact is that, if Trump did not want people associating him with Nazism, he should not associate himself with white supremacists. Aside from his dinner with Nick Fuentes, he has surrounded himself with individuals that espouse beliefs that are, at their heart, racist and find clear parallels in Nazi ideology. For example, his former strategist, Steve Bannon, whom I just released a minisode about called “Trump’s Rasputin,” used to run Breitbart News, which was exposed in 2017 as a platform for neo-Nazis. Then there is his chief speechwriter and policy advisor, Stephen Miller, who espouses the racist “Great Replacement theory” and was caught sharing neo-Nazi websites in his private emails. The signs are all there, and it takes a really weird denialism to claim there are no reasons to link Trump to neo-Nazis and no grounds for the comparison of Trumpism to Nazism.

One clear point of comparison, as mentioned previously, corresponds to the “identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause,” a defining characteristic of fascism according to Laurence Britt that is especially clear in Nazism. Often this characteristic of fascism goes hand in hand with another characteristic, that fascism is racist, as defined by Luis Britto Garcia, and this was obviously the case in Nazism. In other definitions, it is connected to the claims of victimhood, as in Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism. A fascist regime finds a scapegoat and claims that they themselves and the nation as a whole are victims of that enemy, making the defeat or destruction of that enemy a unifying cause. As Umberto Eco recognized in Ur-Fascism, the fascist’s xenophobic promotion of an enemy threat, typically aimed at a marginalized group within that society, presents it as a plot or conspiracy. This aspect of fascism is overwhelmingly clear in Nazism’s antisemitism and claims of a Jewish enemy threat from within. Though Trump has support from and the occasional dinner date with white nationalists and neo-Nazis, he has not openly trafficked in antisemitic rhetoric since 2015, when his statements to the Republican Jewish Coalition seemed to echo Jewish World Conspiracy claims about their supposed control of governments through finance when he said, “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money. You want to control your politicians, that’s fine.” Though he has not openly or explicitly represented Jews as an enemy or blamed them for any American woes, he certainly still does scapegoat marginalized groups. Since the beginning of his campaign, he has made immigrants the enemy, representing all Latin American migrants as violent criminals and all Muslims as terrorists. And among U.S. citizens, Trump and his followers present the LGBTQ+ community, and more and more specifically the transgender minority demographic, as conspirators involved in a plot to indoctrinate or convert children. Perhaps the clearest instance of Trump promoting an enemy threat, however, is his demonization of his political rivals. The Democratic party, which is politically centrist when compared to politics almost anywhere else in the world, is in his rhetoric a Deep State conspiracy to promote Socialism or Communism. Of course, Commies have long served as the red bogeymen of American politics, but it should be noted that Communists were also the vilified enemy of Nazis, and Hitler identified them all explicitly with the Jews, calling Communism a Jewish conspiracy, a pernicious myth that had already contributed to a great deal of antisemitic violence in Russia, for example. And it cannot be ignored that Trump’s rhetoric has recently begun to echo Hitler’s in this regard. As I mentioned previously, in a New Hampshire rally last November, Trump stated, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” and many have remarked on the fact that the use of the word “vermin” explicitly echoes Hitler’s terminology for Communists and Jews. What fewer have remarked on is his further statement in that same speech, when he said, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.” He is again clearly echoing Hitler’s claims of the “enemies within” German society, identified by him, again, as Jews and Communists. But Trump wasn’t finished. The next month, he said in a speech that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” which many were quick to point out is very similar to a passage in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he states, “All the great civilizations of the past decayed because the originally creative race died out, as a result of poisoning of the blood.” When these similarities were pointed out, Trump became the first U.S. President to have to deny that he has read Mein Kampf, and that alone should tell us that there are serious grounds for linking these two figures.

The likely origin of the MAGA slogan, despite the fact Hitler did at least once say something similar about making Germany great again.

It has sometimes been claimed that Trump’s MAGA slogan, Make America Great Again, was also inspired by Hitler, who it is said also claimed he would “make Germany great again.” This is misleading in some ways. First, it seems far more likely that Trump was actually just copying Ronald Reagan, whose campaign poster said “Let’s make America Great again.” Also, Hitler never used the term “Make Germany great again” as a campaign slogan. Hitler didn’t campaign. He never held elected office. Hitler did, however, use this phrase, at least once making the remark that Nazism was a “strong new idea to carry new strength which would make Germany great again.” This comparison is rather weak, in my estimation, as plenty of slogans promise a return to prosperity. However, it approaches closely to an important point of comparison. Both Trumpism and Nazism are based on a myth of a plot to betray the people. One of the formative circumstances that allowed Hitler’s Nazi party to grow was a myth that Germany had been “stabbed in the back.” Hitler did not invent this myth himself. It appeared after World War I, when Field Marshall von Hindenburg, who along with General Erich Ludendorff had been appointed to a position of executive power during the war, claimed that Germany did not emerge victorious and only signed the armistice because it had been betrayed by politicians who had “stabbed the army in the back.” But this was untrue. The generals had focused to much of their efforts on submarine warfare, and their disruption of shipping inadvertently brought America into the war. Germany was struggling with food scarcity and victory continued to elude them, until finally the generals themselves pushed for the formation of a new government that could undertake armistice negotiations. Despite these facts, Hindenburg’s “stab-in-the-back” myth became very popular, especially in the years after the signing of the Versailles Treaty, which blamed Germany for the war and saddled the country with reparations debt. In the years leading up to the rise of Nazism, the German people suffered greatly from inflation as the German mark became more and more worthless, such that one had to spend millions on basic subsistence. And who did they blame for this? Not the Kaiser, not the Iron Chancellor, not the generals who actually lost the war and pushed for armistice, but rather the Social Democrats and Socialists of the new Weimar Republic who inherited the whole mess. Then Hitler came along and said that Germany’s abject condition was the result of a conspiracy, by Communists and Jews, to bring Germany low so that they could control it, and only he and his Nazis could make Germany great again. In much the same way, Trump blames any and all of America’s problems on a plot driven by politicians on the left, or more nebulously, Deep State bureaucrats. His position on immigration is, for example, deeply tied to a conspiracy theory that the Democratic Party is soft on border security for the express purpose of stealing elections with illegal votes.

Since the economy had largely recovered from the Great Recession during the Obama administration, Trump had few concrete economic woes to galvanize his base. He only promised to grow the already robust economy that he inherited by 4% every year, a goal he never achieved even before the coronavirus recession. So instead of economic problems that he could blame on his “enemy within,” he blamed them for cultural changes that scared or enraged his base, suggesting that the left betrayed American values with their political correctness, or “wokeness” as he would say today, and that they assaulted traditional norms with their inclusivity and multiculturalism, making War on Christmas and whatnot. But in a few ways, he has echoed the old stab-in-the-back myth of Weimar Germany almost exactly, characterizing more than a dozen major treaties and international agreements as unfair to America, much as Hitler characterized the Versailles treaty. He withdrew the U.S. from global human rights organizations, refugee arrangements, climate agreements, diplomatic protocols, and arms treaties. He even threatened to withdraw from the World Trade Organization and The North American Treaty Organization, either of which would be catastrophic. And all of his withdrawals were based on his “America First” doctrine, which I should again remind everyone was originally, historically, the name of an organization made up in large part by literal Nazis who did not want America to enter the war against Nazi Germany. And now, after the coronavirus recession hit the economy so hard during his administration and supply chain disruptions contributed to rampant inflation during economic recovery under the next administration, Trump too points to economic woes and blames them on those he characterizes as enemies who betray the real Americans. Specifically it is the inflation he blames on the “radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” It is certainly not the hyperinflation of post-WWI Germany, but the parallel is still striking. Even though the causes of Germany’s inflation were far more complicated, Hitler claimed it was “instigated and carried through by Jews,” his scapegoat. Likewise, Trump too oversimplifies this complex economic issue in order to lay blame on his “threat from within,” whom he mischaracterizes as “radical socialists.” He has claimed that there was no inflation during his administration, though there was about 2% year over year, and that under his presidency the economy was the strongest in the history of the world, which is, of course, a ridiculous claim. In the history of the world, we’d have to compare the American economy to India’s, which along with China’s was the largest economy for most of the Common Era. Even just looking at modern economies, China’s economy outpaced ours in purchasing power ten years ago. If we want to ignore China’s ascendance and presume, based on GDP, that America’s economy remains the largest in the world, the economy under Trump was still not our best economy. The era that marked the most prosperity in the U.S. was the postwar period, sometimes called the golden age of capitalism, from 1946 until the energy crisis of the 1970s, which led into a period of stagnant economic growth and high inflation, called stagflation. But like the stab-in-the-back myth, it doesn’t matter what’s true as long as you can convince your followers that the “enemies within” have betrayed the people and that only you, an outsider strongman leader, can bring the nation back to its former glory.

Paul von Hindenburg, originator of the stab-in-the-back myth and later, the man who appointed Hitler chancellor.

An obsession with the glorious past of Germany was one of the principal drives of Hitler as he entered the political sphere in 1919, along with his fixation on Jews and Communists as being the “invisible foes” who had brought Germany low. He was a dropout, a drifter, a failed artist, and later a soldier. His background could not be more different from Donald Trump’s, and this should be conceded. But like Trump, he took over a political party, the German Worker’s Party in Munich, and remade it through demagoguery to suit his purposes. Renaming them the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, Nazis for short, he looked to the example of Mussolini and his Fascists. He established his own version of the Italian squadristi, which he called the Sturmabteilung, or storm troopers. Like Mussolini’s blackshirts, Hitler’s storm troopers came to be known as brownshirts. In an interview, he made clear his intentions to follow in Mussolini’s footsteps, saying, “If a German Mussolini is given to Germany, people would fall down on their knees and worship him more than Mussolini has ever been worshipped.” So he set about planning his own march on the capital, with the express purpose of overthrowing the democratic Weimar Republic. To his cause he recruited General Ludendorff, the hero of the Great War, who he believed could unite Germany. He presented himself only as “The Drummer,” the harbinger who would announce the arrival of the next great German leader. But he had other ambitions. Upon hearing about a November 8th, 1923, meeting at a beerhall in Munich at which the three most prominent leaders of Bavaria intended to speak, Hitler feared that they intended to beat him to the punch and declare Bavarian independence from the republic. So he scrapped plans for a march on the capital and instead organized his coup to begin at the beerhall. With armed Nazis gathered outside, he entered with his pistol in the air and announced that the national revolution had begun. He then led the three Bavarian leaders into a private room at gunpoint, demanding they support his coup or be killed. Though he said Ludendorff was on board, the revolutionary government he outlined in that room would, he said, be directed by himself. When Ludendorff finally appeared, he felt Hitler had dishonestly maneuvered himself into the position of power that should belong to him. Nevertheless, he stuck with the insurrectionists. Unlike the March on Rome, however, and much like the January 6th Capitol attack, Hitler’s coup, called the Beer Hall Putsch, was an abject failure. Just as the legislators were evacuated from the U.S. capitol in 2021, the hostages in the beer hall in 1923, including the three prominent Bavarian leaders Hitler had forced to endorse his revolution, just kind of left amid later confusion. And just as Vice President Pence and other Republicans, whom Trump hoped would be kowtowed by the insurrection into stopping the certification of the election results, withstood the coercion and did their constitutional duty in 2021, in 1923, the Bavarian leaders promptly issued statements to local radio stations indicating that they were revoking any support for Hitler’s coup, revealing that their agreement in the beer hall had been made at gunpoint. With Nazi forces still occupying the beer hall, Ludendorff convinced Hitler to march on the Field Marshals’ Hall, the headquarters of one of these Bavarian leaders, and confront him again. Much like Trump in 2021, Ludendorff was convinced that, if he were present with the marchers, any opposition from police would simply melt away. This was not the case. In a shootout on the way to their destination, 16 Nazis and three policemen were killed. But much as January 6th was not the end of Trumpism, the Beer Hall Putsch was not the end of Nazism. Just as January 6th insurrectionists are today praised as heroes and martyrs by those on the right, Nazis would go on to commemorate November 8th every year, to praise the “old fighters” of the Beer Hall Putsch as heroes, and to remember the fallen insurrectionists as martyrs.

Just as Trump now faces criminal charges for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and has been indicted specifically for “conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding,” so too Hitler and Ludendorff, as well as others, were indicted and prosecuted for high treason in the wake of their efforts to overthrow Weimar democracy. The charge of high treason in this case referred specifically to efforts to subvert or change the German constitution through violence. By all rights, the defendants should have been tried in the state court in Leipzig, but Bavarian authorities refused to recognize this law and tried them right there in Munich, where there remained much sympathy for Hitler’s abortive putsch. And much as Trump has been aided by his own Supreme Court appointees by being awarded immunity for certain of his acts, a powerful Bavarian court composed of right-wing reactionary judges would also intercede on Hitler’s behalf. His case was assigned to the Bavarian People’s Court, which was known to circumvent the traditional legal process by issuing swift verdicts and allowing for no appeals. It was presided over by judges and citizens, but since the citizens were always hand-picked by the judges, and since there was no system of judicial review, the judges of this court were considered “judicial kings,” free to remake law according to their partisan whims. And they were decidedly right-wing partisans. In the five years since they had been established, they found right-wing defendants in political violence cases to be not guilty more than 92% of the time, whereas leftist defendants they only found innocent 25% of the time, usually convicting them and giving them much longer sentences than they gave to those on the right. To left-wing defendants, they gave death sentences about half the time, and they never sentenced a right-wing defendant to death. Hitler’s trial was a media circus, and the public followed it in newspapers as if it were a serialized novel, as one newspaper put it. It was feared that the trial was making the country look bad on the world stage. Critics on all sides dismissed the trial as a farce, a “deplorable comedy.” Hitler used the trial as a platform to spread his conspiracy theories, and despite being tried for treason, Hitler’s popularity among many did not wane. He was depicted as a martyr, the victim of a corrupt system. It was suggested that the prosecutors themselves were treasonous, though of course they were only doing their duty. Fear ran high that Nazis would breach the courtroom and carry Hitler off to undertake another putsch. During actual testimony, Hitler swore he would take revenge, saying that “a time will come when today’s accused become the accusers!” In the end, the well-respected Ludendorff was acquitted, and Hitler, along with three coconspirators, was given the absolute minimum sentence of five years. The right-wing chief judge praised Hitler’s motives even as he convicted him, calling his intentions “patriotic…noble…[and] unselfish.” Though Hitler should have faced deportation as an Austrian citizen, the judge disregarded this law simply because the defendant had served in the German army and “considers himself to be German.” Cheers and Nazi salutes filled the street when Hitler appeared at a window after the verdict, and his subsequent, rather comfortable stay at Landsberg prison afforded Hitler the time to write his manifesto, Mein Kampf. He would end up only serving eight months of his sentence, and his conviction and imprisonment would do nothing to prevent his eventual rise to power.

