Devil Books and Murder Ballads: The Myth of the Arch-Killer

When we have come to recognize that witches, werewolves, and vampires are nothing but myths, we begin to look elsewhere for monsters. Much as explorers who failed to find dog-headed people nevertheless came to believe that the indigenous people they encountered must also engage in the same monstrous acts attributed to the creatures of their imagination, in the absence of true monsters, people who are thought to commit evil acts prove handy stand-ins, and there are none more monstrous in our eyes than those who commit murders, and particularly those who perpetrate many murders. Like the notion of everyday culinary cannibalism, the notion of the habitual or serial killer chills us, and there is overlap here, as many a serial killer may be driven by their pathology to consume the flesh of their victims. Especially monstrous are those said to have claimed a huge number of victims. One example is Gilles de Rais, whom I spoke about briefly in my episode The Specter of Devil Worship. A war hero and compatriot of Joan of Arc, in the Hundred Years’ War, he was arrested in 1440 and charged with the murder of more than one hundred and forty children, mostly boys. In his trial at the ecclesiastical court of Nantes, the gruesome details of his alleged crimes, including sexual assault, ritual abuse, and necrophilia, truly made of him a human monster. But worse still was Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who stood trial for killing hundreds of young women and girls in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By the highest count, she is said to have claimed as many as 650 victims. It was said that the Countess chose only virgins as her victims and bathed in their blood to ensure her own youth and beauty. In both of these cases, it was not only the aristocratic individual who was tried for the crimes, but also their complicit servants, and also in both cases, there are today doubts about the reality of their crimes. Gilles de Rais had made enemies among the nobility as well as in the church, and questions about exaggerated numbers of victims and dubious witness testimony and perhaps coerced confessions led to some, as far back as Voltaire in the Enlightenment, suggesting that the accusations of devil worship and ritual murder leveled against de Rais may have been a plot against him, much as is suspected of the accusations against the Knights Templar in France 133 years earlier. And in the case of Elizabeth Báthory too, the number of 650 victims is widely thought to be embellishment, and the stories of her bathing in blood are believed to be a later invention. Báthory too is also thought by some researchers to have been the victim of a conspiracy, accused by debtors whose debts would be canceled upon her arrest, and tried by Catholic authorities who sought to seize her wealth and land and to destroy the influence of a Protestant family. Certainly in both cases, there do seem to have been genuine reports of missing children, but how much of these stories are total fiction? It is similar, in some ways, to the demonization of the Mongols. Genghis Khan is sometimes called the world’s most destructive mass murderers, claiming some 40 million victims, such that the resulting reduction in carbon dioxide cooled the planet. And the Mongols, another early candidate for Pliny’s dog-headed monsters, were also rumored to be cannibals. However, this is the portrait of Genghis Khan created by those he invaded. Even the most devoted pacifist can recognize the difference between a serial murderer and a general marshalling troops in warfare, and among his own people, Genghis Khan was a hero, whose empire was ruled by law and encouraged religious and racial tolerance. We find this to be the case again and again, when we look at the claims of human monsters throughout history. Much of what is claimed about them is questionable, if not downright fictional.

In my last episode, I established that in many cases, accusations of conspicuous, habitual cannibalism as a core aspect of cultures considered “savage” was largely, if not entirely, a fiction. However, the same cannot be said of cannibalism generally, as I conceded. When starving, people will break the taboo and resort to eating the remains of other humans, or even killing their fellows in order to eat them. This is not denied. Nor can it be denied that there do exist cannibal murderers, those whose pathology or mental illness compels them to commit acts of anthropophagy during the course of their murders. Many of these have been Americans: Boone Helm, the Kentucky Cannibal, Albert Fish, the Brooklen Vampire; Arthur Shawcross, Henry Lee Lucas, Lester Harrison, Jeffrey Dahmer… the list goes on, and that’s not even considering cannibal killers from other countries. To walk a fine line between respecting the grief and suffering of these murderers’ victims and also recognizing the many contributing factors that may lead some individuals to commit these heinous acts, I do want to recognize that these killers are human beings. However monstrous their acts, they are not “monsters” in the principal sense of the word, that of a nonhuman creature of strange or terrifying shape. Despite what Netflix calls these killers, they are less monsters and more precisely are sociopaths or psychopaths. They are people who suffer from antisocial personality disorder or borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. Rather than demonize, we must recognize that they are the product of their particular background and environment, their specific genetic predispositions, and their developed pathologies. Some may object that this leaves no room for evil, and very well. If by evil one means demonic possession or some such nonsense, then yes, I am not leaving room for that, and I would suggest that to literally demonize mass murderers in this way is to take away culpability for their crimes. It is something that such criminals may sometimes try to do themselves, claiming they are not responsible because the devil made them do it, which is nothing but a convenient fiction. Many such serial murderers also  demonize themselves by vastly inflating the numbers of their victims, claiming they killed hundreds when there may only be evidence for a handful. The point is that both murderers themselves and the public that struggles to comprehend their crimes and is morbidly fascinated by them both tend to construct false versions of these killers, mythical monsters that we then tell scary stories about. In this way, it is much like the Euhemerist view of mythology, which states that mythological accounts likely originated in actual historical events and people, but were distorted in their retelling through the ages. And if we want to know how people will tell stories about Jeffrey Dahmer and other modern day serial murderers 500 years from now, perhaps the best model would be how we remember legendary murderers who lived half a century ago.

A depiction of Gilles de Rais using his victims’ blood to perform black magic.

