Don't be fooled, MAGA fever hasn't broken

Some Democrats and the corporate news media continue to underestimate the power of former President Donald Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant messaging. Tens of thousands of his supporters showed up at his rally in Wildwood, New Jersey over the weekend, the Associated Press reported. During Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, MSNBC hosts have repeatedly used the lack of the physical presence of pro-Trump demonstrators as evidence that our MAGA fever has broken. Wildwood indicates it’s still very much with us.

“When I return to the White House… We will shut down deadly sanctuary cities such as Newark and Philadelphia,” Trump told the massive crowd. “We will not let criminals come into those cities. And we will not let them release illegal criminal aliens into your streets.”

As Max Pizarro reported, Trump “brought his cruel, weird, hateful, indicted, egomaniacal, name-dropping TV personality brand to Wildwood, apparently trying to take advantage of perennial New Jersey dysfunction, while entertaining his own public delusion.”

Of course, Trump attacked the press that were assembled to cover the rally and his adoring adherents took the prompt from their mind master and booed the assembled reporters. Like the convenor of a lynch mob, Trump’s dark power is fueled by an alchemy that makes people feel bigger and bolder unified in the hate that energizes and defines them.

There’s an instant gratification from it. No need for discernment or fact-checking. He’s right because he’s always right, which is why the politically correct establishment wants to deny him the chance to protect this country from the immigrant invasion being facilitated by Biden and the Democrats.

And here in the Garden State, thanks to the right-wing media juggernaut that’s composed of 101.5 FM, WABC 770 AM, the New York Post and Fox News many thousands of fans exist in that same parallel universe with Trump. They believe the 2020 election was stolen from the former president who says he would pardon the scores of Jan. 6 insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol waving the Confederate Star & Bars in hopes of disrupting the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Unlike in the Civil War, when the Confederate members of Congress were prohibited by the 14^th Amendment from being eligible for their seats when the war was over, the scores of Republican members who voted NOT to certify Biden’s 2020 victory after the violent attack continue to hold office, like Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., who chairs Trump’s New Jersey re-election bid. Their betrayal of the U.S. Constitution has been rewarded with committee chairmanships.

“We all love America. I love Cape May. I love New Jersey,” said Van Drew, reported Pizarro.  “We see what’s happening today in a faltering economy. We’re here today because we’re tired of the open borders. There is nothing wrong with saying we believe in America first.”

America first. Hmmm. When did we last hear that catch phrase?

In the years since the attack on the U.S. Capitol former, Rudy Giuliani, the architect of so much calumny, found mass media sanctuary and a paycheck on WABC 770 Radio thanks to billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis. But the former mayor of New York was just one of the radio personalities in the WABC line-up that kept the Trump 2020 Big Lie and virulent anti-immigrant narrative alive.

The law and order former mayor is being criminally prosecuted in Georgia and Arizona for his role in the Trump fake electors conspiracy. Back in December, after a week-long federal civil trial, Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million for defaming election workers Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman. Giuliani, along with Trump,  falsely accused Moss and Freeman of tampering with the ballots they were counting at the State Farm Arena for the Fulton County Board of Elections. The election workers’ lives were completely upended by the Giuliani-Trump axis as the MAGA mob fixated on the two civically minded women.

On Friday, before Trump’s Wildwood rally, Catsimatidis pulled the plug on Giuliani’s radio show “after the station said he [Giuliani] violated its policy by trying to discuss discredited claims about the 2020 presidential election on air,” the New York Times reported.

“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” Catsimatidis told the newspaper. “We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it.”

What’s not clear from the reporting about Giuliani’s show being canceled is why now, after years of promoting Giuliani and his twisted worldview, WABC pulled the plug. Judging by the size of the crowd at Wildwood the damage has already been done.

Saturday’s rally with all of the red, white and blue trappings was reminiscent of that night on February 20, 1939, when 20,000 ‘patriotic’ Americans packed the old Madison Square Garden to cheer Fritz Julius Kuhn, leader of the American Bund, which supported Nazi Germany. Kuhn spoke in front of a massive rendering of George Washington.

Of course, he denounced the “Jewish-controlled press.”

“We, the German American Bund, organized as American citizens with American ideals and determined to protect ourselves, our homes, our wives and children against the slimy conspirators who would change this glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik paradise,” Kuhn told the crowd.

Marshall Curry directed “A Night At the Garden”, the short documentary Academy Award film winner in 2017 that uses archival footing to depict the events of that night 85 years ago which grew a large crowd of counter-protestors outside the venue. Documentary Magazine’s Tom White asked Curry how audiences reacted to the provocative film.

“Most people are shocked. Very few Americans that I have talked to had any idea that the rally happened, and when they watch it, they have the same sense of revulsion at what was happening—and also a sense of familiarity,” Curry said. “We have seen hateful ideologies get wrapped up in the symbols of American patriotism a lot recently.”

Curry continued. “And we have seen an uptick in hate crimes and anti-Semitic crimes, and all of this stuff that should be ancient history for America doesn’t feel like ancient history. It feels familiar.”

As familiar as this weekend’s headlines.