The Beer Hall Putsch

Of course, the differences are apparent. Hitler actually marched with and clashed with police alongside his insurrectionists. He did not orchestrate it from a position of power. His intentions to overthrow the government were explicit. Yet again, the parallels give me pause. Trump’s efforts to subvert the election also failed and he too was indicted for it. Sympathetic judges have worked to ensure he too will not be held responsible. His supporters believe him a martyr and victim of a witch hunt or conspiracy, further radicalizing many in his base. And his trials have drawn much media attention, allowing Trump the opportunity to fan the flames of conspiracism on which his political career is fueled. Perhaps most analogous is the lying on which both relied. Trump’s problem with lying is well known. Over the four years of his presidency, the Washington Post documented more than 30 thousand lies he told. This did not cease, of course, after his ouster. There is the most obvious lie, dubbed the “Big Lie” by the American Press, of election fraud, and there have been numerous lies regarding his various criminal trials. He has lied about infringement of his right to testify, about the kind of defenses he is allowed to make, about paying bail, and most egregious, about his entire prosecution having been orchestrated by his political rivals for purely political reasons. In 1924, during his own trial, Hitler too took the opportunity to tell many lies, about his background, for example, about the timeline of his involvement in the Nazi Party, and the size of the party, vastly inflating his number of followers, which we might compare to Trump’s obsession with crowd size. While Trump’s lies about election fraud have sometimes been likened to the stab-in-the-back myth, they are more typically called his Big Lie, which is itself a reference to Hitler and his political philosophy about lying. And I think this is the most pertinent comparison to be made. In Mein Kampf, Hitler told the world that he thought lying was an especially effective political tool. He coined the phrase “the big lie,” explaining that in it

there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Though in his book, he is attributing such big lies to his “invisible foes,” Communists and Jews, historian Jeffrey Herf has argued convincingly what I think we can all clearly recognize: that during the course of his regime, Hitler cynically employed this propaganda strategy himself. And I think that this description of the “big lie” also describes clearly how most Trump supporters refuse to disbelieve his false claims and never see him for what he is, continually making excuses for him and searching for alternative explanations, typically resorting to conspiracism in the absence of clear evidence to exonerate their leader.

It must also be emphasized that when Hitler did come to power, it was not through his unlawful coup. After his release from prison, he devoted himself to accumulating power legally. Indeed, it became something of a joke how careful he was to remain within the letter of the law, such that the press gave him the nickname “Hitler the Legal.” While Mussolini may have used his insurrection to attain a position of power and then worked within the system for some years before seizing absolute dictatorial power, Hitler’s putsch had failed and he was forced to work within his country’s electoral system for far longer before consolidating and seizing dictatorial power. After his release from prison, the Weimar Republic chose a right-wing president in Hindenburg, the originator of the stab-in-the-back myth. While the Nazis and other nationalists hoped this would mean the end of the Republic, Hindenburg at first governed in strict accordance with the Constitution. As inflation eased and the German economy recovered, extremist parties lost ground to moderates in ensuing elections, and Hindenburg played by the rules. Only when the American Stock Market crashed in 1929 and the Great Depression reached Germany did he begin to display autocratic tendencies, dissolving parliament because they would not pass his budget. With deepening economic problems came further extremist activities on the left and the right. Moderates lost ground and Nazism rose in popularity as a perceived bulwark against Communism. As Hindenburg struggled to govern through executive decree, running through numerous ineffectual chancellors who more than once dissolved parliament in hopes of finding the next one to be more cooperative, Nazi power grew in the Reichstag. Eventually, in 1933, Hitler was in a position to demand the chancellorship. At first, his government did not look so very different from others that preceded it. It too was composed of a coalition of establishment parties. Besides his, only two other cabinet positions were held by Nazis. Hindenburg and others, including industrialists who had helped him get to where he was, believed his position to be weak. In the view of many, he was an uneducated buffoon, a “roaring gorilla,” as one newspaper editor called him, whose radical aspirations would be tempered by the reality of government. It was thought that he would not last in his position, or that if he did, he would have to play by the rules like everyone else, which would itself quell Nazi agitation. But then four weeks into his administration, a Dutch communist broke into the Reichstag at night and started a fire, and Hitler seized on this event as the first sign of a Communist uprising in Germany. He introduced a bill that he called the Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich, otherwise known as the Enabling Bill, giving him unprecedented but temporary emergency powers to deal with the perceived threat of Communism. Again, it was all perfectly legal to change or even suspend the Weimar constitution through an act of parliament, and those who voted for the bill knew what it meant. It allowed Hitler to pass his own laws without parliamentary or presidential approval, even if those laws violated the constitution. It was essentially the founding document of the Nazi Reich, making possible all the repressions, the persecution, the warmaking, and the atrocities that would follow. Yet still, as many a Fascist do, Hitler insisted on keeping up the pretense of democracy, retaining the trappings of the republic. The law only granted him his emergency powers for a period of four years, but he simply kept renewing the law by fiat, because the law allowed him to do so, and occasionally he would still make a show of convening “parliament,” though by then it was just an assemblage of Nazis gathered to applaud his pronouncements. A year after seizing power, he purged the country of all he considered disloyal, executing around a hundred or more people and arresting more than a thousand.

More than a decade after his failed coup, Hitler, having since seized absolute power, addresses his Nazis in the same Beer Hall in commemoration of the event’s anniversary. (AP photo)

After releasing the first part of this series, I had a longtime listener state on social media that they used to like this podcast but that “making comparisons like these is demented.” I knew when I decided to produce these episodes that they would upset some listeners. My hope is that some who, like this listener, believe such comparisons to be unwarranted might come to realize that they are not as groundless as they think. Parallels have been noted by numerous legacy news media outlets, explored in many peer-reviewed academic journal articles, studied by historians and described at length in recent books. To suggest that all of this analysis is being done by demented or irrational people is close to believing in a vast media conspiracy, which is itself baseless and untenable. Those who suggest that all the people sounding this alarm are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS, a pejorative way of dismissing continued criticism of the former president, miss the simple fact that, when so many reasonable and intelligent people are preoccupied with the idea that he is a credible threat to democracy, it means there are concrete reasons for them to be concerned. I have tried to assemble the reasons and draw the parallels here in a clear and organized way, but I am not alone in seeing these parallels. Like Hitler, Donald Trump was underestimated as something of a buffoon by most establishment politicians and pundits when he came to power legally in 2016. As was thought about Nazis in 1933, many believed that a Trump presidency would mean the de-radicalization of many extremists in his base, as there would be less for them to get worked up over when their candidate won. Many also thought, as they did of Hitler’s government in ’33, that Trump’s government would not end up being so very different from other Republican administrations even though he was a government outsider. None of these predictions were accurate then or now. Just as Hitler was quite open about his intentions to seize absolute power, even if just for a limited time, Trump too has made the same thing clear. He more than once threatened to deploy active duty military domestically, considering declarations of martial law openly during the George Floyd protests, asking, according to his Secretary of Defense, why he can’t just have soldiers shoot protesters. And also, according to one Homeland Security official, as well as the findings of the January 6 Committee, he also considered declaring martial law on January 6th. These threats have since become even more transparent, as during his current presidential campaign, he has promised to deploy troops to the southern border and to invoke the Insurrection Act in order use the military as a domestic police force, all while promising “retribution” and explicitly stating he would arrest and jail lawmakers and prosecutors who have moved against him. As Hitler was before him, we know that Trump is obsessed with loyalty, and we also know that he wants to perform an unrestrained purge of any who are disloyal to him. We see this in the simple fact that turnover in his executive office and cabinet was astronomically higher than previous administrations. He just fires anyone who pushes back. It’s his thing. But he has also tried to implement a more extensive purge, something called Schedule F, which would make it possible for a president to not just fire his own political appointees, but also to wipe out while swathes of the federal government, terminating any civil servants deemed disloyal to the President and replacing them with appointees. His organization already has lists of inexperienced devotees and sycophants who will follow his every order, ready for appointment. Schedule F would massively increase the president’s personal control over every aspect of the federal government, stripping away the protection of as many as 50,000 public sector employees, career civil service personnel whom Trump and his organization portray as a Deep State conspiracy. It must be emphasized that I am not suggesting such mass firings are the same as extralegal executions, nor am I suggesting Trump would order murders. I am only indicating his willingness to purge any who do not fall lockstep in line. The thing is, it’s hard to tell what a fascist is capable of before they seize absolute power. And just like Hitler before him, Trump has explicitly said that he will take dictatorial power, but only for a limited time. In his exclusive town hall with Sean Hannity on Fox News, he was prompted to promise America that he “would never abuse power as retribution against anybody,” and he responded: “Except for day one.” And then he immediately doubled down, tellingly paraphrasing Hannity’s prompt as the question: “You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?” and answering again, “No, no, no… other than day one…. After that I’m not a dictator.”  And yes, perhaps even a Trump with dictatorial powers would not end up a literal Hitler. Perhaps Trumpism would not prove capable of producing such inhuman atrocities as Nazism produced. But why on Earth should we give him a chance to prove how different he really is? Far better to never allow him to retake power. In the Weimar Republic, members of parliament were intimidated into signing Hitler’s Enabling Law. If, on the many occasions when Hitler made it clear what he was and what he would do, the people had believed him, then perhaps he would never have risen to supreme power in Germany. And so again, I say of Trump, he has shown us who he is, and we must believe him.

This election year, remember, even if Trump is not “literally Hitler,” and even if it is unfair to call him a Nazi, it is undeniable that he is the favorite of neo-Nazi voters and that he continues to give valid reasons for concern of his authoritarian tendencies. That alone should be enough for America to vote against him and protest any further moves he makes to steal the election. 

Further Reading

“Breitbart Exposé Confirms: Far-Right News Site a Platform for the White Nationalist ‘Alt-Right.’” Southern Poverty Law Center, 6 Oct. 2017, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/06/breitbart-expos%C3%A9-confirms-far-right-news-site-platform-white-nationalist-alt-right.

Cillizza, Chris, and Brenna Williams. “15 times Donald Trump praised authoritarian rulers.” CNN, 2 July 2019, www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/donald-trump-dictators-kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin/index.html.

Evon, Dan. “Hitler and Trump: Common Slogans?” Snopes, 4 March 2016, www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-germany-great-again/.

Hardinges, Nick. “'Unified Reich' Reference Contained in Video Posted to Trump's Truth Social Account?” Snopes, 21 May 2024, www.snopes.com/fact-check/unified-reich-trump/.  

Hayden, Michael Edison. “Emails Confirm Miller’s Twin Obsessions: Immigrants and Crime.” Southern Poverty Law Center, 25 Nov. 2019, www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/25/emails-confirm-millers-twin-obsessions-immigrants-and-crime.

Hett, Benjamin Carter. The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Henry Holt and Company, 2018.

King, David. The Trial of Adolf Hitler: The Beer Hall Putsch and the Rise of Nazi Germany. W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

Lombroso, Daniel, and Yoni Appelbaum. “'Hail Trump!': White Nationalists Salute the President-Elect.” The Atlantic, 21 Nov. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/.

Narea, Nicole. “Donald Trump’s Long History of Enabling White Supremacy, Explained.” Vox, 29 Nov. 2022, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23484314/trump-fuentes-ye-dinner-white-nationalism-supremacy.

Nunn, Joseph. “Trump Wants to Use the Military Against His Domestic Enemies. Congress Must Act.” Brennan Center for Justice, 17 Nov. 2023, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trump-wants-use-military-against-his-domestic-enemies-congress-must-act.

Richards, Zoe, and Peter Nicholas. “Trump once complained that his generals weren't like Hitler's, book says.” NBC News, 8 Aug. 2022, www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-complained-generals-werent-hitlers-book-says-rcna42114.

The Rise of Adolf Hitler. Edited by Annette Dufner, Greenhaven Press, 2003.

The Rise of Nazi Germany. Edited by Don Nardo, Greenhaven Press, 1999.

Smith, Peter, and Tiffany Stanley. “US Jews Upset with Trump’s Latest Rhetoric Say He Doesn’t Get To Tell Them How To Be Jewish.” Associated Press, 25 March 2024, apnews.com/article/trump-jewish-voters-democrats-antisemitism-a43bf6f6266d9c6a4b761b82281aa512.