The first and most famous of legendary murderers from long ago that I think serves as an apt example of how some potentially true story can be inflated and fictionalized into legend is Sawney Bean of Scotland. According to the legend, Alexander Bean, Sawney for short, the surname spelled sometimes with an e at the end, was born in East Lothian to a family of ditch-diggers and hedge-tenders. He didn’t much care for the life of manual labor he was born into, and his father beat him savagely for his indolence. Eventually, he ran away from home, and during his wanderings, he found a kindred spirit in one Agnes Douglas, called Black Agnes because of her cruelty and because of rumors that she practiced witchcraft. The two were a match made in hell, for they both had no compunctions about robbing people to sustain themselves, murdering them to cover their crimes, and even consuming the flesh of their victims to serve both ends. The two of them took up residence in a cave on the coast, near Bennane Head, a very real cave that can be visited today. There, over decades, Sawney Bean and Black Agnes raised fourteen children, 8 boys and 6 girls. Withdrawn from society entirely, they continued to prey on passing travelers, ambushing them as they traveled at night, dragging their corpses back to the family cave, feasting on their remains and pickling whatever they could not eat to preserve it for later. Searches for these victims would conclude when discarded body parts washed up on beaches nearby, and the deaths were typically blamed on animal predators. Over the decades, the Sawney Bean clan grew, with his children incestuously producing numerous grandchildren, some 32 grandsons and granddaughters. With so many mouths to feed, their depredations increased, to the point that they could no longer be hidden. Local inhabitants came to recognize that there were murderers in the area and began searching for them. Some found the cave but did not believe that any person could live in it. Instead, more than one innocent person was accused of the Sawney Bean clan’s crimes and hanged for them. Eventually, one of their victims escaped. He was a man riding home from a country fair. While his wife was pulled from her horse and killed by the inbred cannibals, the man held them off with his sword and pistol and was eventually saved when a large group of travelers approached, scaring the cannibal clan away. When the news spread, a posse of 400 men was mustered by the king for the purpose of seeking out the clan. Their bloodhounds led them right to the cave, where along with a pile of pilfered valuables they found, to their horror, barrels full of pickled body parts and corpses hanging from the walls like a butcher shop. In the end, according to almost every version of the tale, every last member of the Bean Clan was killed for their horrific crimes. Sawney Bean himself was defiant to the end, it was said. “It isn’t over,” he shouted, according to one telling, “it will never be over!” And indeed, it never would be, for his legend lives on today. Although the Bennane Cave is difficult to reach, visitors still frequent it. One can easily find YouTube videos of people exploring it.  Its interior is covered in graffiti. And beyond local lore, the story survives in the lyrics of various heavy metal songs and in numerous fictionalized retellings, the most prominent of these being Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, as well as other films centering on inbred cannibals, like Wrong Turn and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But how much of the original story was itself fiction?

First, it must be acknowledged that the story did not appear until long after the time it is supposed to have happened. So far as anyone can determine, it was first told in British chapbooks, small booklets printed on the cheap and sold cheaply that told lurid stories of criminals. These cheap publications were preceded by the broadside ballads that sold for just half a penny and had previously done so much to popularize stories of cannibalism, and they would be followed by the “penny bloods” or “penny dreadfuls” of later years, so-called because of their gruesome content. The earliest of these to contain the story appeared sometime in the late 1700s, whereas the story itself is said to have happened in the late 1500s or somewhat later. This is a difference of some 200 years. Add to this fact the claim in the story that the Sawney Bean clan murdered more than a thousand people, and we begin to recognize that there must be some fiction here. The murder of thousands would not go unrecorded for two centuries and only first appear in literature known for embellishment. It is especially so if the news had reached the royal court, and a force of men was dispatched upon royal decree to find and bring the cannibals to justice. There would be record of that. Yet there are no reliable historical records of these events previous to the chapbooks. Additionally, in the several chapbooks and many later retellings of the story, there are numerous differences and contradictions. Early ones indicate that it took place during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, while others claim it was King James VI of Scotland, James I of England, who brought the clan to justice. Likewise, the story of the clan’s end was inconsistent. By one account, when they were taken to stand trial, the men of the clan were first forced to watch their women and children burned at the stake before they were themselves drawn and quartered, but in other versions, the women and children were first forced to watch the men be mutilated and bled to death, their hands, feet, and genitals severed. Then in still other versions, they were all executed without process, as the posse that found their cave destroyed it with the clan inside, detonating a charge of gunpowder and collapsing the cave on them. Of course, this version does not work with the identification of Bennane Cave as the Sawney Bean cave, since that cave is not collapsed, but then again, there are further issues there. That cave, for example, is simply not big enough to have housed such a massive clan. With 14 children and 32 grandchildren, we’re talking about a family of nearly fifty people, and beyond the difficulty of even finding a cave big enough to house such a brood, it is simply unlikely that so massive a clan could have gone unnoticed for 25 years, as the story claims, even if they did hide in their apparently huge cave during the day and only came out by night.

Sawney Bean at the entrance of his cave

One further theory is that this story originated as anti-Scottish propaganda, and there are several points to be made in favor of this notion. First, it should be recalled that there was a long history of characterizing the people of the region as savage cannibals. According to the Romans, cannibalism was practiced all over Europe by the primitive peoples there—another example of claims that the Other is inhuman because they do unthinkable things. Julius Caesar claimed the Irish were cannibals. Pliny claimed the Druids of Gaul were cannibals. Likewise, in the Common Era, St. Jerome of Stridon described, in the late 4th century, “the Attacotti, a British tribe,” which he claimed “eat human flesh,” saying that “when they find herds of swine, cattle, and sheep in the woods, they are accustomed to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds, and the paps of the shepherdesses, and to consider them as the only delicacies of food.” These mysterious inhabitants of the British isles were then said to prefer the shepherd to the flock, as it were, and it is telling that this baseless account was long taken to mean that the Scottish were cannibals, when really no one knows if the Attacotti were entirely made up or who they were, if they really existed. Now consider when and where the story of Sawney Bean emerged: specifically in British publications, not Scottish literature, and in the wake of the Jacobite rebellions, when supporters of James II, the exiled Stuart king, made five attempts to restore him to the throne. The movement was strong in Scotland, so fears of Jacobite revolution often centered on fears of Scottish uprising. Therefore, a story about British forces being dispatched to root out the threat of Scottish savages does seem somewhat to have been a thinly veiled propaganda story. Driving home that notion is the fact that, among the British, “Sawney,” the name given to the chief savage in the tale, was actually a racist epithet for Scotsmen. However, there are reasons to doubt this characterization of the story as well. While early versions of it have Queen Elizabeth, the last Tudor monarch, wiping out the Bean clan, many versions of the story have James I crushing the cannibal brood, and this English king was also James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and himself a Stuart monarch. Therefore, the symbolism does not really work. Moreover, the sorts of chapbooks in which the story appeared mostly told the stories of vicious and savage British criminals, so it is difficult to suggest that it was pure propaganda.

