Artist unknown, but thank you for the evocative portrait of Lady Liberty. This handmade image was on someone's back as we marched down Fifth Avenue to Trump Tower after the 2016 election.
The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.
-Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945
I woke up this morning thinking about the Bret Baier interview with Kamala Harris. Not the obvious ploy of his aggressive interruptions, but the semiotics of the camera shots from behind Baier's muscular shoulders looking down on the Vice President and dominating her. Not only did he use his voice to try to diminish her, he used his stature, literally and figuratively. As I have worked in newsrooms and studios, I am sure, absolutely certain, that the camera person was instructed to shoot from behind Baier at regular intervals. The semiotics of the managed scene was reminiscent of Trump stalking Hillary during their debate.
Any woman who has struggled to make herself heard, to achieve status, earn a wage equal to her male peers or—on the more domestic level—get her male partner to pull his weight raising children and running a household will understand what happened, what viewers saw and understood: propaganda.
My early morning realization would not quit. I went online to read excerpts from Mein Kampf. There have been rumors that Trump read Hitler's 1924 manifesto and kept a copy by his bedside. I am sure he has it memorized by now. The parallels between the two men are stark. Hitler began writing while he was in prison following his conviction for high treason to overthrow the German Republic in what is known as the "Beer Hall Putsch." Trump has not yet been imprisoned, but he and his cohorts attempted a violent coup. They already have the Supreme Court in their pockets, and many federal judges.
In recent weeks we've heard the word "misogyny," to describe the reaction of some men—white and Black—to the possibility of a woman becoming their Commander in Chief. And we heard President Obama blasting Black men for such a reaction. He even invoked Michelle during the encounter, and laughed as he did so, as did his audience. But it is not a laughing matter for men to denigrate women and threaten them with incarceration in the domestic sphere. What JD Vance is saying about women and what Joseph Goebbels said are nearly identical; one a lawyer, the other with a PhD in philology. All the education in the world did not dampen their hatreds.
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it," Goebbels once said. Sound familiar?
On the eve of this election let us keep in mind that it doesn't take much for a democracy to fail, and for a frightened population to fall under the spell of despotic, manipulative killers. It's our mandate as free Americans to fight the fascists in our midst at the ballot box, to make this election a landslide, and to ask everyone we know to stand with us.