“Trump says maybe U.S. will have a president for life someday.” PBS News, 4 March 2018, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-maybe-u-s-will-have-a-president-for-life-someday.

Ullrich, Volker. Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis. W.W. Norton & Company, 2023.

The Looming Threat of Fascism - Part One: The March on Rome

In the years between Adolf Hitler’s accession to chancellorship in Germany and the outbreak of World War II, when the threat of Fascism and Nazism loomed large on the world stage, many in America did not shrink from identifying what seemed to be fascist threats at home. Indeed, there were many in America, especially among the wealthy, who openly admired Mussolini’s brand of authoritarian government, even apparently conspiring to overthrow President Roosevelt and replace him with a similar strong man leader in a planned insurrection called the Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch. And there were outright Nazi sympathizers within the U.S. as well. The organization Friends of New Germany was actually organized by the Nazis and run by Nazi agents, and this organization transformed by 1936 into the German American Bund, which worked tirelessly to promote Nazism and make Hitler palatable to the American public. Many in this organization would go on to be very active in the America First Committee, which lobbied to keep America out of Hitler’s war. In this, the heyday of literal fascists, it was a matter of duty and vigilance among those who recognized fascism as the threat it was to point out when any American leader seemed to tend toward authoritarianism. With unabashed fascists abroad and at home, it was no idle threat. Amidst this turmoil, in 1935, Nobel prize winning author Sinclair Lewis dramatized the threat in his classic novel, It Can’t Happen Here, in which a populist demagogue rises to the U.S. presidency with promises of making the country great again, and once in office becomes a brutal authoritarian tyrant. It was a timely and timeless warning, and in those years, it was not uncommon or uncalled for to point out when a politician was looking like a fascist. Ironically, though, while Italian Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism were both inherently right-wing extremist movements, here in the U.S., while forces on the far right pretty openly plotted to bring about their own literally fascist regimes, it was politicians on the left who were called fascists. One, of course, was Louisiana senator Huey Long, who was called “the Hitler of one of our sovereign states,” and who some said would “Hitlerize America.” The comparisons were so common that one supporter of President Roosevelt said “Hitler couldn’t hold a candle to Huey.” Now, Long certainly can reasonably be described as a demagogue, and he did have authoritarian leanings, but I’ve argued before that painting him as a fascist misses the mark and shows a lack of understanding of what fascism is. Long was not alone in being compared to Mussolini and Hitler, though. In 1933, when FDR took office, a New York Times reporter described the support for Roosevelt as “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts.” It may seem absurd to compare FDR to Mussolini, since Roosevelt moved the country out of neutrality in his efforts to fight the threat of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Also, there is the fact that his greatest enemies were the wealthy, many of whom saw Roosevelt as a traitor to his class and they themselves wanted fascism because of its protection of business aristocracy. But because of some superficial similarities between his sweeping New Deal programs and some economic recovery programs enacted by both Mussolini and Hitler, he was called a “fascist dictator” on all sides, by the Communist and Socialist Parties and left-leaning publications, as well as by his critics on the right, most vocally by the Republican president he had unseated, Herbert Hoover. While this characterization of Roosevelt may not have stood the test of time, it was not out of bounds as political rhetoric. In fact, staying actively vigilant against such threats was very necessary and would remain so, even after the war. In 1946, the U.S. War department, recognizing the continuing threat of fascist movements within the U.S., produced an educational film called Don’t Be a Sucker, in which it compared those who are taken in by fascist movements to marks duped by swindlers. In it, a man stands listening to a speaker on the street who is spewing hate speech and nativist rhetoric, and a Hungarian immigrant points out that it is very reminiscent of the Nazi rhetoric that he saw take root in Germany. He goes on to convince the other man that such divisive rhetoric is dangerous, because it enables the rise of brutal authoritarianism, something that all Americans need to remain vigilant against. This short film went viral in 2017, after the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville that saw anti-racist counter-protester Heather Heyer murdered by vehicular homicide and then President Trump seemingly defending the neo-Nazi demonstrators as also having “very fine people” among them—a remark recently deemed by Snopes to have been taken out of context, but which still seems unmistakable when examined within the context of the press conference in which it was uttered.

The rediscovery of the 1946 film Don’t Be a Sucker speaks to the fact that we again live in a time when there is a growing threat of nationalist authoritarianism in the world. According to the last several Freedom in the World reports, there has been a “global decline in freedom” for the last 18 years, and according to the latest Democracy Report, for the first time in the last three decades, “The world now harbors more closed autocracies than liberal democracies.” However, even though we are in the midst of another period of increased danger justifying increased vigilance against the rise of fascist movements, it has become gauche to draw comparisons between current political movements and fascists or Nazis, or between prominent political figures and Mussolini or Hitler. It is called lazy, and it is said to trivialize the Holocaust. In fact, Mike Godwin, in 1990, coined Godwin’s law, the idea that any online argument will inevitably devolve into baseless name-calling and comparisons to Hitler. In many cases this is true. If one makes groundless comparisons of those one disagrees with to Nazis, it is certainly toxic rhetoric and it definitely can trivialize the Holocaust. Case in point, when actor Gina Carano posted a tweet comparing the experience of being conservative to the experience of Jews in the Holocaust being beaten in the streets by Nazis. It’s unsurprising that she received backlash over this comparison. But it was not for the simple act of making a Nazi analogy. Many right-wing pundits defended her by saying critics of Trump had been comparing him and his supporters to fascists for years, crying double standard, but Carano is not a good example. She just made a bad taste comparison, and since her job relied on her remaining publicly palatable, she was held accountable for her own sentiments in a pretty standard way. Don’t stir controversy and then complain when you come to be viewed as controversial. A more valid example of Nazi analogies made by those on the right is Donald Trump himself saying that Joe Biden is “running a Gestapo administration,” or when he promised at a rally to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical Left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” which is quite an interesting statement, since he is trying to identify fascism with its almost diametric opposite, communism, and in the same breath calling those he demonizes “vermin,” a word famously used by Hitler for those he demonized, Jews, whom he explicitly identified with Communists. Trump is criticized for making these analogies, just as are those who compare him with Hitler or Mussolini. The difference is that there are simply more parallels when comparing him and his movement to fascism. He has simply given the world more reason to identify him as a fascist threat. To equate the analogies on all sides is misrepresent them. As we have seen, there is a long history to making such analogies and scrutinizing leaders and movements for the whiff of fascism, and with the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, there is again strong reason to be skeptical of any politician or party that stinks of fascism. It is more important than ever to really look at why these comparisons are made and to evaluate them seriously. Is there a Holocaust or pogrom being perpetrated against Republicans, as Carano suggested. Obviously no, so her comparison was odious, to say the least. And what reason does Trump have for comparing the current administration to Nazis? Simply that he has been prosecuted under its auspices, but Trump has been investigated not only by the Justice Department, but also by district attorneys in New York and Georgia, and indicted in every case based on evidence by grand juries composed of citizens, not Justice Department officials. The comparison to the Gestapo just falls apart in the face of the truth of the criminal cases against him. So much for the right calling the left fascist. Now let’s look at the parallels that compel critics to suggest that Trumpism looks a lot like fascism. Though Godwin’s Law has sometimes been misconstrued as suggesting that any time someone makes such an analogy they must automatically be disregarded, Mike Godwin himself rejected this, saying that his law “should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter,” and urging that any who make such comparisons “develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully…. and not be glib.”  “If you think the comparison is valid,” he says, “and you've given it some thought, do it.” So here goes.

Concerns that Donald Trump’s candidacy represented a fascist threat to American democracy first appeared before the 2016 election. During the run up to Election Day, a non-profit documentary made by college students in Canada and called It Can Happen Here went through fourteen defining characteristics of fascism as defined by Dr. Lawrence Britt and examined their presence in Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric. These characteristics are: Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism: disdain for the importance of human rights, identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause, the supremacy of the military/avid militarism, rampant sexism, efforts to control mass media, an obsession with national security, religion and the ruling elite being tied together, the power of corporations being protected, the power of labor being suppressed or eliminated, disdain for and suppression of intellectuals and the arts, obsession with crime and punishment, rampant cronyism and corruption, and fraudulent elections. At the risk of equating both sides, some of these characteristics, like protection of corporations and militarism, are arguably true of the American political system generally, regardless of the party in power, and that should give us pause. But certainly, over the course of the last 9 years, Trump and his MAGA movement have demonstrated again and again their anti-intellectualism in their attacks on science and academia, their sexism in their misogynist rhetoric, their nationalism masquerading as patriotism, their mafia-like corruption, their demonization of political opponents, as well as immigrants and minority groups, as “enemies” to unite against, and perhaps most obviously, their intention to marry church and state. While such early warnings as this documentary may have seemed premature or alarmist at the time, they have proven prescient. Just before the election, in my very first podcast episode, I too wanted do my part to sound a warning against Trump’s candidacy, which I worried then was dangerous, even though I had no real platform to speak of at the time. I was not yet ready, however, to call Trump a fascist. Instead I focused on his phony populism and nativist rhetoric, identifying him as a demagogue and comparing his movement to the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party of the 19th century. And though some listeners dislike my political takes, the fact is that I rarely mentioned Trump at all during his term in office. During my episode on the Reichstag fire, I did not compare him to Nazis; rather, I only mentioned there were fears that he may exploit some attack as a kind of modern Reichstag Fire, just as there had previously been fears and arguments that Obama and George W. Bush would do or had done likewise. I only vaguely mentioned Trump’s conspiracy-mongering and efforts to undermine trust in the press with his use of the term “fake news” in my episode on newspaper hoaxer Joseph Mulhatton. But after Charlottesville, I felt moved to more directly address his egregious remarks and called him out for his assertion that protesters of confederate monuments were “changing history” in my episode on the Lost Cause Myth of the Confederacy. After that, I did not again make mention of him until the lead-up to the 2020 election, when I again felt moved to use my by then somewhat bigger platform to caution listeners about the danger of his conspiracism and claims about a “deep state,” placing them within the long history of baseless political conspiracy mongering going back to the Bavarian Illuminati. My episodes were more and more political following Trump’s election defeat, as threats to democracy seemed to loom with his baseless claims of election fraud, proven lies that came to a head with the capitol insurrection on January 6th 2021. I have since written more than one piece  comparing January 6th to other incidents in American history, one of them an explicitly fascist plot, the Wall Street Putsch, and I am not alone in comparing January 6th to a fascist coup attempt. That is because it bears such a striking resemblance to the first fascist coup, led by Benito Mussolini.

The January 6th U.S. Capitol attack should be foremost in the minds of all American voters this Election Day. It was incited not only by Donald Trump’s election denialism but also by an explicit campaign, organized by Trump strategists Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and bankrolled by Trump’s donors, which included robocalls to muster participants, the organization of over 80 buses to transport the participants, and the apparent recruitment of march leaders, like conspiracist Alex Jones, and collusion with the principal instigators of violence, the militant Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, many of whom have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy. That very day, on social media, Trump was suggesting that his supporters could prevent the peaceful transition of power, and in a rally that morning not far from the Capitol, he invoked violent rhetoric, telling them to “walk down to the Capitol,” and asserting that “if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.” He said that he too would march with them on the Capitol, though this did not happen. During the ensuing storming of the Capitol, one protester was shot and killed while trying to unlawfully enter a building. 174 police officers were injured, 15 hospitalized, and one afterward died, suffering two strokes after having been assaulted with bear mace. Four Capitol Police officers who responded afterward committed suicide. In the days before the attack, Steve Bannon reportedly remarked that he was actively involved in a “bloodless coup,” but this certainly was not bloodless, and the historical reference should not be lost. Mussolini’s March on Rome in October of 1922 was also called “bloodless” when it too was very violent. The parallels between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the January 6th insurrection were not lost on the media. The Capitol attack was variously called “Trump’s abortive March on Rome” and “Trump’s Half-Baked March on Rome.” It was not the first time that Trump was linked to Mussolini. Early in his 2016 Presidential campaign, he came under fire for retweeting a Mussolini quotation, “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” In an interview, he insisted that he knew who had said it and that he didn’t much care. It was a rather striking parallel to when Louisiana Senator Huey Long was asked by a radio broadcaster if he was a fascist and responded in kind. “Fine. I’m Mussolini and Hitler rolled into one. Mussolini gave them castor oil,” he said, laughing as he referred to a violent force-feeding incident during the March on Rome. “I’ll give them Tabasco, and then they’ll like Louisiana.” Just as Long’s exasperated joke in the face of direct accusations of fascism didn’t make him a fascist back then, Trump’s unrepentant admiration of Mussolini’s quote also didn’t make him a fascist. But then Trump went and fomented an insurrection with numerous parallels to Mussolini’s historic fascist coup, which his own organization gave the very similar name “March to Save America.” The “march to the Capitol,” as many participants called it, was eerily similar to Mussolini’s Marcia su Roma, or March on Rome, which was also a march on the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

Louisiana Senator Huey Long, who was also called a Fascist, but who never fomented an open insurrection.