Some of the chapbooks of the era did tell the stories of real crimes, and the Sawney Bean story was thereafter immortalized in sensational true crime catalogues like The Newgate Calendar, which was a publication associated with Newgate Prison. It has therefore long been thought that there may have been some truth behind the story, some kernel of history that served as the basis. One of the earliest versions of the Sawney Bean tale that wasn’t anonymous gives the author name “Captain Charles Johnson,” and it has been pointed out that this was a known pseudonym of the pamphleteer and novelist Daniel Defoe, author of the famous castaway novel Robinson Crusoe. Since Defoe was known to have based that story and others on true life sources, it has been suggested that he may have done likewise with the story of Sawney Bean, or may in fact be the inventor of the tale. However, the potential real life basis of the story is hard to find. No contemporaneous sources, such as 16th century pamphlets or private diaries, have ever been found relating a story about someone named Sawney Bean. The closest would be a broadside from 1750 that mentions one “Sandy Bane,” a murderous Scotsman who ate cats. Some have found other potential candidates. In a 1696 popular history, Nathaniel Crouch wrote of a thief who lived with his wife and children “in a den,” who were all burned alive for the crime of killing and eating young people over the course of many years. And then perhaps the most likely candidate is Andrew Christie, called Christie-o-the-Cleek, a butcher who during a 14th century famine lived in the Scottish wilds with a group of scavengers who resorted to cannibalism to survive. Thereafter supposedly developing a taste for it, it was said that Christie led the group in ambushing travelers and eating both them and their horses. He derived his name from the detail that he supposedly hung the corpses on butchers’ hooks called “clekes.” Stories of Christie Cleek predate those of Sawney Bean by a century or more. However, if we were able to identify Christie Cleek as the basis of Sawney Bean, the same problem remains, for we find that Christie Cleek’s story was also embellished in its retellings. The earliest accounts describe only Christie’s resorting to cannibalism during the famine, not to any group of accomplices or their ambushing of travelers. And studies of all such literature indicate that the theme of ambush on the roads was a common trope used again and again in such pamphlets and chapbooks as those in which the stories of Christie Cleek and Sawney Bean appeared. So it seems that the entire story of an inbred cannibal clan that might set upon unwary travelers was simply a horror fiction invented to capitalize on common fears of highway robbery at the time.

Depiction of the capture and execution of legendary German arch-killer, Christman Genipperteinga

Complicating further the entire question is the fact that there are numerous other such strikingly similar stories that appeared in generally the same time period but elsewhere in Europe, specifically in Germany. The most awful of these was one Christman Genipperteinga, also variously called Gniperdoliga. Like Sawney Bean, Christman took up residence in a cave, not on the coast but in the woods near Bernkastel, in the Rhineland. His cavern home was chosen because it offered a nice vantage of the nearby roads and passing travelers. Genipperteinga turned highway robber, murdering travelers and discarding their corpses in the deepest recesses of his cave. According to some tellings of his tale, he kept a journal in which he detailed the wealth he had amassed as well as the number of his victims, which, being supposedly 964, was rivaled only by that of the Bean clan, but Genipperteinga did it all by himself. He did have children, which he fathered by raping a certain woman victim he had kept alive and captive as a slave, but rather than amass a brood of little killers, he was said to have murdered all of his children, hanging them, and then remarking on how they danced as they hanged. Eventually, he allowed the female hostage he kept, the mother of his murdered children, to go into town, and she revealed the killer’s den to authorities. Christman Genipperteinga is said to have been condemned in 1581 and broken on the wheel—a brutal method of torture and execution in which the limbs are snapped and woven within the spokes of a wheel that is then suspended above ground on a pole, allowing gravity to do the rest. Genipperteinga survived 9 days on the wheel, according to the story, but there are no local records that attest to the tale, only a series of pamphlets. Thus much like Sawney Bean, Christman Genipperteinga is considered likely a fictional character. Like Bean, the inflated number of victims strains credulity, for he would have had to murder a traveler something like twice a week to reach such a number. And we see elements of his story in other folklore, as well. The element about the female captive turning him in recalls the Brothers Grimm story The Robber Bridegroom, in which a young woman finds herself the bride of a robber and cannibal. While Genipperteinga was not called a cannibal in the earliest of the pamphlets, in some later ones, this was added to his story. And the detail of Genipperteinga living in a cave also reappears. There is the legend of the Robber Lippold, who supposedly lived in a cave in Lower Saxony and abducted a local mayor’s daughter, and years later, when she was allowed to visit the market if she swore to talk to no one, she turned the robber in. Perhaps this was the inspiration of the Brothers Grimm tale, but since it goes back to the 15th century, or perhaps it was the inspiration of the Genipperteinga story. Then there was Daneil’s Cave, also in Lower Saxony, which was supposedly home to the robber Simon Bingelhelm, who, it was said, killed several infants and even cut unborn fetuses from the bellies of his pregnant victims. The infanticide of this tale certainly corresponds with Genipperteinga’s, and the fact that Bingelhelm was said to make candles with the children’s entrails for black magic purposes may correspond as well, for in some later versions of Genipperteinga’s story, he too was said to be a magician, turning himself invisible.

With the introduction of child murder for the purposes of black magic, we find here undeniable parallels with the story of yet another German serial killer, who coincidentally or not, was put to death in the same year that Genipperteinga was said to have been executed, and in the same way, on the wheel. His name was Peter Niers, and while he too was dramatized and embellished in pamphlet literature, there are also local records to indicate that he was a real person. He did not claim the rather unbelievable total of a thousand victims, but his number of killings is still rather unbelievable, having been convicted of 544 murders, 24 of which were unborn infants cut out of their mothers. Unlike Sawney Bean and Christman Genipperteinga and the Robber Lippold and magician Simon Bingelhelm, it was never claimed that Niers or his band of robbers lived in a cave. Like actual highway robbers of the period, they roamed and hid in different places. But like Sawney Bean, he was accused of cannibalism, and like Simon Bingelhelm, he was said to use the fat and the flesh of the infants he killed to craft magical candles, and as was said of Genipperteinga, he was supposedly able to make himself invisible, specifically through the lighting of those magical candles. It was also said that, through his black magic practices, he could turn himself into an animal to avoid capture. Yet he did not avail himself of these powers when he was captured, first in 1577, and then after escaping, again a few years later, when it was claimed an innkeeper and some suspicious citizens of a town he was visiting opened his bag to find fetal organs. While, as I said, there is much reason to conclude that Peter Niers and his gang were real criminals, the stories of his black magic, invisibility, and transformation into animals should make clear that he was thoroughly mythologized. The fact that confessions of his crimes were extracted under torture makes the stories about him no more reliable, since as we have seen with the Inquisitions and witch hunts that were still going on then in Europe, torture will cause people to say whatever their captors want to hear. And Niers’ torture was horrific. His skin was peeled off in strips, and hot oil was poured into his wounds. His feet were oiled and roasted over coals. And finally, he too was broken on the wheel. When Niers was first captured, in 1577, he confessed under torture to 75 murders, but somehow, by the time of his execution in 1581, it had become 544, which would mean 469 murders in just 4 years. That’s ten murders a month, 2.5 a week. What is more likely, that he was actually able to carry off so many murders or that he simply kept increasing the number of murders he was confessing to in order to get his captors to stop torturing him? 

