From the insightful article by SARAH CHURCHWELL I quoted the other day, another reminder of exactly what we are up against inside the party of Trump:

In June 2020, as millions of Americans protested against systemic racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd – a killing described by many as a modern lynching – the proposal that some military bases be renamed after someone other than white supremacists prompted a tirade from Trump. He tweeted that they were “Monumental and very Powerful Bases”, “Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations” that “have become part of a Great American Heritage”, a “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom” – in brazen denial of the fact that they had started a war over slavery and lost. Thus for “Winning, Victory, and Freedom”, we must read “losing, defeat, and slavery”, while remembering the importance of the big lie to the Nazi propaganda machine.

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Thus for “Winning, Victory, and Freedom”, we must read “losing, defeat, and slavery”, while remembering the importance of the big lie to the Nazi propaganda machine.

Reminiscent of the great man’s clarification, after declaring Putin innocent of election interference after their private tete a tete in Helsinki when he changed his remark to the opposite of what he’d said at the time (“I don’t see why he WOULD” to “I don’t see why he WOULDN’T”), as one does.

And equally interesting:

The Klan became mythologised while many of its fellow paramilitary travellers were forgotten, thanks in large part to the so-called “Plantation School” of American literature, devoted to glorifying the Lost Cause of the noble South, especially Thomas Dixon’s enormously popular The Clansman (1905), the novel that inspired The Birth of a Nation. Dixon was drawing on the tradition established by Thomas Nelson Page, in whose fiction grateful, deferential black slaves loyally serve benevolent, ­paternalistic white masters on idyllic Southern plantations until the perfidious and ­corrupt Yankees start the “War of Northern Aggression” – as some Americans below the Mason-Dixon line call the Civil War to this day. This includes the statement of the great-grandson of the Louisiana governor who took power after the Colfax massacre, in which he objected to the removal of his ancestor’s memorial while insisting that the white supremacist confederate generals who had led a treasonous war against the US were “good people”.

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Very fine people, on both sides, on both sides. As you say after Klansmen, American Nazis and assorted other groups very fine extremist young men mount a threatening show of racist and antisemitic force — as some of Trump’s staunchest supporters did four years ago Wednesday. USA! USA!!!!