Much like Donald Trump, who famously said on television more than a decade before securing the Republican presidential nomination, that “[i]n many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat,” Benito Mussolini did not start out as a far-right political figure. He was, in fact, prominent in the Italian Socialist Party. He considered himself a Marxist, but he leaned more toward authoritarian communism, rejecting socialism’s egalitarian principles, and as he drifted more toward militarism in support of Italian intervention in World War One, he was expelled from the Socialist Party. At that point, his politics devolved into rabid nationalism. He built his political ideology in direct opposition to socialism. He stood in opposition to democracy, admiring Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of an Übermensch, or superman, seeing in it an ideal national leader, a supreme aristocratic figure who could lead Italy through strength. In 1919, he formed the Italian Combat League. The Italian word for “league” being fasci, a term referring to a sheaf or bundle, representing strength in unity. The word had been used in the late 19th century to refer to many and various political groups. Mussolini’s use of it was rather mundane, but because of his actions, the word would take on sinister meaning. His political group formed armed squadrons, or squadristi, known as blackshirts for their choice of attire, and this far right militant faction engaged in violence directed at all leftist groups, from Social Democrats and Socialists to Communists and anarchists, and because of a perceived threat of a potential communist revolution, owing to worker strikes in recent years, the government did not respond to the violence perpetrated by Mussolini’s squads. Soon, the National Fascist Party was formed and Mussolini was elected to the lower house of the Italian parliament. A year later, he directed his squadristi to march on Rome and was summarily appointed Prime Minister by King Victor Emmanuel III in what was widely represented as a bloodless revolution. Before we further examine the remarkable parallels between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the January 6th attack, we can acknowledge its differences without taking away from the point. Mussolini came by his leadership of militant squads somewhat honestly, having volunteered for military service in World War I. Trump, on the other hand, dodged military service in Vietnam through a medical deferment. While it is true that, in his youth, Mussolini too avoided military service by fleeing to Switzerland, in the Great War, he fought through nine months of trench warfare and was eventually discharged after being wounded in a mortar explosion. And Mussolini did not hide his direct command of or responsibility for the blackshirts and their violence. Certainly the violent militant groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have been likened to Mussolini’s blackshirts, but Trump has been insulated from direct contact with them. Ties between Trump associates and these extremist groups have been probed, and the January 6 panel was presented evidence of coordination between Trump allies and these groups, and we all saw Trump on television choosing carefully his coy phrasing, telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” rather than condemning their violence. Certainly these groups believe that he at least tacitly approves of their actions, though, even if he is not directly issuing them commands. Additionally, Trump’s insurrection on January 6 could better be described as a self-coup than a coup. He had attained power through legal means and incited an autocoup, an illegal attempt to remain in power. Mussolini’s, on the other hand, was more of a traditional coup d'état, seizing power he did not already have. In fact, Mussolini’s seizure of power was essentially legal, as the King granted him his position. He really did not seize absolute dictatorial power for another few years, and in that case, his too was a self-coup. Finally, perhaps the most crucial of differences, but one that should encourage our vigilance rather than comfort us and make us complacent, is that, while Mussolini’s March on Rome succeeded, Trump’s failed. That does not mean, however, that such a coup cannot possibly succeed in the United States.

While the differences cannot be denied—such as the differences of time and place and culture, which I don’t even mention—the similarities between Trump’s March on the Capitol and Mussolini’s March on Rome should also not be denied or ignored. In both cases, the attempted coup came in the wake of unrest and mass demonstrations of a more leftist character, which those on the right feared as revolutionary. In America, the unrest preceding the insurrection was the George Floyd protests, which I am reluctant to characterize as political in nature, since they were protests for civil rights and human rights, which rightly should not be considered political, but rather a matter of human decency and justice. Certainly the widespread demonstrations were treated as political, though, and Trump himself, in an official statement, described those protesting for police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder as “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and… dangerous thugs,” generalizing the demonstrations as “acts of domestic terror,” though 93% of them were not violent or destructive, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. Similarly, during the years before Mussolini’s March on Rome, there were mass demonstrations over inequities in working and living conditions. Most notable was the so-called “Red Week,” during which the Italian Socialist Party called a general strike in the wake of three unarmed socialist protesters being massacred by police in the town of Ancona. These mass labor demonstrations across two northern and central regions of Italy were viewed as an attempted Communist revolt, so the government sent 100,000 soldiers to quell the rioting, resulting in the further killing of 17 protesters as well as the injuring of thousands. Once again, when making historical comparisons, we cannot pretend that a one-to-one, perfect likeness exists. Red Week was actually years before the March on Rome, whereas the George Floyd protests occurred less than a year before the January 6th attack. Also, whereas Trump was the one sending soldiers to quell the unrest in 2020, in 1914, Benito Mussolini was actually an organizer of the general strike during Red Week. When the strike was called off, Mussolini began to view the socialist movement as failed and began his drift to the political right. While it’s true that riots during Red Week took on an insurrectionary character, destroying railways and bridges and taking control of entire towns. In contrast, even in the few cases when Black Lives Matter protests did degenerate into riots and looting, there was never an insurrectionary character. They never attempted to disrupt the government or seize the reins of power. Nevertheless, the parallel here is important because in both cases this unrest affected the response to the later insurrections.

A Blackshirt Action Squad in 1922

Whereas the general strike during Red Week was responded to swiftly and violently, the Italian military and gendarmerie mostly looked the other way when blackshirts began their campaigns of violence and terror and did almost nothing to oppose them in their March on Rome. Likewise, BLM protesters demonstrating in Washington, D.C., on June 1st, 2020, were met with strong and violent law enforcement response, including SWAT teams and mounted police as well as the presence of federal agents, Secret Service, and the National Guard, even though they never attempted to breach the Capitol, or the White House, outside of which they were protesting. In contrast, on January 6th, 2021, with a crowd of comparable size initiating an overt attack on the Capitol building while representatives were tallying and certifying electoral college votes, only Capitol police were present, and eventually some metropolitan police, all in meager numbers. The Capitol Police twice refused reinforcements, but with nearly 2000 sworn officers and its own bomb squad, it should still have been up to the task, as evidenced in previous crisis situations, such as during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings two and a half years earlier, when they managed to clear demonstrators from buildings and arrested 73. On January 6th, only a few hundred Capitol Police officers were on duty, while others were teleworking, and of those on duty, some were nowhere to be seen, while others posed for pictures with insurrectionists and in some cases appeared to let rioters enter buildings. Numerous officers certainly acted heroically that day, and among these, there was a sense that they had been set up for failure, as one officer afterward stated, “I feel betrayed. They didn’t even put us in a position to be successful.” Certainly the disproportionate law enforcement response compared to previous riots is a major parallel between January 6th and the March on Rome. Another is that insurrectionists involved in both incidents, as well as their apologists, relied on direct comparisons between themselves and protestors on the left. In the wake of the Capitol siege of 2021, when legislators convened for the historic purpose of impeaching the already once impeached President Trump, Republicans more than once compared the insurrectionists to Black Lives Matter protestors, drawing a false equivalence and denying the insurrectionary character of the Capitol siege. Likewise, in Italy, fascist violence had long been excused as only a countermeasure to potential socialist revolution and similar in character to socialist labor demonstrations, and Mussolini too denied the insurrectionary character of his March on Rome, claiming that it was not anti-democratic. His March was no coup, he insisted, though he was careful to make explicit the continuing threat that it could be, saying in a speech to the Italian parliament the next month, “I could have made this drab silent hall into a camp for my squads…I could have barred the doors of parliament and created a government which was only made up of Fascists: but I didn’t want to, at least for now.” January 6th apologists similarly insist that their siege of the capitol was not anti-democratic. They did not seek to overthrow the government, according to their defenders, just to prevent the certification of the election. Of course, if they had succeeded, and if Donald Trump had unlawfully remained in power despite election results, then he would have been in a similar position to Mussolini, an unelected leader who had taken his power through a show of force, with the implicit threat that he could take more if he wanted to, a threat on which Mussolini, eventually, made good.

A similarity that has been previously noted between Trump and Mussolini is that, while both clearly roused their followers and paramilitant bad actors to march on the capital with the clear intention of seizing power, or in Trump’s case, maintaining power, neither was physically present. Neither participated himself. Testimony presented before the House committee investigating the attack revealed that Trump actually seems to have genuinely intended to join the insurrectionists, believing that a televised march on the capitol with the President at its head might pressure legislators to give in to his demands that the election results not be certified. He appears only to have relented when his Secret Service security detail, unprepared for such an affair, were unable to get roadblocks set up on short notice, with Capitol police already struggling to deal with the crowds Trump had sent their way. According to one White House aide, he even climbed into his limousine and throttled a Secret Service agent who refused to drive him to the Capitol. On the other hand, Mussolini seems to have never had any intention of joining his blackshirts in their March on Rome. Instead he remained near the Swiss border, in Milan, ready to flee if his coup went south. He only came to Rome by train once he was assured that his forces controlled the city, after he had been invited by the king to form a cabinet. Once there, he took a propaganda photo showing him marching with his blackshirts in the street, but he was not actually present during the days of violence that had preceded his arrival. It has been theorized that, if Trump had personally led his insurrectionists, his coup may have succeeded, as Capitol police may have ceased all efforts to hold back the mob when faced with the President, and lawmakers may have bent to his demands if he had marched into the room with a squad of paramilitants in tow. This counter-factual analysis of January 6th is very common of coups both successful and unsuccessful. Long have historians analyzed Mussolini’s coup through similar what-if scenarios. It is often asserted that if the Italian army had been called in, if there had been a concerted effort to actually confront the blackshirts, then the March on Rome would not have succeeded. This is one talking point of a certain view on Mussolini’s coup that places blame entirely on the king. The problem is, we don’t know, we never know, what might have happened in some given incident if circumstances had been different. Certainly the blackshirts would have been outnumbered, but they had always been outnumbered and that had never stopped them from seizing power or control in other cities during the years leading up to their march on the capital. Mussolini’s squadristi had managed to overthrow the local governments of almost 300 towns, and earlier that summer, they had marched on Ravenna and taken control of the entire region. Since neither the police nor the military put up the resistance necessary to halt fascist seizure of weapons, vehicles, and buildings during the three years of blackshirt terror prior to their March on Rome, there is no clear reason to believe the military would have been effective in stopping them or even motivated to do so. A more troubling and pressing counterfactual premise to ponder is whether January 6th would have been more successful if red-hat rioters had demonstrated their willingness and capacity to disrupt local governments and seize public buildings countless times before their march on the capital, as had blackshirts. As it was, anti-masking and anti-lockdown demonstrations prior to January 6th are not comparable to the fascist violence before the March on Rome. Only once, just three months before the Capitol attack, did right-wing militiamen storm a state capitol during Covid lockdown protests, in Michigan, in what is seen as a kind of dry run for the later insurrection in Washington.

A newly arrived Mussolini posing for pictures with his insurrectionists after days of violence in Rome.

This depiction of the March on Rome as no real threat is part and parcel of the larger portrayal of the Fascist coup as being harmless and legal. This was a view of the March on Rome that Mussolini himself promoted. While his blackshirts were still marching on the capital, he gave an interview to The Times in which he claimed no violence was taking place. Mussolini was a longtime writer for newspapers and was even working for Hearst News Service at the time of the March. He was adept at spinning the press narrative, and this is a big reason why many in America viewed him and his party favorably following his seizure of power. In fact, this perspective of the March on Rome would be immortalized in history books for a long time. It was simply easier to blame the collapse of democracy on the weakness of the king rather than on the threat of a violent minority of extremists. So the insurrectionary march on the Italian capital was characterized by historians as bloodless and farcical, more of a joke than a serious coup. In many historical representations, it was mere choreography, purely symbolic, a bluff that paid off. And how could it not be? The Fascist marchers were not an army, but rather citizens, and their march was therefore a lawful demonstration since, again, it was peaceful according to the history that the victors had written. The blackshirts were poorly equipped, a “rag-bag” crowd, it was said, and their display was a “parody,” a “grotesque.” In this way the threat and the violence of the fascist insurrectionists in Italy was downplayed, and indeed, Mussolini would even go so far as to pretend that, when there was violence, his blackshirts were themselves the victims, painting them as martyrs, comparing them to fallen French revolutionaries. “We should remember… that the insurrection was bloody,” he said, not shying from calling it what it was, an insurrection, but reversing the true direction of the violence that had taken place: “There were dozens of Fascist dead…many more than fell during the sacking of the Bastille.” In reality, as later historians who set the record straight have revealed, the Fascist March on Rome was anything but peaceful. Most notably, a Communist party official, Giuseppe Lemmi, was abducted, shaved, and forced to drink more than a pint of castor oil. He was then paraded through the streets, his head painted with the colors of the Italian flag, with a card hung around his neck labeling him a deserter, and he was forced to shout “Long live Fascism!” Beyond this clear example of violence, there were countless others. Blackshirts had lists of names, targeting specific Communist and Socialist political figures as well as liberals and trade unionists generally for execution. They burned homes to the ground. They destroyed the presses of opposition newspapers. They occupied whole neighborhoods that were seen as leftist strongholds, and when anyone resisted them, throwing insults or the occasional brick their way, they opened fire, killing more than one innocent bystander, like an elderly man who was out on his balcony when someone in his building shouted down at the blackshirts. The violent nature of this coup cannot be denied, and yet it was, convincingly. The January 6th riot and breach of the Capitol was also undeniably violent. About 140 police officers were assaulted that day, according to the Department of Justice, and dozens of those were severely injured, according to the Associated Press. The violent intentions of the insurrectionists were clear. They set up gallows and announced their intention to kill the Vice President. They stormed the Capitol with firearms, knives, clubs, pepper spray and bear mace. Some were photographed carrying zip tie handcuffs, and they too had a list of targets. Besides the Vice President, they were explicitly searching the building for the Speaker of the House, who was hiding under her desk with other lawmakers. Yet Republican politicians claim it was only a peaceful and lawful protest. They downplay its violence, its organization, and its effectiveness, pretending the rioters were never a real threat. Donald Trump claimed that there were “no guns whatsoever,” but court records and news reports have proved this was strictly false, as numerous defendants were charged with possession of firearms on the Capitol grounds. Trump and other insurrection apologists, as well as the press generally, also portray the January 6th rioters as “rag-tag” and not a real threat, or as heroes and martyrs, pointing specifically to the killing of Ashli Babbitt, who ignored warnings from law enforcement not to enter the Speaker’s Lobby through a shattered window, beyond which legislators were being evacuated, and was shot in her left shoulder. Despite later claims that she was unarmed, crime scene investigation showed she was actually carrying a knife. While Babbitt’s death is tragic, the shooting was ruled justified. The point to emphasize here is that, in the downplaying of the insurrectionists’ violence and the threat they posed, as well as in their misrepresentation as victims and martyrs, the parallels between January 6th and the March on Rome are hard to deny.