A depiction of torture and execution by the breaking wheel

Then there is the further fact that Peter Niers was said to have been mentored by another prolific German arch-killer of the 16th century, a robber named Martin Stier who had been executed in Württemberg in 1572. Martin Stier was a shepherd, and he was said to have organized a gang of other shepherds, and while today we may have some idyllic view of shepherds and their pastoral lives, as one of my principal sources, Joy Wiltenburg makes clear in her book Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, herdsmen were of a low station at the time, thought to be dishonorable sorts who loitered out in fields plotting their crimes. So already, we have some reason to suspect that Stier and his fellow shepherds may have only been the victims of prejudice against their class. It was claimed that Stier was really the master sorcerer, and that he taught Peter Niers all he knew. It was apparently Stier who showed Niers how to turn invisible, who taught him the power of eating the hearts of unborn fetuses. How do we know this? Because it was claimed by the author of a single anonymous pamphlet, which was actually a ballad or song about Niers, and we might imagine that this connection was only made because it offered a convenient rhyme.   Yet much of what was said of these arch-killers in ballads and pamphlets was taken as truth, and we know this because of the work of Johann Jakob Wick, the compiler of the largest surviving collection of broadsheets and pamphlets on the heinous crimes and supposed miracles of the 16th century, called the Wickiana. Wick was a Protestant clergyman, and he collected these reports in an attempt to compile evidence of Satan’s works and to discern indications that the world was in the End Times. Interestingly, when the pamphlets he collected were actually signed, it was revealed that they were often also written by Protestant clergymen, and thus motivation for their embellishment of the crimes and the dubious claims of sorcery and the supernatural appears clear, as with the claims of cannibalism, which were common of many accusations of devil worship and witchcraft. Therefore, the crime literature of 16th century Germany is revealed to be little more than religious mythmaking, inventing more satanic bogeymen to scare the public into pious devotion, just like the witches and devil worshipers that were claimed to lurk everywhere, and much like those other supposed sorcerous murderers who were accused of being werewolves, like Peter Stumpp, about whom I spoke in detail in my series on the topic. In the end, everything is questionable, from the number of their victims to the savagery of their deeds, and even, in some cases, their actual existence.

The 16th and 17th century accounts compiled by Wick of prolific serial murderers are too many to actually examine in detail. There was also Ulrich Oettinger, who was nicknamed Sew Vile, and Melcher Hedeloff, who was credited with 251 murders, and numerous others. And that is just in the Wickiana, which was specific to Mainland Europe and not considering the many British arch-killers profiled in later English chapbooks, like Sawney Bean. Most were highway robbers, many were the founders and chiefs of gangs, several were said to live in caves, and commonly they were said to practice cannibalism and black magic, especially that which required them to kill pregnant women and remove their unborn children. Some, like Niers, were even said to be possessed by the devil, or on the Devil’s payroll, as in literally, Satan was said to have provided them a monthly salary. Another term for these books that Johann Wick collected were “Devil books” because it was thought they kept readers apprised of the literal works of the devil. In some ways, the legendarium surrounding highway robbers in Early Modern Europe is very similar to the later myth surrounding the Thuggee strangler gangs of colonial India, which I spoke about in great detail in my episode on the topic. Like those highway robbers in India, who may have been prolific murderers but whose crimes were also undoubtedly embellished, European highway robbers became not only killers on the road, but also evil cultists practicing ritualized sacrificial murder, which wasn’t actually the case with the Thuggee at all. Whether tapping into fears of travel in a dangerous world or fears of the end times, these Devil Books, these gruesome pamphlets, were essentially inventing monsters, much as their successors, the penny dreadfuls, would do in the 19th-century. These monsters were upsettingly human, but as we try to track them down, to find the truth of them, we find them to be phantoms, as illusory as any phantasm. So after all, everywhere we look for monsters, whether it be werewolves, vampires, witches, giants, savage cannibals, devil worshippers, or even just extraordinarily wicked murderers, we find a lot of myth and falsehood. True crime aficionados will argue that, certainly, heinous crimes are real, which is true, but they must recognize that most good research on most true crime stories involves debunking the mythology that has developed around each case. And the fact is that, while true crime obsession can lead one to feel that heinous crimes happen everywhere all the time, in reality crime rates are dropping, something also not widely reported on because there is often more interest in crime than in the lack of it. All of this is, I think, rather comforting. Perhaps, much of the time, the only thing to fear in this world is actually the falsehood that is spread to make us fearful, or as FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Further Reading

Crone, Rosalind. “From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: Murder Machines in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis. Cultural and Social History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2010, pp. 59–85. Taylor & Francis Online, doi.org/10.2752/147800410X477340.

Gammon, Julie. “Retelling the Legend of Sawney Bean: Cannibalism in Eighteenth-Century England.” To Feast on Us as Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, edited by Rachel B. Herrmann, University of Arkansas Press, 2019, pp. 135–52. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv8jp0cn.12.

Hobbs, Sandy, and David Cornwell. “Sawney Bean, the Scottish Cannibal.” Folklore, vol. 108, 1997, pp. 49–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260707.  

Wiltenburg, Joy. Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany. University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Anthropophagi: The Myth of Cannibalism

Every Halloween season, we are inundated with images of monsters and evil beings, the stories about whom we can trace back to history and folklore. In fact, this is something I have endeavored to do during several October episodes of the podcast, such as my series on vampires, a monster that appears to have arisen from the conjunction of sleep paralysis nightmares experienced by mourners and a lack of understanding of the decomposition process by those who dug up corpses, thinking they had been rising from the grave to trouble people at night. I explored the historical basis of folklore surrounding the werewolf as well, which appears to be a monster that took form from language used about violent criminals and accusations of sorcery. Closely connected to the myth of werewolves was the myth of witchcraft, which I explored and demonstrated to be rooted in moral panic and scapegoating, typically caused by a tragic and lethal combination of social, political, and economic factors. And we see a parallel between the phantom threat of witchcraft and the specter of devil worship generally, which throughout history has been a baseless accusation leveled by the religious against those outside their communities, against personal enemies, or against the Other. The concept of the Other is important to understand here in an anthropological sense. In this field, Otherness is defined as the state of being excluded by a dominant group or culture. Othering is the act by a dominant group, of excluding another group and stigmatizing them because of differences, whether real or imagined. Witchcraft and devil worship were common forms of Othering, perpetrated often against outsider women who may not have conformed to local norms, and in the case of the European witch persecutions of the early modern period, specifically the witch trials of the Inquisition, against entire Christian communities whose doctrines were deemed unorthodox. One accusation commonly made against the Other, which sprang entirely from the fevered imaginations of the accusers, was that of cannibalism. The devil worshipper, it was thought, sacrificed and consumed people, the witch was said to eat babies. We see this too claimed as the habit of all the monsters we fear. The werewolves, who were so closely related to witches in their folklore, were said to be man-eaters. And even the legend of vampires or revenants, who in some cases too were thought to have been witches or cursed by witches, depicts an inhuman creature that feasts on the living, drinking their blood and even devouring their flesh. We might conclude that at the heart of all our monster stories is the notion of cannibalism, or anthropophagy. This does not, however, suggest any basis in reality of these legends, for among modern scholars, the idea of cannibalism has come to be viewed more and more as a myth, a baseless imputation, like that of sorcery, frequently leveled against the Other but perhaps reflective more of the fantasies and fears of the accuser.

Claims about monsters being man-eaters did not appear when we started calling people witches, werewolves, and revenants. No, there is a long history in mythology of man-eating monsters. Of course, we might presume that this can be traced back into the distant, benighted past, when humanity struggled for survival against predators that would literally devour them. Indeed, even in medieval and Early Modern Europe, the threat of man-eating wolves was very real and clearly influenced our notions about monsters, like the wolf man. We see this also in folklore about ogres, the man-eating monsters of many a legend that were depicted as hairy beasts, not unlike a werewolf themselves. Ogres were also enormous, which connects them to perhaps the earliest of mythical man-eating beasts, the giants of ancient Greek mythology. In the works of Homer, we see the idea of a man-eating, humanoid monster going far back into antiquity. Aside from the less than human looking sea monsters that might devour sailors, like Scylla, there was the Cyclops who ate men, and the Laestrygonians, a whole tribe of giants that were said to be man-eaters. In a poem attributed to mythological bard Orpheus, he speaks more generally of a time when all men were cannibals, “When men devour’d each other like the beasts, / Gorging on human flesh,” and thus the myth of a primitive human people who customarily dined on the flesh of other human beings seems to have been born. And even before the common era, it was already being used to Other those in distant lands, with Herodotus, The Father of History and perpetuator of myth, speaking of distant and mysterious peoples like the Scythians north and east of Greece, and of the mystery lands beyond, about which he must only have heard rumors and folktales. “Beyond this region the country is desert for a great distance,” he explained confidently, “and beyond the desert the Andropophagi dwell.” The very word means “man-eaters,” just as the more modern version, “anthropophagi” means “human-eaters,” but in case it wasn’t clear, Herodotus clarifies: “The Andropophagi have the most savage customs of all men; they pay no regard to justice, nor make use of any established law. They are nomads, …they speak a peculiar language; and of these nations, are the only people that eat human flesh.” Here we see the cannibalism of a certain foreign tribe connected with their Otherness, the peculiarity of their customs and strangeness of their language, and their supposed savagery. This notion of faraway and savage peoples engaging in cannibalism would develop through the Middle Ages and come of age during the Age of Exploration, when Europeans traveled the world and came into contact with foreign tribes that they assumed practiced cannibalism. The investigations of explorers and conquistadors convinced the world that, indeed, these distant people were savages and did practice cannibalism as a habit of everyday life. Even modern ethnographers and anthropologists, having never questioned it, subscribed to this idea. It was not until the 1970s that a skeptical view of this belief began to gain currency in the field.

A depiction of Odysseus’s ships being attacked by the giant cannibals, the Laestrygonians.