Since 2022, when more and more information was revealed not only about the Capitol attack but also about Trump’s illegal fake elector scheme, many in the press and media, as well as political analysts, began to raise the alarm about what they called a “slow motion coup” or “slow moving coup,” because of Republican efforts to get election denialist Trump supporters elected as the chief elections officers of numerous states. With the further push to place election deniers into positions as poll workers and elections officials all over the country, it appears that the groundwork is in place to prevent the certification of election results before they ever reach Congress. But Mussolini’s Fascist coup in Italy was not swift either. When blackshirts marched on the capital, it was the culmination of three years of similar insurrections in cities and towns across Italy, dress rehearsals for their storming of the seat of political power, and in all of the preceding insurrections, similar violence took place. Neither was their coup complete when Mussolini was named Prime Minister, nor did their violence cease. Before the end of the year, in Turin, blackshirts attacked local labor leaders who resisted their domination, killing at least eleven and maybe as many as two dozen. Still, for the next year and a half, Mussolini ruled with the trappings of democracy, under a coalition government, slowly but surely working toward consolidating his power. Crucial to his machinations was getting a law passed that would allow for minority rule, awarding the party with the most votes in an election a majority of seats in parliament, even if the party receiving the most votes only had a quarter of them. In the 1924 elections, blackshirt intimidation and violence at polling places ensured Fascist control of the legislature. That year, an outspoken critic of Fascism, the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, published a book called The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination, and he spoke more than once before the Chamber of Deputies and Parliament, denouncing Fascist interference in the election and declaring the results invalid. Within several days of his last such speech, he was abducted on his way to parliament by members of Mussolini’s secret police, and he was stabbed to death, his corpse abandoned outside of Rome and discovered two months later. The murderers were later discovered and put on trial, and there was much suspicion of Mussolini’s direct involvement. In a famous speech, early in 1925, Mussolini took responsibility for the murder and all other Fascist violence and essentially dared anyone to do anything about it. He soon outlawed opposition parties and did away with all pretense of democracy. This was the beginning of his outright dictatorship, more than two years after the March on Rome and more seven years after Mussolini first organized a Fascist Action Squad. So it seems, even by definition, according the original historical example, we should expect fascist coups to be relatively slow-moving.

Socialist Giuseppe Lemmi following his torture by Blackshirts.

I’m certain that I have probably picked up some new listeners who may not have gone back to listen to my more politically charged episodes, like 2022’s “The Perils of American Democracy.” To any who take umbrage with my comparison of Trump with Mussolini in this episode, though its unlikely you have made it to the end, I would reiterate what I said back in 2022. After January 6th, this is no longer a partisan argument. This is about concern for the future of our Republic and its democratic system, as many Republicans, to their credit, have themselves come to realize. I am not the first to have compared the former president to Il Duce. His style of politics and posturing of strength, lend weight to the comparison. It is hard to listen to reports about Rudy Giuliani saying in the days before January 6th that “We’re going to the Capitol. It’s going to be great. The president is going to be there. He’s going to look powerful,” without thinking of the original strongman, Mussolini. Mussolini and Trump both came to power on anti-establishment populist movements, as demagogues. While in power, they both leveraged mouthpiece media platforms to propagandize. Trump’s “America First” doctrine, regardless of its historical connection to fascism, can’t be viewed purely as a neutrality doctrine, like that for which the phrase was originally coined. Though in part it colored his isolationism and protectionism in trade policy, it most clearly expresses a sentiment about American nationalism, and in that sense, it is very similar to Mussolini’s description of Fascism: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” When criminal investigations into his political and business wrongdoing began, Trump called prosecutors “radical, vicious, [and] racist” and called on his supporters to rise up if legal action was taken against him. Some have compared this to the Matteotti Crisis, as it has been revealed Giacomo Matteotti was investigating Mussolini’s corruption in connection with Standard Oil when he was assassinated. And last but not least, in the wake of the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump, when a gunman apparently knicked his ear and he wore large bandages on the minor wound during subsequent public appearances, it was widely compared with a similar incident in April 1926, when an Irish woman named Violet Gibson, otherwise an avowed pacifist, shot at Mussolini and grazed his nose. As was the case with Donald Trump, this attempt to destroy him, which must of course be condemned in a civil and lawful society, had the opposite effect of strengthening his cult of personality. Mussolini afterward appeared to the public on numerous occasions, waving to his Fascist mobs wearing an oversized bandage that covered not only his nose but spread across both his cheeks, a symbol of his strength in the face of opposition that could be seen even from very far away. Considering all of the, dare I say, weird parallels that can be made between Trumpism and Fascism, it is clearly not an inane or reckless comparison. There is a definite likeness that must make every American wary and influence their decision at the polls in November. Nor are these the only parallels that we all need to be aware of lest a dark passage of history repeat itself. For those of you who take issue with me comparing recent history to the rise of Italian Fascism, you’ll see that I can indeed take it further, as in part two I will compare recent events to the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic. So, yeah, I’m going there, and not fallaciously, but rather with serious and sober critical thought. 

This election year, remember, even if we cannot fairly call Trump an outright fascist, it is undeniable that he has for the last 9 years followed the fascist playbook in numerous ways. And that should be enough for all of us to shut him out of American politics forever.  

Further Reading

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “An American Authoritarian.” The Atlantic, 10 Aug. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump/495263/.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.” Politico, 3 Aug. 2024, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/03/assassination-attempts-mussolini-trump-00171825.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Trump’s Promotion of an Image of Strength After Assassination Attempt Borrows from Authoritarian Playbook.” The Conversation, 25 July 2024, theconversation.com/trumps-promotion-of-an-image-of-strength-after-assassination-attempt-borrows-from-authoritarian-playbook-235038.

Blinder, Stephen, “The Tragic Myth of America’s 2021 ‘March on Rome.’” Spectrum, no. 12, 4 June 2024, doi: https://doi.org/10.29173/spectrum251.

Bosworth, R.J.B. “The March on Rome 1922: How Benito Mussolini Turned Italy into the First Fascist State.” History Extra, 14 Feb. 2023, www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/march-on-rome-mussolini/.

Foot, John. “The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual.” Modern Italy, vol. 28, no. 2, 6 March 2023, pp. 162-177. Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/mit.2023.5

Greenway, H.D.S. “Trump’s Mussolini roots.” Boston Globe, 21 Oct. 2022, www.bostonglobe.com/2022/10/21/opinion/trumps-mussolini-roots/.

Marantz, Andrew. “Why We Can’t Stop Arguing About Whether Trump Is a Fascist.” The New Yorker, 27 March 2024, www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/why-we-cant-stop-arguing-about-whether-trump-is-a-fascist.

McGreevy, Nora. “The Little-Known Story of Violet Gibson, the Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini.” Smithsonian Magazine, 22 March 2021, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1926-irish-woman-shot-benito-mussolini-and-almost-altered-history-forever-180977286/.

Nichols, John. “Trump Steals a Strategy From Mussolini’s Playbook.” The Nation, 1 Feb. 2022, www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-texas-pardons/.

Dänikenitis – Part Two: Human Chauvinism

Erich von Däniken’s thesis, that extraterrestrials have visited Earth in the distant past and interacted with human cultures, is not in and of itself a ridiculous prospect. It should not be rejected based on any preconceptions or prejudices about such a theory, but rather on the basis of its weak, erroneous, and misrepresented evidence. The fact is that there is a long history to the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, much estimable work has been done in this field, and there remains strong reason to believe in the possibility of alien life, theoretically, and out there, in the cosmos, rather than down here on Earth. Inventor and electrical genius Nikola Tesla believed at the end of the 19th century that radio communication could be established with extraterrestrial civilizations, and throughout the 20th century, this line of reasoning has developed into numerous SETI projects, SETI standing for Seach for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and radio searches have long been a focus of such projects. Indeed, when such searches find anything unusual in our galaxy, the presence of extra-terrestrial life or technology is often the first conjecture that astronomers and scientists consider. Tesla himself mistakenly believed he had detected a radio signal from Mars, and similarly, in the 1960s, when the regular radio signals of a pulsar were first detected, astronomers labeled it LGM-1, for “Little Green Men.” Many noteworthy astronomers in the 1960s were preoccupied with SETI. In 1962, a Soviet astronomer, I.S. Shklovsky, wrote a major work on the topic, titled Universe, Life, Intelligence, and in 1966, Harvard astronomer Carl Sagan, a champion of science and skeptical thought, collaborated with Schklovsky on a revision and translation of his work, expanding the scope of the study, and publishing it for English-speaking readers under the title Intelligent Life in the Universe. This book introduced the concept to the public that intelligent life not only may exist but actually seems statistically probable, given the size and complexity of our galaxy. More than this, it suggested that there may be civilizations more advanced than our own, which have already achieved interstellar spaceflight. This notion had been around for a long time by then, and had been debated by scientists already, most notably by Enrico Fermi, among his fellow physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it is said that Fermi, during one such conversation, blurted out something to the effect of “Where is everybody?” Fermi set forth a paradox through the following chain of reasoning. If, considering the billions of stars in the galaxy and the likelihood that other planets could be found within the habitable zones of their solar systems, and therefore extra-terrestrial intelligent life is likely, it follows that, since many stars are far older than our own, and thus many of these civilizations would have developed interstellar travel in the distant past. Therefore, Earth should logically have been visited before by these ETs. On the surface, this reasoning seems like a slam dunk scientific theory to help support the ancient astronauts theory, but Fermi’s entire point was that there is no convincing evidence for such visitation, which is what makes it paradoxical. This is not something that is taken lightly by scientists and mathematicians. Paradoxes beg to be resolved, so many have since examined Fermi’s logic and even developed various equations and solutions to the problem. Much of Fermi’s reasoning was based on assumptions about the likelihood of multiple developments, not just the likelihood of habitable planets, but the likelihood of the evolution of intelligent life on them and the likelihood of their achievements in spaceflight. In 1961, astrophysicist Frank Drake developed an equation to better discern these likelihoods, taking into account most of these variables. Not only was the development of interstellar travel considered, but also the development of deep space probes. In 1972, Drake and Sagan had designed a message to be included on the Pioneer space probes that could potentially communicate something about humanity to extra-terrestrials who might encounter the probes after they left the solar system. They came up with a plaque of aluminum dipped in gold, representing humanity’s mastery of metallurgy. On it was etched a diagram of two hydrogen atoms, the math related to which would serve as the key for all further measurements, as the plaque also included a sort of map. A representation of our solar system was given, with the probe’s path shown, and a series of radiating lines was depicted that should allow for the triangulation of our Sun in relation to a number of pulsars. Lastly, two nude human figures were depicted, male and female and unfortunately both very white looking. Rather ridiculously, NASA insisted on erasing the line that depicted the woman’s vulva before the creation of plaque. So it really did end up representing humanity in that it reflects our numerous prejudices and small-minded hangups. A few years after the plaque was launched, astrophysicist Michael Hart proposed the Hart-Tipler conjecture, based on the idea that, if other intelligent civilizations had developed, then similar such probes, or more advanced, self-replicating probes, would have been encountered. His solution to the Fermi paradox is that no intelligent life exists other than humanity. An alternative theory that has developed is the firstborn hypothesis, that humanity just happens to be the first to develop intelligence and thus is the most advanced of all such civilizations. More recently, in the 1990s, another concept was proposed by one Robin Hanson, an economist, of the Great Filter, some obstacle to the development of intelligent life that has not been taken into account by the probabilities previously put forward. The most commonly agreed upon filter is abiogenesis, the emergence of life from non-life on a molecular, chemical level. Other potential filters include the development of high technology, which may not be as likely as assumed, and the potential that other intelligent civilizations simply depleted their resources and destroyed themselves. I think the last of these is very telling, since humanity itself, having never achieved interstellar travel, seems bound on a path toward resource depletion and self-destruction. But of course, ancient astronaut theorists don’t get this deep into the weeds in the scientific considerations of extra-terrestrial life. Erich von Däniken and all the talking heads on Ancient Aliens will just say there is evidence that aliens have been here, so there is no paradox. But in order to be actual evidence, and not mere talking points, it must be reliable and reproducible. And such evidence has never been provided. This is Historical Blindness.