Skepticism of the very existence of customary cannibalism among any group of people simmered for some time in the academic community. It began rather logically. Specifically, as belief in cannibalism had grown through the centuries, many had come to believe in what is called gastronomic cannibalism, that is the eating of human flesh for culinary reasons, as a preferred dish, rather than for any other cultural or religious reason. To go along with this understanding of cannibalism was the notion that, if some people just loved eating other people for the taste of it, then they would not limit themselves to eating the dish only when they managed to vanquish some enemy or encounter some outlander; rather, they would seek their favored meat within their own community, which is called endocannibalism. It made little sense that any people would thus diminish their own numbers by killing those within their own community just to sate some hunger for human flesh, especially when other sources of food existed,. Therefore, gastronomic endocannibalism appeared to be unlikely, except in cases of mortuary cannibalism, or eating of the dead. But this then meant that cannibalism could not have been a customary, everyday practice, as had long been thought, and tales of tribal kitchens being always full of body parts, of their frequent “cannibal feasts,” seemed less and less believable based on the simple fact that, logically, opportunities for cannibalism must have been rare, limited only to sacrificial rituals or warfare. Then in 1979, cultural anthropologist William Arens dropped the bombshell book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, which actually examined the evidence for the existence of such practices and found it wanting. Specifically, he demonstrated that in almost every encounter thought to provide proof of cannibal practices, there had been no direct witnessing of cannibalism, there had been language barriers to clear communication, and there had been preconceptions on the part of European colonizers that influenced their reports of cannibalistic practices. Arens blames not just colonialism but also anthropologists for perpetuating the myth, and this, of course, led to backlash, with many a colleague and peer attacking his conclusions, comparing him to a flat-earther because there was simply, in their estimation, too much evidence of cannibalism to deny it. However, Arens’s view of cannibalism as little more than a racist presumption of savagery that has led to centuries of slander and defamation, especially of Pacific Islanders, has only gained credence during the last 50 years. Though there are still academics who treat it as a kind of denialism, they often do so by misrepresenting Arens and those who picked up his torch. For example, those who view cannibalism as a myth perpetuated by European explorers do not claim that the act of cannibalism has never taken place. There is no sense in denying the act of cannibalism among murderers and the mentally ill, for example. Pathological cannibalism, then, is conceded as real. Nor is there any denial of the fact that individuals, or even entire peoples, may resort to cannibalism, despite taboos, when facing starvation. This too is conceded. Even ritual cannibalism is conceded by some of these academics, as human sacrifice is known to have been practiced in some cultures and it is not impossible that some such rituals contained the symbolic consumption of small portions of the sacrificial victim. What is denied, and what Arens and other academics, like Gananath Obeyesekere, a principal source for this episode, have convincingly proven, is that widespread customary cannibalism, as a typical practice among native islanders, was wildly exaggerated and largely inaccurate.

Before the Age of Exploration, which brought with it stories of distant people who had actually been encountered, there were medieval travel narratives and legends of faraway places that fired the imaginations of explorers. Before trans-oceanic contact, tales of exploration focused on the far east, and many were absolute fiction. In the Alexander Romance, a fictional account of Alexander the Great’s exploits, the biblical names Gog and Magog are reinvented as kings of so-called “Unclean Nations” deep within Asia who practice cannibalism—essentially the equivalent of the faraway Andropophagi imagined by Herodotus. Hundreds of years later, the Letter of Prester John appeared, a fictional description of a Christian kingdom in the far-off and fantastical East about which you can hear a great deal more in my episode on the topic. In this letter and its later embellishments, we find mention again of the cannibalistic Gog and Magog nations, as well as strange monstrous people like unto the man-eating myths of preceding mythology, including one-eyed creatures like the cyclops but also beings with big floppy ears, hopalong folk with one giant foot, beings with their faces in their chests and no heads, and dog-headed people—oddities who had centuries before been recorded in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, but whom, of course, no one had ever actually encountered. Several of these monsters would be further described in other fictions masquerading as genuine travel narratives, such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which described an Englishman encountering them during his journey across India and China, depicting dog-headed men specifically as cannibals. During these years another travel narrative often considered more genuine appeared, that of Marco Polo, which was a clear influence on Mandeville’s Travels, and which omitted any such monstrous creatures but still described cannibalistic customs in India, China, and Japan. Lacking strong evidence for the cannibalism Marco Polo claimed to have observed, and considering other major omissions from his narratives, some have come to suspect that Marco Polo’s entire narrative might be pieced together from hearsay rather than any actual travels he undertook, but that is a topic for another episode. For now, what’s germane is that, by the time of Christopher Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic, the myths and legends of faraway places being peopled by monsters and cannibals were so ingrained into the European imagination that Columbus and his men fully expected to encounter them.

A depiction of the monstrous races thought to inhabit distant places, from The Voyage and Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Columbus owned a copy of Mandeville’s Travels and seems to have believed he would find such creatures as were described in it when he crossed the Ocean Sea. In his journals, he acknowledges that this was not the case, stating, “I have not found any monstrous men in these islands, as many had thought.” Nevertheless, the people he did find there he tended to view as still being monstrous and savage in their customs. He expected to find dog-headed cannibals, and finding instead people with normal heads, he still did not think that perhaps then they were not eaters of men. Indeed, we owe the English word “cannibal” to Columbus, who popularized it as a synonym for the awkward anthropophagus, or man-eater. The word derived from the name of the native tribe Carib. Columbus encountered first the Arawak people, with whom he attempted to communicate, which meant only miming through gesture. I will speak more on the problem of miscommunication through gesture later. What’s important now is that he returned claiming that to the south of these Arawak there dwelled monstrous people with dog noses and only one eye, called Caribales, who were known to eat human flesh. The simple fact that Arawaks seemed to have confirmed the existence of cyclopean dog-headed monsters reveals that there was obvious miscommunication, that Columbus was trying to ask about the monsters he’d expected to find, and that the Arawak, only vaguely understanding, had indicated that he must mean the Carib, their enemies, whom they viewed as warlike. Since Columbus’s reports resulted in a widespread identification of the Carib people with cannibalism, even skeptics sometimes suggest that the Arawak themselves may have suspected the Carib of man-eating, or that the Carib purposely tried to scare their enemies by encouraging the thought that they might devour them, but the simple fact is that we do not know whether the Arawak held this belief about their enemies prior to European contact, when through crude gestures, white men came around asking where the evil man-eating people might be. According to Columbus, through these uncertain communications they learned not only that the Carib people were one-eyed and dog-faced (which was not true), and not only that they ate the flesh of people, but also that they did so as a matter of course, not in a religious context but simply as regular meal preparation. And where did they get their meat? Supposedly they raised children like livestock, fattening them for the slaughter. Here we see the myth of cannibalism in its final and lasting form—the notion that an uncivilized culture just decided they love eating people and built their whole food cycle on it. It is not clear whether the Arawak were saying the Carib ate their own children or the children of their enemies, and this clarification was unnecessary because the purpose of the story, if indeed it was actually conveyed to the Spanish in the way that they understood it, was likely only to demonize the other tribe. Columbus actually did show some skepticism, acknowledging that the Arawak may have been slandering their enemies or telling the explorers what they wanted to hear, but he nevertheless happily spread the stories in Europe, and when the first accounts of his voyage were published, they were illustrated with pictures of those same old man-eating monsters Pliny had long ago described.

Today, it is recognized that the Carib that Columbus claimed were cannibal monsters. who actually called themselves the Kalinago, never practiced cannibalism in the way described, fattening children for slaughter for their own everyday nutrition. Even so, some historians will still insist that they did practice cannibalism of a ritualistic kind during warfare, a ceremonial consumption of small portions of their enemies. First, it must be recognized that this is far different from the kind of gastronomic cannibalism first attributed to them, and second, this too relies on only secondhand hearsay evidence; no skeletal evidence of cannibalism among the Kalinago has ever been produced. During Columbus’s second voyage, a captain under his command sailed into a certain island harbor, scaring the natives away, and he reported that, inside one of their dwellings, he found “four or five bones of the arms and legs of men.” This was accepted as evidence of cannibalism among the Kalinago for a long time, even though the captain actually didn’t know what tribe’s village he had invaded, saying only, “we suspected that the islands were those of the Caribe, which are inhabited by people who eat human flesh.” In later years, French missionaries would make direct contact with the Kalinago and report that they were not cannibals, and that they kept the bones of their ancestors in their homes in accordance with their beliefs that ancestral spirits acted as guardians. These reports did little to halt the already widespread view of the Carib cannibal. After this initial claim that some among the native peoples of the New World practiced cannibalism, the myth appears to have spread based purely on prejudice, that is, the pre-judgment that cannibals would be found there, and the repetition of claims that had been previously made. For example, during the next century, a popular narrative was published by a soldier who claimed to have lived in native captivity in colonial Brazil, describing the cannibalistic practices of the Tupinamba natives there. Afterward, some French explorers and writers also published works that describe the same tribe’s cannibalism, and these works were drawn on by one of the most influential works on the topic, an essay called “On Cannibalism” by Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. As scholars since have revealed, however, there is no independent evidence of that soldier’s captivity among the Tupinamba, his narrative appears not to have been written by him, its contents seem to have been plagiarized from preceding accounts of cannibalism elsewhere, and the works of the French explorers who followed appear to have cribbed liberally from his narrative in describing their own encounters with the Tupinamba. The simple fact behind all of this rehashing of claims and narratives is that lurid accounts of cannibalism sold well, so there was always the temptation for travelers to make up such experiences in order to reap financial rewards. Indeed, one of those French writers who has since been shown to be plagiarizing a plagiarism, Jean de Léry, in his 1578  History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Also Called America, acknowledges this tendency to deceive, referring to “the fabulous tales found in the books of certain people who, trusting to hearsay, have written things that are completely false,” and conceding “that since … travelers to distant lands cannot be contradicted, they give themselves license to lie.” Nevertheless, he insists that his narrative is true, though he also is sure to remark that “if there are some who are unwilling to give credence to … this history, let them be advised, whoever they may be, that I have no intention of taking them to see those places.” So what we find, again and again in the stories of cannibalism in the New World published by supposed travelers during the Age of Exploration, is that they borrow liberally from each other, cannibalizing each other’s work, if you will, and without any concrete evidence for their recycled claims, each is essentially just saying, “Trust me, bro.”

A late 16th century depiction of cannibalism in Brazil.

Another major vector for the spread of claims about cannibalism comes from encounters with Pacific Islanders, especially among the sailors of Captain James Cook’s expeditions. As his were scientific expeditions on behalf of the Royal Society, who tasked him with finding the mythical southern continent of Terra Australis, he and his officers documented their journey extensively and conducted what then passed for ethnographic studies when encountering native islanders, such that it would seem their records are reliable and that, when they recorded their encounters with cannibals, their claims were credible. The problem was, these men of science, voyaging almost 300 years after the myth of cannibalism had taken root in Europe and become standard belief, arrived at every island expecting to find cannibals, and this is evidenced in their journals and reports, which describe their efforts to communicate with islanders and, invariably, to determine whether each new group of islanders were cannibals. To be entirely fair to Cook, they may have had some reason for expecting to encounter cannibals, as prior to his return to the area in his second voyage, a French expedition preceded them, also searching for Terra Australis, and also collecting ethnographic information around New Zealand and Tasmania, and its captain, and others sailors, had been massacred by a Maori tribe’s attack on their camp. Months later, after French reprisals on the tribe, a grisly discovery was made at one Maori settlement: bones near a fire and what appeared to be a Frenchman’s cooked head on a spike. Word spread quickly then that the Maori were barbarous cannibals, and the next year, some of Cook’s men seemed to witness such evidence of their cannibalism for themselves when a boat they’d sent out at Grass Cove did not return. On investigating, they found the boat and some articles of clothing, and nearby, they found some baskets with cooked meat, which they took to be human flesh because also nearby, they discovered one of their sailors’ heads and two white hands. What must be emphasized here, however, is that in neither of these incidents was actual cannibalism witnessed. At the very least, we only see evidence for the killing of the sailors—and it must be remembered that many Maori viewed the Europeans as strange alien invaders—and at most, it’s proof of the placing of their corpses into fire, which was often described by the Europeans in culinary terms as “roasting” or “cooking.” But just as valid an explanation can be found in the known regional practices of human sacrifice, typically of enemies slain in battle. Captain Cook, who became somewhat obsessed with being invited to one of these “cannibal feasts” he imagined, would eventually be allowed to witness such a sacrifice in Tahiti, years after the Grass Cove incident, and what he described offers a plausible explanation for both previous massacres. With much ceremonial ritual, they prepared the sacrifice’s body, and the skulls that surrounded the ceremonial site indicated its head would be removed, but Cook saw them bury the body, and the closest to cannibalism they came was when the victim’s eyeball was removed and ceremoniously shown to the tribal chieftain, who merely nodded his approval. Then a dog, which were commonly eaten by Maori, was butchered and cooked on the fire, and it was the dog meat that was consumed in the ritual. Cook imagined that in the distant past they may have consumed the sacrificial victim and that by his time, the dog meat served as a surrogate, but this was speculation. Wartime human sacrifice rituals likely varied across Polynesia, but the fact is that the dismembered heads and hands found after both of the previous massacres very well could have been evidence of a known ritual that did not involve the consumption of human flesh at all, and the baskets of cooked meat at Grass Cove may not have even been human flesh. Indeed, the sailors who reported discovering it even said that they “supos’d it was Dog’s flesh,” and they admitted to skepticism, saying they, “still doubted their being Cannibals.”