In the Oscar-nominated documentary In Search of Ancient Astronauts, based entirely on the work of Erich von Däniken, host Rod Serling described New Guinea natives searching the skies for the return of WWII pilots, whom they worshipped as gods. What the film describes is what are called “cargo cults,” a term that is not really used anymore because it presupposes the confusion and primitiveness of the native peoples who developed the beliefs. The fact is that these beliefs typically revolved around the relative abundance of life when colonial powers arrived, bringing with them additional resources as gifts, or in the case of WWII, when outside forces, both Japanese and Allied, distributed and airdropped goods to the native islanders in order to gain their favor, since they were using their islands as airbases. What’s important here is that, the film suggests this is a parallel to the ancient aliens claim, but in reality, likely just off camera, abandoned airstrips and control towers, empty barracks and even actual planes, not straw models, were left behind on these islands. For this to serve as an analogy for ancient astronauts, it begs the question, where are the remains of the visitors’ technology, such as that left behind for Melanesian islanders to remember their visitors? This would be the reliable evidence that would make the Fermi paradox less paradoxical. What is von Däniken’s answer? It is just what you would expect. The pyramids, or other ancient monuments, all of which need no extra-terrestrial technology to explain. I just wrapped a 6-episode arc on pyramid nonsense, so I won’t spend much time on that. Von Däniken, predictably, claims that pyramids just appeared out of nowhere, with no historical precedent, which is just a lie, denying all archaeological evidence for the development of pyramid building from mounds to mastabas to step pyramids and the Bent pyramid to true pyramids and finally the massive Giza pyramids, built over natural rock outcroppings to aid in their construction. He repeats the often-repeated pyramidology nonsense of Charles Piazzi Smyth about pyramid measurements reflecting pi, which, of course, if it were true—which it’s not—would still not mean aliens were involved. And like many another pyramid huckster even today, he claims that it would not have been possible to move such large stones into place, or even to cut them. The simple truth, cutting through all the BS with Occam’s Razor and subscribed to by any Egyptologist and archaeologist who has studied the evidence is that the soft limestone blocks, which we know were quarried in Aswan, were cut using copper tools, including drills, chisels, and saws. Others protest that the hard granite used in the King’s chamber could not have been quarried with copper tools, and that’s true. Evidence suggests these materials were quarried using simple sand abrasion techniques, using quartz sand, and took far longer. And this is why only about one tenth of one percent of the materials used were granite. Again, no alien technology needed. Von Däniken protests that plentiful food would have been needed to feed all the workers, and this is true, but so what? Egypt was the bread basket of the Mediterranean, producing plenty of grain, and if we recall, even the earliest reports about the pyramid’s construction, told to Herodotus, were focused on how much food Khufu provided to feed his laborers. Von Däniken also suggests that wood was not plentiful enough to provide the rollers and sledges needed to move the stone blocks. First of all, hieroglyphic texts record that Egypt engaged in regular trade with Lebanon, importing a great deal of cedarwood. Good evidence for the commonality of wood was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb, wherein most of the artifacts were wooden. And second, it seems to me that if von Däniken protests that they didn’t have the wood they would need to move the blocks, then he is tacitly admitting that they could have moved the blocks if they had the wood, which they did.

Not only does von Däniken underestimate the ingenuity of ancient people, he also does not seem to understand exactly what modern technology is capable of. He says, “Today, in the twentieth century, no architect could build a copy of the pyramid of Cheops, even if the technical resources of every continent were at his disposal.” Yet in 1972, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco was completed, towering almost 400 feet higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza. And starting in the 1990s, many other pyramids have been built, in Las Vegas; Memphis, Tennessee; and Long Beach, California. There’s even a Pyramid Shopping Mall in Malaysia. It begins to seem like everything appears to von Däniken to be ancient alien technology because he simply doesn’t understand technology generally. This is abundantly clear when he starts talking about Egyptian mummification as evidence of alien tech. He suggests, quite stupidly, that Egyptian mummification was a kind of suspended animation technology, that ancient Egyptians were preserving themselves so that they could be revived when the alien founders of their civilization returned. If von Däniken had really read up on Egyptian mummification, he would have realized that it’s not a high-tech practice at all, and no one could be revived from a mummified state. Egyptians removed the brains of those they mummified and filled their skulls with resin. They removed all their internal organs and put them in jars. And then they saturated the entire corpse in embalming fluid that solidified, such that mummies often had to be chiseled out of their sarcophagi. The resin mummifying King Tut had to be melted using paraffin lamps, bringing him to an astonishing 932 degrees Fahrenheit just to remove him from his coffin. Mummification was not an advanced technology based on any clear understanding of biology or life, and it’s unclear how aliens would have revived corpses with no brain, heart or lungs that were essentially filled with glue. But von Däniken himself clearly has little working understanding of biology, as much of his theory is predicated on the idea that humanity was somehow born of these alien visitors. Sometimes he suggests that aliens genetically engineered humanity, using terminology that betrays a rather poor understanding of genetics, though perhaps he may be forgiven, writing in the sixties. Modern genetic data going back 800,000 years as well as mass spectrometry techniques that allow the sequencing of ancient proteins from tooth enamel, has helped to rather thoroughly map out human lineage, which split gradually from chimpanzees some 9-7 million years ago, evolving slowly, branching from common ancestors, ever since. With this information, added to archaeological evidence that reveals the slow progression of stone toolmaking and the gradual domestication of plants and animals, there is simply no genetic or archaeological evidence to support a kind of sudden “artificial mutation” producing Homo sapiens, as von Däniken suggests. Ridiculously, though, he also suggests that it was accomplished more naturally, through good old-fashioned sexual intercourse. And I think it should be obvious that alien life forms, who evolved according to very different conditions, are extremely unlikely to be biologically similar at all, let alone that we’d be compatible enough reproduce. When von Däniken makes these mistakes, he is demonstrating what Carl Sagan called “human chauvinism.” As he explains, “The most likely circumstance is that extra-terrestrial beings will look nothing like any organisms or machines familiar to us.” But as Star Trek and Star Wars attest, we tend to think about all alien life as being humanoid, because it’s hard to imagine something intelligent that is unlike ourselves. Or as 17th-century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens put it, in a quote that Sagan and Shklovsky included in their book, “’tis a very ridiculous Opinion, that the common People have got, that ’tis impossible a rational Soul should dwell in any other Shape than ours . . . This can proceed from nothing but the Weakness, Ignorance, and Prejudice of Men.”

Among the monuments that von Däniken claims are evidence of his ancient and very humanoid astronauts are the Olmec colossal stone heads. I have discussed these before, in my series on Pre-Columbian Trans Oceanic Contact theories, since some suggest their facial features indicate that ancient Black Africans colonized the Americas, while others argue that their features suggest ancient Chinese contact with the Americas. Von Däniken looks at them and sees extra-terrestrials, though not so much because of their features. Rather, he is focused on their headwear, which he calls helmets in an effort to draw a comparison with helmeted astronauts. It’s as if he has never heard of headdresses. He does this quite a lot, pointing to the Tassili site in the Sahara desert, for example, where during a specific period, figures in prehistoric rock art are depicted with “round heads,” and calling them spacemen with a kind of quintessentially human astronaut’s helmet on. And one of the central pieces of “evidence” in his book, the monolithic mo’ai statues depicting humanoid figures that stare out to sea enigmatically from the shores of Easter Island, he also calls helmeted because some used to feature additional stones on their head, which again were not space helmets, as von Däniken imagines, but rather represented the topknots worn by chieftains of the Rapa Nui people. As he did with the pyramids, von Däniken denies the possibility that monuments such as the Olmec heads and the Easter Island mo’ai could possibly have been moved and erected by mere human beings. Of the Olmec colossal heads, he even says, “they will never be on show in a museum. No bridge in the country could stand their weight.” In fact, pretty much every Olmec head has been moved and displayed in museums—all four La Ventana heads, all 10 San Lorenzo heads, and others. Even when von Däniken was writing his book, several were on display in museums, so this is just another example of him blowing hot air. Likewise, he claims, much as he did with the pyramids, that first of all, the carving and moving of the mo’ai statues on Easter Island was impossible, and that they didn’t have the wood they would need to move them—yet another tacit admission that, if they had the wood, they could have moved them. And the British explorer James Cook, who first landed on the island in 1774, reported the presence of forests there. Regardless, all claims, by von Däniken or any other pseudoarchaeologist, that the Rapa Nui people could not themselves have quarried, carved, moved and erected the statues are outright lies. In the mid-1950s, during Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition to the island, the islanders explained exactly how it was done and even demonstrated it for him. They wetted the volcanic tuff to soften it, and carved it using teardrop-shaped hand axes. They moved it easily a hundred yards using a wooden sledge and walking the statue, as we might today walk a heavy piece of furniture or major appliance to move it. And they erected it by levering and rocking the statue and pulling on it with rope, so that they could place more and more rocks beneath it, forcing it slowly up and into position. It was a remarkable display of ancestral memory, megalithic monument building, and the ingenuity of ancient man. Von Däniken dismissed it by saying “archaeologists all over the world protested against this example,” which was strictly untrue. While some archaeologists suggested that damage to the base of the statue from walking it indicated this wasn’t the way it had originally been done, more recent experiments have brought the academic community around to the technique. Regardless, even if some slight variation was required to get it just right, the demonstration proved beyond any doubt that it could be done without extra-terrestrial intervention.

We see similar slipshod scholarship—and you can’t really even call it scholarship, since it’s more like anti-scholarship—in his other major pieces of “evidence” that he sees as working together to demonstrate the credibility of his thesis. One is the Palenque astronaut, a relief carved onto the sarcophagus lid of Pacal the Great, the Mayan governor of that region. I mentioned Pacal the Great and his sarcophagus before, since it was claimed by Ivan van Sertima that his even having a coffin was evidence of a cultural connection with Egypt, even though Pacal himself was not mummified. Well, nor was he an alien. The relief on his sarcophagus, according to von Däniken, is an unmistakable depiction of a man piloting a rocket, and by his description, it certainly does sound convincing. But of course, seeing it is a little different. What von Däniken fails to emphasize is that the “helmet” he says the pilot is wearing is an elaborate headdress that does not cover his face at all, that he is otherwise unclothed, save for a loincloth, that the only vaguely rocketlike shape, or rather tapering columnar outline within which this rocketeer is featured, is not aerodynamic at all, with numerous perpendicular appendages shown and various animal forms, serpents and birds, adorning it at awkward angles, even at its tip, where it would need to be more pointed. Nor is it even enclosed, with numerous gaps in its supposed hull, and the pilot himself even extending his head from it. If it were a rocket, then the astronaut rode it like a motorcycle, but with no helmet and no shoes on. All of this can be waved away as the result of Mayans simply not understanding the rocket technology, but the fact is that, when you compare this relief to other similar pieces of Mayan art, it is very clear that it is simply the result of the dominant artistic style, which saw tracery designs chiseled in to fill up the entire space, incorporating many of the same motifs, including the sacred maize tree and the plumed serpent bird, though tellingly, no other examples can be so mistaken for a rocketship. Additionally, with the idea of a “rocket,” von Däniken reveals that he is thinking of the rather old fashioned spaceflight technology of his own era. Where are the gyroscopic wheels within wheels capable of flight in any direction? Where are the flying saucers?

Of course, a discussion of von Däniken’s claims would not be complete without a refutation of his assertions regarding the Nazca Lines. If you are unfamiliar with these amazing geoglyphs in the Peruvian desert, they are essentially massive geometric shapes, mostly straight lines, as well as some animal figures, that were created in the distant past by removing the darker surface stones to reveal lighter colored soil beneath. The movement of these stones is not so very mysterious. Rather, it is the question of just how these geoglyphs were created when they cannot be truly observed except from the sky. They were first reported by a Spanish conquistador who thought they were trail markers in 1553, but the scope of them was not observed until Paul Kosok surveyed them by airplane in the early 1940s. This fact has led even scholarly archaeologists to consider somewhat surprising ideas, such as that ancient Peruvians had developed ballooning technology. As we will see, however, no such notions need to be entertained to explain their construction. First of all, they can be seen from nearby foothills. In fact, they were first seen for what they are by a Peruvian archaeologist looking down on the desert from a higher vantage, no flight required. And the discovery of ancient wooden pegs driven into the desert floor at the termination of some lines supports the notion that these massive glyphs were created using rather typical survey techniques. In fact, in 1983, noted skeptic Joe Nickell even proved that it was possible to do so, using the simple technologies available in ancient Peru. Working from a drawing of a geoglyph, they simply scaled it up, measured out a number of points, and connected the dots. The result was a very precise reproduction of the condor geoglyph. However, while it has proved very simple to figure out how these glyphs were created, needing no extraterrestrial or other advanced technology whatsoever, figuring out why has been trickier. Von Däniken scoffs that “Archaeologists say they are Inca roads. A preposterous idea!” In reality, no archaeologist suggests this. Among the many theories regarding their purpose, they are thought to be solstice aligned pieces of art that served ceremonial purposes, some sort of elaborate representation of star constellations or other archeoastronomy, or looms for the fabrication of extremely long textiles used for wrapping mummies. More mundane explanations suggest they were irrigation systems, or aqueducts, or markers for field division. Perhaps the simplest and most convincing is that they were involved in the worship of deities who were thought to supply water. If you want to catch the attention of the gods, then of course you mark out messages to them that can be seen from their abode in the sky. But even this, which alone should have been enough to excite von Däniken’s reckless theorizing, did not go far enough for him. Instead, he proposed the really preposterous idea that it was a “airfield.” Talk about preposterous! Once again, von Däniken thinks in terms of outmoded flight technology, that his ETs need landing strips and are therefore incapable of vertical takeoff and landing. Also, the lines are miles long, far longer than would be needed for even an airplane to land, and the desert soil there is too soft and sandy for an airstrip. And besides that, with no landing lights, all of these supposed airstrips would be rather useless as soon as the sun set.

What is abundantly apparent, when one really examines von Däniken’s writings and his claims, is that he is only a compiler of claims that others made before him, and as such, he is not even the best proponent of any of them. Nor is he a good judge of their credibility. This is evidenced clearly by the fact that, like other conspiracists, he includes known frauds and hoaxes in his books, spreading them without any critical examination of them, and presenting them as if they are convincing evidence of his thesis. Several such instances can be listed. One example is in Chariots, when he refers to a papyrus fragment discovered by Alberto Tulli, which talks about what sound like UFOs. In reality, the Tulli papyrus was lost, and then the fragment translated was only found in the 1950s, during saucer mania, and was likely a fraud. Another is his assertion in 1972’s Gods from Outer Space that he read the Book of Dzyan, a work of occult knowledge said to be found in Tibet and perhaps to have originated in the lost continent of Atlantis. Von Däniken says the book was alien in origin. In fact, the “surviving fragments” von Däniken read were a hoax, written by Helena Blavatsky. It was yet another esoteric work plagiarized from a variety of Eastern religious texts and occult sources. Yet another example is his promotion of the Ica stones, a series of engraved stones from Peru that appear in some cases to depict advanced technology. As it turns out, these stones were being manufactured by a Peruvian potter as tourist souvenirs, and von Däniken was aware that this potter claimed to be the manufacturer of the stones. He did not mention this at all, and instead chose to believe that the potter was lying about making them and that the stones were actually ancient. Lastly, in his 1973 book, The Gold of the Gods, he focused on the legend of Cueva de los Tayos, a cave in the Andes that is said to contain gold plates that tell the true history of humanity. This legend was begun by one Janos Móricz, who claimed to have explored this cave and seen the “Golden Library.” His claims spurred numerous expeditions, including one mounted by a Mormon group, who suspected that the gold plates must be the same ones Joseph Smith had translated the Book of Mormon from. In the 1970s, von Däniken too made a trip, met with Móricz, and made claims about having been taken to the cave and seeing the metal plates. However, in a later interview, Móricz said it was all a lie. Von Däniken had only been in town a few days and made up an entire story based on their conversation. He had even misrepresented photos as having been taken on that nonexistent expedition. As for the story itself, Móricz was a Hungarian nationalist with interests in Nazi occultist ideas, and it is generally believed that his Golden Library, which he never produced and which no later expedition ever found, was likely a hoax meant to promote his pseudohistorical ideas, as he claimed the Golden Library was created by an ancient Magyar civilization in Mesoamerica.

When confronted with the allegations of his lying, von Däniken merely said he had made it all up merely for dramatic effect. This is typical of his blithe deflection when confronted with his deceptions and misrepresentations. For example, in Chariots, he claimed a certain iron pole near Delhi must be alien in origin, calling it “an unknown alloy from antiquity” and claiming it didn’t rust. In fact, it was resistant to rust because it was relatively pure iron, but it did rust a bit. In 1974, a Playboy interviewer confronted him on this—as well as many other inaccuracies in his writings; it’s a great read that I recommend to anyone interested—and Von Däniken merely said he had made an error, saying “we can forget about this iron thing.” The interviewer pressed him on why he hadn’t made corrections to the text in subsequent editions, and von Däniken lamely blamed his publishers: “Oh, God, I have so many times tried to correct things, and my experience has been that the corrections are almost never made.” So in the end, by his own admission, his books are littered with errors and misrepresentations that no one has bothered to correct. Or as Carl Sagan said, “I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of Von Däniken.” So why, we must ask, are his theories still such popular mainstays of even mainstream entertainment like the History Channel and the Joe Rogan Experience? As Sagan said in his Foreword to my principal source, Ronald Story’s The Space-Gods Revealed: “The times are such that simplistic doctrines like von Däniken’s sell—even though they may represent, as I believe they do, a small but definite social danger.” And that social danger has only grown with time, doing more and more harm to our trust in science and history, and our recognition of outmoded racial ideas, until today it is a veritable social disease, and we find ourselves in the terminal stages of Dänikenitis.

Further Reading

Nickell, Joe. “The Nazca Drawings Revisited: Creation of Full-Sized Duplicate.” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 7, no. 3, Spring 1983, skepticalinquirer.org/1983/04/the-nazca-drawings-revisited-creation-of-full-sized-duplicate/.

Story, Ronald. The Space-Gods Revealed: A Close Look at the Theories of Erich von Däniken. Harper & Row, 1976.

Dänikenitis - Part One: Wheels Within Wheels

In the public imagination, there is nothing outrageous about the idea that extra-terrestrials visited Earth and made contact with human beings, or even created human beings, in the ancient past. Indeed, it is such a common notion that we see it saturating the entertainment industry. For the last ten years or so, superhero films based on comic books have dominated the box office, and I’m not criticizing these entertaining films. I enjoy them. What’s interesting is that so many of them play with the notion of ancient contact with extra-terrestrials. The depiction of the old Norse Gods as actually having been inter-dimensional space aliens in the Thor films comes to mind. As does the 2021 film The Eternals, which portrayed a species of giant ancient aliens, the Celestials, who actually created humanity through genetic experimentation. A similar story was explored just this year in the final season of Star Trek: Discovery, resurrecting from an obscure episode of the nineties series Star Trek: The Next Generation a species called the Progenitors, ancient aliens who had created all life and all alien species in the Milky Way galaxy. We see it also in the 2012 film Prometheus, which expanded Ridley Scott’s Alien films’ mythology to reveal that a gigantic humanoid alien seen only as a skeleton in the first film was actually a member of an ancient alien species that had seeded the primordial Earth with its own DNA. Meanwhile, this popular trope, long exclusive to the realm of science fiction, has bled into the public’s understanding of history. In the nineties, the History Channel was thought of as the “Hitler Channel” with its focus on World War II docuseries, but in the 2000s, chasing viewers, it began to diversify into reality television and docuseries on more sensational topics, and in 2010, it premiered Ancient Aliens, which has become their tentpole program. To most, the series is a joke, the origin of numerous memes, usually involving the wild-haired UFOlogist Giorgio Tsoukalos, asking if a thing could ever be possible and then excitedly answering yes. The ancient aliens concept is now so thoroughly wedged into the zeitgeist that it seems impossible to dislodge it, to examine its claims and demonstrate its fundamental weakness in such a way that it might change minds. Even those who think the History Channel program is a joke may still believe that there is reason to think its underlying propositions are valid or convincing, especially with the juggernaut podcaster Joe Rogan frequently platforming people who promote the idea, like David Grusch, the congressional whistleblower who in the last year has made countless world-shattering claims about extra-terrestrials, none with actual evidence, including that aliens created humankind. Despite its ubiquity today, the notion of ancient aliens really only took hold of our imaginations in the 1970s. It was certainly in the 1970s that Marvel Comics legend Jack Kirby began to weave the notion of ancient aliens throughout the Marvel Universe. And this came in the wake of a major motion picture, 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its iconic depiction of ancient alien contact with early humanity, as ape-like hominids learned the use of tools in the presence of a mysterious monolith. But it is not this film along that accounts for the vast popularity of this idea during the seventies. Rather, it can be traced back to the huge popularity of one book during that decade, and its author, who may himself have taken some inspiration from the Arthur C. Clarke short story “The Sentinel” that had inspired Kubrick’s film. In order to get to the root of the ancient astronaut theory that has become so entangled in modern thought, we must trace it back to its origin point, the primary vector for its propagation, and consider the actual arguments made in that book, Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken.

In my series Pyramidiocy, on the myths and misconceptions about the Pyramids and ancient Egypt, I spoke already about the ancient astronaut theory as it relates to nonsense about the Great Pyramid, and I spoke specifically about Erich von Däniken. More importantly, here at the beginning of this series, I spoke about the origin of the idea of ancient alien contact with Earth, as it originated from some of the same people as had made up nonsense about ancient Egypt and Atlantis: namely Helena Blavatsky and other Theosophists. As I spoke about in my episode on the Religious Dimension of UFO Belief, there was a circuitous throughline, from the Christian mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg to the spirit channeling of mediums to Blavatsky’s Theosophy. Swedenborg claimed to take spiritual journeys to inhabited worlds, Spiritualists claimed to channel not just ghosts but also extra-terrestrial intelligences, and the medium Blavatsky, claiming to have been tutored by enlightened beings and to have mental access to the Akashic Record, a hidden history of everything, fleshed out a timeline in which ancient aliens from the Moon and Venus helped mankind develop on lost continents. And of course, there was an element of white supremacy in her work, which focused so much on root races and the superiority of Aryans. Aside from the very specific claims of Theosophists, the notion of ancient aliens was really only toyed with, such as by Charles Fort, a well-known compiler of reports on anomalous phenomena, or “Forteana,” who speculated on the possibility that stories about demons could actually reflect visitation from otherworldly beings who had tried to colonize the ancient Earth. Both the claims of Theosophists and the musings of Charles Fort were influential on the young science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft, who transformed the inchoate ideas into a cohesive science-fiction legendarium involving a “pseudomythology” that featured ancient monstrous deities from outer space who had long lain dormant. It’s thought that Lovecraft also took inspiration from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken,” which spoke of that sea monster’s “ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep,” as well as from The Gods of Pegana, a 1905 collection of fantasy stories in which the author, Lord Dunsany, invented a pantheon that included a chief god that had been lulled to sleep and was expected to wake again. But we know that Lovecraft read Theosophical works, and much as those same works grew in popularity in late 19th century Germany, contributing to notions of the German inheritance of Hyperborean Aryan superiority, so too they may have contributed to Lovecraft’s white supremacist views, which showed through clearly in his fiction, with his rejection of miscegenation as an abomination depicted in stories about humanity being corrupted by inhuman bloodlines. As I explained before, all ancient astronaut theories descend from these threads, from Theosophy and the scifi of Lovecraft, and thus derive from racist ideas.

19th century art of the Kraken by John Gibson. The poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about this legendary monster of the deep may have inspired Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.

As is probably true of other widespread concepts and how they enter the cultural zeitgeist, the man credited with bringing the idea to the public’s attention, and who for most of his career has enthusiastically taken credit for originating the notion, really only repackaged the ideas of others who are now largely forgotten. In a very real way, Erich von Däniken is just a thief. He was born in 1935, in Switzerland. He was raised Catholic, but as a young man he rejected his father’s faith as he became more and more interested in UFOlogy. His willingness to resort to theft first showed in 1954, when he was convicted and given a four-month sentence for pilfering money from a camp where he worked as a counselor and from an innkeeper. His sentence was suspended, but a psychiatrist who examined him at the time declared that he showed a clear “tendency to lie.” His father pulled Erich out of school after his trouble with the law and apprenticed him to a Swiss hotelier, and von Däniken seems to have taken from his earlier brush with the law a sense that innkeepers were easy marks, for he was later convicted of embezzling money from his new hotel position, this time serving nine months for the crime. Somehow, he managed to continue his employment in the Swiss hotel industry after this, and eventually he worked his way up to becoming the manager of the Rosenhügel, a sports hotel in Davos. It was while employed in this position that he began to research and write the book that would eventually be published as Chariots of the Gods, under its original title Memories of the Future. More than a dozen publishers rejected his manuscript, but eventually, the publisher Econ-Vorlag took an interest in 1967. The publisher recognized that the book could potentially strike a chord with the public, tapping into modern ideas about extra-terrestrial life then being considered by great astronomers like Carl Sagan and reflecting the growing modern disbelief in God, which had become popular in the 1960s with the spread of the phrase “God is dead.”

The problem was that von Däniken’s manuscript was an unfocused mess. His publis’er thus brought on an editor, Wilhelm Roggersdorf, to improve it, and it was Roggersdorf who apparently rewrote the book and transformed it into the seminal work on ancient astronauts that it became. It is perhaps relevant to note here that Roggersdorf was a pen name, and this editor was actually Wilhelm Utermann, formerly a Nazi propagandist who had edited the Nazi Party’s mouthpiece newspaper. The connections between ancient astronauts theory and Nazi race ideology are many and various. But back to Erich von Däniken; it appears that while he had been managing the Davos hotel and working on the book, he took many an expensive trip to South America, for example, and to Egypt and elsewhere, seeing for himself some of the sites that he wrote about in the book. In late 1968, he was arrested for the third time, once again charged with fraud and embezzlement and also with forgery, for he had apparently been cooking the hotel’s books, stealing from the business and misrepresenting his finances in order to obtain loans to pay for his travels. His absurd defense was that he had meant no harm, that as a writer he could not help sacrificing his morals to pursue his obsessions, and that it was the job of the creditors he had defrauded to investigate his loan applications more thoroughly. Unsurprisingly, a psychiatrist appointed by the court declared him to be a criminal psychopath. But it mattered little. By this time, his ex-Nazi editor had turned his book into a sensation, and it had become the bestselling book in Germany. He was able to easily pay the court’s fines and his outstanding loans. Soon, “Dänikenitis” would sweep the world, as his book and the theories it promoted became a sensation, inspiring further books and documentaries, as well as the science fiction of comic books and films. According to German magazine Der Spiegel, who coined the term Dänikenitis, his success can be attributed mostly to “folly, fraud, and business acumen.”

Erich von Däniken in the 1980s.