While some aboard Cook’s scientific expedition may have been skeptics about native cannibalism, that cannot be said of sailors generally in that era. Cannibalism had essentially become a part of shipboard life for many British sailors. Numerous were the incidents, famous and not, of shipwrecked or starving sailors resorting to cannibalism for survival, such that, when they returned to England, they often stood trial for their actions and were invariably acquitted, to the point that many a sailor came to recognize the practice as acceptable in such circumstances. Indeed, the phenomenon of shipboard cannibalism was so common that sailors returning from long voyages often found themselves put in a position of confirming or denying whether it had occurred. It became a favorite topic of ballads and broadsheets, and it was here, in the context of British shipboard cannibalism, that the myth of human flesh tasting delicious was spread among sailors. Add to this the preoccupation with finding evidence of cannibalism among the more scientifically minded on Cook’s voyage, who at every stop hoped to find bones or skulls that would provide evidence of the Polynesian cannibalism they had heard so much about, and we begin to get a sense of how strange encounters with them must have seemed to Pacific islanders: ragged white men disembarking from their ships, half starved and making signs and gestures about cannibalism, such as biting their own arms and pointing at the natives. On more than one occasion, it appears very clear that this inquiry through gesture was mistaken as the British telling the natives that they themselves desired to eat human flesh. At one point, Captain Cook and his men attempted an experiment with a couple of Maori who had come aboard their ship. Having discovered a decapitated human head, they cooked it themselves and cut off a morsel of its flesh, offering it to the Maori, urging them to eat it through gesture. These Maori obliged, and they made a big show of how delicious it was. This grotesque “experiment,” which he actually conducted twice, seems to have finally convinced Cook that all Maori were indeed cannibals, even though, when we read accounts of the incident, it sounds an awful lot like the Maori visitors, surrounded by strange and formidable men that they believed to be man-eaters who wanted them to be man-eaters as well, simply went along with what they thought was expected of them, pretending to relish the taste just to appease them and so as not to offend them. Indeed, on many occasions, even when the islanders appeared to understand that the British were inquiring about their own native customs, they still understood it as meaning that the British themselves practiced cannibalism. Take the case of Captain Cook’s death, during his third voyage. At Hawaii in 1779, his men watched through a spyglass as he was clubbed and carried away. His men made demands that they he be returned or that they would make war on the native Hawaiians. Two terrified priests then came to Cook’s lieutenant and showed him a piece of cooked meat, indicating that it was all that remained of the captain. Through carefully questioning, the Hawaiian priests confirmed that Cook was indeed dead, that the priests had cut his flesh off, and that they had burned it in a fire. Cook’s lieutenant then asked if they had eaten the flesh, for that was the only purpose he could think of for removing flesh and cooking it, but according to him, “They immediately shewed as much horror at the idea, as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom among us?” What the priests had actually performed on Cook’s corpse were the funerary rites that their culture typically reserved only for their most respected elders and leaders. While Cook’s men thought they had savagely dined on their captain, they had actually accorded him their highest honors.

A depiction of Captain Cook’s witnessing of a human sacrifice ritual.

These are the kinds of stories we find as we examine the “evidence” of cannibalism more and more closely, as William Arens and Gananath Obeyesekere have done. We find that, among indigenous peoples portrayed as cannibals by colonizers, there was as much of a taboo on eating human flesh as there is in any Western culture—and perhaps even stronger taboos. Take the example of the Aztec people during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlán. Though they were suspected of being cannibals by the Spaniards, to the point that they became notorious for it and are even remembered as cannibals in 20th century scholarship, when they were starving to death in their besieged city, they never resorted to cannibalism and instead surrendered to the Spanish genocide. Elsewhere in the Americas, more recent discoveries of massive amounts of bones with scrape marks on them have led archaeologists to assert that cannibalism was a regular part of Pueblo Native American culture, but others have cautioned that there may be different explanations, such as ritual “witch curing” practices. Certainly in examining the Polynesian human sacrifice and funerary rituals, which also involved cutting the flesh from bones but as far as we can prove did not involve the consumption of that flesh, we find further alternative explanations that could account for these archaeological findings. And considering all the misunderstandings and false accusations of cannibalism that we know have occurred throughout history, we really must err on the side of caution. Reports from the Roman empire that inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland were savage cannibals persisted through the 19th century and into the 20th, but that doesn’t make them true. And we all recognize that the Blood Libel, claiming Jews were kidnapping and consuming Christian Children, was nothing but baseless conspiracism that fueled moral panic, much like the claims of cultists eating children in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Because of this history of getting it wrong, we must require only the most incontrovertible evidence to conclude that any peoples ever engaged in cannibalism. It must be acknowledged, though, that the skeptical view of cannibalism spearheaded by Arens has not yet become the scholarly consensus. Nevertheless, it has led to a reevaluation of the evidence, and to a more nuanced and convincing understanding of the practice as being more rare, mostly small scale, in a ritual or ceremonial context, engaged in largely symbolically when and if it did occur. So despite the objections of anthropologists to the scope of some skeptics’ denial of cannibalism, they have nevertheless mostly relegated the old idea of institutional, commonplace, gastronomic cannibalism among the Other to the realm of mythology, acknowledging that such claims were mostly the propaganda of colonizers who used it to justify their “pacification” (aka conquest) of “savages” (aka the indigenous), as well as the cultural erasure that they termed “civilizing.”

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Until next time, remember, when you see a cartoon native putting your favorite Looney Tunes character in a cauldron, when you see Cap’n Jack Sparrow tied to a spit over open flames by Caribbean islanders, as you might well suspect, that kind of scenario may be entirely fiction and more than a little racist.

Further Reading

Arens, William. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Oxford University Press, 1979. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/maneatingmythant0000aren/mode/2up.

Fischer, Josh. “Cannibals and Witches Have Scientists Gnashing Their Teeth.” Science, 20 Jan. 1999, www.science.org/content/article/cannibals-and-witches-have-scientists-gnashing-their-teeth.

Mancall, Peter C. “Columbus believed he would find ‘blemmyes’ and ‘sciapods’ – not people – in the New World.” The Conversation, 5 Oct. 2018, theconversation.com/columbus-believed-he-would-find-blemmyes-and-sciapods-not-people-in-the-new-world-104306.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. 1st ed., University of California Press, 2005.  

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/.