Erich von Däniken has protested against the raising of his criminal record in the evaluation of his work. He argues first that he was innocent—all three times he was convicted of the same crimes—and second that his criminal record is not relevant to his theories. It is little more than an ad hominem attack, he complains, poisoning the well in order to unfairly put all of his arguments in doubt. I will grant this, but I raise his criminal past for historiological purposes, to demonstrate that his thievery (and I need not qualify that as alleged, since he was convicted of it every time), in order to draw a further parallel with his liberal borrowing of other people’s ideas. In the recent conclusion to my series on pyramid myths, I discuss the work of Jason Colavito, who traces the entire concept of ancient astronauts from Theosophy to von Däniken through Lovecraft by way of the French writers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, whose book Morning of the Magicians preceded von Däniken’s by nearly a decade. In it, Pauwels and Bergier suggest that “it is quite legitimate to imagine that ‘Strangers from Beyond’ have been to inspect our globe, and have even landed….” In a strikingly similar fashion to the Ancient Aliens meme, they write, “Have we already been visited by the inhabitants of Elsewhere?” and then immediately answer, “It is highly probable.”  And indeed, since so many examples and supposed pieces of evidence that von Däniken raises for his thesis were raised also by Pauwels and Bergier, Von Däniken was forced to include a citation for their book in the bibliography of later editions. Nor was this the only instance of von Däniken stealing from other writers and being forced to document them as sources only under threat of lawsuit. Very much the same thing happened with the book One Hundred Thousand Years of Man’s Unknown History by Robert Charroux, another French author who had taken up the ancient astronaut theory in 1963, five years before von Däniken’s book came out. While Pauwels and Bergier’s work was focused largely on compiling every weird fringe claim they could, with only passing theorizing on alien visitation in the past, Charroux’s work came to this explicit conclusion. After numerous chapters touting supposed evidence of lost continents and ancient high technology, he builds up to a chapter actually called “Extraterrestrials Have Come to Our Planet,” and this becomes a central argument. And he too partakes of the same sorts of rhetoric, ridiculously presaging the Ancient Aliens meme. When listing unsupported claims of there being a space base on the Moon, he writes, “Are we to conclude that these lunar craters have been frequented by extraterrestrial astronauts?” and immediately answers his own question, stating with confidence, “The possibility cannot be rejected.” Interestingly, not only did Erich von Däniken steal his thesis from these books, and nearly all the supporting examples that he discusses, he also takes from them his rhetorical style, which touches on his supposed evidence only In brief outline, then launches into long series of questions and thereafter moves on and refers back to the questions he raised as if they were solid points he has already established.

Von Däniken tries to preemptively address criticism of his arguments in his book by saying “Admittedly this speculation is still full of holes. I shall be told that proofs are lacking. The future will show how many of those holes can be filled in.” So let us look now at his supposed proofs and see how well holes have been filled in the 56 years since the book’s publication. One of the first pieces of “evidence” he raises is the Piri Re’is Map, which should by now be very familiar to my listeners. This map was actually only recently discovered, in 1929, when the old Imperial Palace of Constantinople was being turned into a museum. In the 1930s, it garnered scholarly attention, as it appeared relatively accurate for a 16th-century map, and the cartographer, Piri Re’is, an Ottoman navigator, makes mention in the marginalia of the map that he had based his map on a number of existing maps, Iing a now lost map created by Christopher Columbus. The entrance of the Piri Re’is Map into fringe pseudohistory came as the result of its depiction of a coastline that stretched both west and south of Africa. Clearly at least part of the landmass depicted is meant to represent South America, as Rio de Janeiro is unmistakably pictured. There are a variety of reasons why the South American coastline is thereafter depicted as sloping eastward, toward and beneath the African continent, the most obvious being that the rest of the continent had not yet been mapped. This, in conjunction with notions about terra australis and the hypothetical balancing of landmasses on the different hemispheres of the planet may have caused Piri Re’is to imagine the size and dimension of South America that way. Then there is the additional notion that, since the edge of the parchment used actually curves the same direction, he was actually just using the space available to him to depict the continuing coastline, without a real sense of its accuracy. But in the 1960s, a certain theory, championed by one Charles Hapgood, a New Hampshire state college history teacher, suggested that this was actually depicting Antarctica, and this false idea simply hasn’t been shaken. You hear Graham Hancock prattle on about it quite a bit, for example. Hapgood himself was more of a catastrophist, denying the science of continental drift and arguing that in the distant past, the Earth’s poles reversed, thus Antarctica was not always a frozen landmass. But like all the pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theorists and ancient lost civilization theorists who rely on his theory, his argument rests on the idea that the Piri Re’is map was based on some lost ancient maps.

The Piri Re’is map.

Pre-Columbian Trans-Oceanic Contact theorists attribute Piri Re’is’s source maps to ancient mariners, and lost civilization theorists attribute them to, you guessed it, lost civilizations. Ancient astronauts theorists attribute them to, you’re right again, ancient aliens. What’s ridiculous is that Piri Re’is describes his source maps on the marginal notes of the map itself, identifying them not only as Columbus’s lost map but also as being Arabic and Portuguese maps, as well as mappae mundi, or medieval Christian world maps. But ancient astronauts theorists take their claims about the map much further, declaring that it could only have been drawn from an aerial view of the world. Pauwels and Bergier suggested it first in their customary series of questions, asking, “Were these copies of still earlier maps? Had they been traced from observations made on board a flying machine or space vessel of some kind? Notes taken by visitors from Beyond? We shall doubtless be criticized for asking these questions.” Then Charroux followed suit, claiming, “As for the means by which the surveys were made…they could only have been aerial.” Von Däniken merely repeats them, and repeats their mistake in referring to the singular Piri Re’is map as a set of maps (another sign of his plundering of their material), and taking their claim that the map is suspiciously accurate even further, claiming it is “absolutely accurate” and asserting that originals of Piri Reis’ maps must have been aerial photographs taken from a very great height.” The precision of the Piri Re’is map is a blatant lie that can be easily discerned by anyone comparing it to an accurate world atlas. But it’s quite apparent that these authors weren’t too concerned with accuracy. Pauwels and Bergier wrongly state that Piri Re’is himself presented his maps to the Library of Congress in the 19th century, which would have been quite a feat for a 16th-century Ottoman. Von Däniken claimed that the map (or maps, in his verbiage) were discovered in the 18th century, only about 2 centuries off the mark. The closest was Charroux, who very specifically said the map was discovered in July of 1957, when in fact it was discovered in October of 1929. These inaccuracies seem to indicate that all these guys were careless in their research and perfectly willing to misrepresent facts in order to create mystery where it otherwise does not exist.

Keeping this in mind, let us move on to Erich von Däniken’s further claims in Chariots, which look much further back than 16th century maps, finding the presence of aliens in the Bible. Here he raises ideas that I have addressed ad nauseum in the past, such as that the Genesis story about the “sons of God” who fathered “Nephilim,” typically translated as giants, with human women is really a story about genetic engineering and hybrid species. If you want to hear all the reasons for us to doubt that “sons of God” even referred to angels, or that “Nephilim” even meant giants, or that any giants ever actually existed, I did a whole series about it a couple years ago called “No Bones About It.” Check it out. He also raises the idea that the Ark of the Covenant was a high-tech device, something I have touched on a few times. You can hear a great deal more about the legends surrounding the Ark in my episode The Whereabouts of the Lost Ark of the Covenant. He spreads the further interpretation that, the pillars of fire and cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt were actually alien craft, and when God descended on Mount Sinai, it wasn’t just a thunderstorm, as the text would suggest, but rather the arrival of a spacecraft, all notions I have again discussed before, in my episode on the Religious Dimension of UFO belief  as well as in my recent episode on the Bible Code. In putting forth these claims, he moves away from his most obvious French sources, and instead borrows from the works of UFOlogists who had already raised the notion of certain Bible stories actually referring to aliens, such as Brinsley Le Poer Trench, who in his book The Sky People asserted that not only were the Nephilim a hybrid offspring of aliens and humanity, the creation of Adam and Eve was also just an experiment conducted by extra-terrestrials. Perhaps more influential overall on the ancient astronaut theory was Morris K. Jessup, whose 1956 book UFO and the Bible was the first to suggest that “There is a causal common denominator for many of the Biblical wonders; and …this common cause is related to the phenomena of the UFO.” You may remember me mentioning Jessup in regards to the connection made between his tragic suicide and the Philadelphia Experiment hoax. In his prolific writings, Jessup was one who anticipated the Dänikenitis to come. Another was M.M. Agrest, a Russian mathematician who wrote extensively on the prospect of “paleocontact,” specifically suggesting that the destruction of Sodom and Gommorah was actually the result of a nuclear detonation, as ancient aliens wanted to destroy their nuclear stockpile and thus warned the inhabitants of the cities to flee the coming atomic destruction. This claim came to von Däniken by way of Charroux, who repeats much of Agrest’s claims without question. What both should have asked is why these aliens wouldn’t just detonate their nukes somewhere uninhabited. They might also have asked why the destruction was described as fire and brimstone raining down, when a nuclear detonation would appear to be a rising cloud of fire. Many have been the theories about the historicity of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but this one is just ridiculous. A more rational one, published a few years ago in Nature, suggests that it may have been the result of a meteor strike, or more specifically, a cosmic airburst as is thought to have happened over Tunguska in the early 20th century. But of course, von Däniken and his French predecessors think the Tunguska Event was also the result of alien nuclear technology.

A late 16th-century depiction of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

Perhaps most telling of Erich von Däniken’s desire to see extraterrestrials in Bible stories are his tortuous twisting of scriptures to fit his interpretation. It has been noted before, by Richter Jonas in a 2012 scholarly article entitled “Traces of the Gods: Ancient Astronauts as a Vision of Our Future,” that just as Greeks remade Egyptian and other mythology through their own lens, nterpretation graeca, and the Romans then reinterpreted Greek mythology to suit their own culture, nterpretation Romana, what Däniken seems to be doing could be called nterpretation technologica, reinterpreting myths to suit his own worldview. For example, he scours the scriptures for passages that might refer to spacecraft, and some are a real reach. His title, Chariots of the Gods, seems to derive from his creative interpretation of a couple Bible passages. One is Elijah’s translation into heaven, saying that he was taken up by a “chariot of fire.” In fact, what it says in 2 Kings is that a chariot of fire, driven by horses of fire, came between Elijah and his son, and then Elijah is actually carried into heaven “by a whirlwind.” Von Däniken keeps the chariot of fire image and does away with the whirlwind, because one seems to work with his argument and the other doesn’t. And more than that, he then inserts the chariot of fire image into other stories that never included it. For example, Enoch, whom the Bible only says “was no more, because God took him away,” but von Däniken, either in error or through purposeful transposition claims that “according to tradition, [Enoch] disappeared forever in a fiery heavenly chariot.” Likewise, von Däniken saw in Ezekiel’s vision of God a detailed description of an alien spacecraft, described as a “wheel within a wheel,” able to move “in any of the four directions without veering.” Having spoken about this vision before, in my episode on UFO religions, you may already realize that this description in Ezekiel’s inaugural vision was of God on his throne, carried aloft by angels. Nine chapters later, when again Ezekiel sees these living creatures beside the wheels, he explicitly says these were cherubim. More than that, these flaming wheels within wheels, which are covered in eyes, came to be identified with the Throne itself, a class of angels called ophanim. What makes Von Däniken’s discussion of this vision less than honest is that he again omits whatever doesn’t work well with his interpretation. For example, he only partially quotes Ezekiel 1:1, including “the heavens were opened,” but omitting “and I saw visions of God.” He is misrepresenting his sources, cherry-picking only what makes his claims sound convincing, and this is characteristic of all his work, as we will see in Part Two of this series. What’s curious to me is that, though he renounced his religious background and his efforts to undermine the religious views of his father are clear in his work, he nevertheless seems to understand his ancient astronaut theory as a kind of religious view. He has said that the basis of his theories first came to him in visions during his incarceration. And though he claims to be challenging orthodox science with legitimate scientific evidence, when he defends his claims against criticism, he tends to refer to it as if it is religious belief and therefore unassailable. “[W]hen I compare it with the theories enabling many religions to live unassailed in the shelter of their taboos, I should like to attribute a minimal percentage of probability to my hypothesis,” he says, which is just a convoluted way of saying his ideas may not hold water, but they’re at least as believable as religion. And when, in an interview, he was directly confronted about his cherry picking, he said, “It’s true that I accept what I like and reject what I don’t like, but every theologian does the same.” It almost seems like von Däniken never really believed his claims about ancient astronauts and only expressed them as a kind of satire of religious belief. Were it not for the fact that he has led so many to believe in his theories, I might actually appreciate them as an elaborate refutation of religion.

Until next time, remember, whenever someone like von Däniken or Hancock tells you that they are unfairly criticized by “orthodox” academics simply for “asking questions,” that means their ideas have been disproven and they’re resorting to claims of being victimized just to save face. Von Däniken did not write Chariots of the Gods in good faith. He knew before its publication that it would be refuted. That’s why in the first paragraph of his introduction, he says “scholars will call it nonsense” but sets up himself and those who will believe him as somehow better than all experts, saying in his first sentence, “It took courage to write this book, and it will take courage to read it.” And I guess it does take a kind of misplaced courage to be insistently wrong in the face of all contrary evidence. Or maybe we call that obstinacy, not courage.

Further Reading

Gershon, Livia. “Ancient City’s Destruction by Exploding Space Rock May Have Inspired Biblical Story of Sodom.” Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Sep. 2021.

Colavito, Jason. “The Origins of the Space Gods: Ancient Astronauts and the Cthulhu Mythos in Fiction and Fact.” 2011, www.jasoncolavito.com/uploads/3/7/5/9/3759274/the_origins_of_the_space_gods.pdf

Richter, Jonas. “Traces of the Gods: Ancient Astronauts as a Vision of Our Future.” Numen, vol. 59, no. 2/3, 2012, pp. 222–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23244960. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Story, Ronald. The Space-Gods Revealed: A Close Look at the Theories of Erich von Däniken. Harper & Row, 1976.