Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  Obama as Hitler

  Godwin’s Law states that the longer any online debate goes on, the likelier it is that someone will play the Nazi card. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of going nuclear and stupid at the same time. It used to be the reflexive attack of the campus politically correct crowd on conservatives, but in Obama’s first year a political role reversal was pulled off—Hitler was now a liberal.

  This was a neat trick, inspired in part by a popular and thoughtful anti-big government treatise by National Review editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg (and son of Clinton nemesis Lucianne Goldberg), titled “Liberal Fascism.” It allowed conservatives to de-link the right with fascism by pointing out that Nazis got their name because they were national socialists. Goldberg himself pointed to an overlap in Obama’s utopian rhetoric on Glenn Beck’s show during the spring of ’08: “When Barack Obama campaigns, he’s basically saying, ‘I’m a silver bullet. I’m going to solve all your problems just by electing me.’ FDR, Hitler, all these guys, they basically said, ‘All your problems can be solved.’”14

  The initial point of departure wasn’t dictatorship or genocide but the ugliest imaginable partisan spin on Obama’s oratorical talents. It’s an interesting move: You turn inspiration into adulation and then you call it a cult of personality—next stop, Hitler.

  The first known Obama-Hitler comparison occurred in February 2008, when Fox News radio host Tom Sullivan offered side-by-side airings of Obama’s speech at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner and a Hitler speech.15 After Obama’s address in Germany outside the Brandenburg Gate, conservative columnist Charles Kraut - hammer drily made the same point: “Standing in front of 200,000 Germans at a rally who are chanting your name—Bad vibes sometimes, historically.”16 “Seventy-five-thousand people at an outdoor sports palace, well, that’s something the Führer would have done,” concurred conservative economist (and sometime actor—“. . . Bueller? Bueller?”) Ben Stein after Obama’s August nomination acceptance speech at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High.17 Ann Coulter reached for another form of literary comparison, casting “B. Hussein’s” memoir Dreams from My Father as “a dime store Mein Kampf.”18

  Soon the comparison started gaining currency at the grassroots. A sign drawn up by a volunteer in one of the McCain campaign’s Florida field offices compared “Barack Hussein Obama” to a litany of dictators from Hitler to Stalin to Mussolini to Castro. “Who else called for change in this fashion?” the sign asked. “Each and every one called on youth movements. And you want Obama for President? Are you nuts!”19

  The designer of the sign, a self-identified “12thgeneration” American named Robert E. J. Driscoll was dismissed from volunteering for the campaign but refused to apologize. He said he had been offended by the way activists on the left had compared Bush to Hitler without mainstream media criticism. In any case, he told the Sun-Sentinel, “Clinically and morally there is nothing wrong with the poster. . . . If I compare the oration ability of Senator Obama with that of Adolf Hitler (both quite good in communicating), does that mean I am suggesting Obama will be a mass murderer? Of course not.”20

  Congressman Paul Broun’s post-election outburst comparing Obama to Hitler offered a similar qualification: “I’m not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I’m saying is there is the potential of going down that road.”21

  The delicate politics of this differentiation was explained in fuller detail by the master of political-attack-as-entertainment, Rush Limbaugh: “When you’re dealing with a guy like Obama and the Democrat Party, who are going to impose Nazi-like socialism policies on this country, you’ve got to say it. And the same time you say it, you have to go out and point we’re not talking about the genocide—that’s at the tail end of Hitler.”22

  Right. So the Wingnut argument is that they are not comparing Obama to Hitler the genocidal dictator, but they’re comparing Obama to Hitler the political leader—those six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are just a detail people keep getting hung up on.

  In April ’09, as the Republican Party’s officials tried to regroup, Michigan party chair Saul Anuzis—an ambitious if unsuccessful aspirant for national RNC Chair—advanced the ball by advising the GOP to characterize Obama’s policies as “economic fascism.” “We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Anuzis reasoned. “Fascism—everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”23

  Later that month, Glenn Beck obligingly picked up the talking point: “They’re marching us to a non-violent fascism. Or to put it another way, they’re marching us to 1984. Big Brother. Like it or not, fascism is on the rise.”24 Fox producers partnered the commentary with a minute’s worth of goose-stepping Nazi b-roll.

  The message was received loud and clear. In June, the president of the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, fired off this e-mail complete with the requisite paranoid capital letters: “Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common in my view. Obama and Hitler use the ‘blitzkrieg’ method to overwhelm their enemies. FAST, CARPET BOMBING intent on destruction. Hitler’s blitzkrieg bombing destroyed many European cities—quickly and effectively. Obama is systematically destroying the American economy and with it AMERICA.”25

  Prefab Obama-as-Hitler signs began to pop up at August health-care town halls, featuring the president with a narrow mustache, bearing the slogan: “I’ve changed.” They were the product of the conspiracy theory cult of Lyndon LaRouche. It was a LaRouche aide named Anton Chaitkin who started the Obama-as-Hitler attack on healthcare in response to what he called “a propaganda movement for euthanasia.” Soon pamphlets were produced: “Act Now to Stop Obama’s Nazi Health Plan!”

  In Massachusetts, Congressman Barney Frank’s town hall was disrupted by a glassy-eyed young LaRouche-ite who asked, “Why are you supporting this Nazi policy, as Obama has?” (Frank deserves bipartisan props for his response: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”)

  In Nevada, at a Las Vegas town hall, an Israeli-American was defending Israel’s national health care to reporters when a woman named Pamela Pigler shouted, “Heil Hitler!” and then proceeded to make whining sounds mocking him when he took offense. Pigler later explained, “I’m a conservative and I just believe in biblical values.”26 It remains unclear how shouting “Heil Hitler” is consistent with biblical values.

  In Iowa, a World War II vet named Tom Eisenhower (presumably no relation to the late president) proclaimed to the crowd at Senator Chuck Grassley’s town hall, “The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler. . . . I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”27

  By the 9/12 march on Washington, dozens of homemade Obama-as-Hitler signs were a prominent part of the scenery. I saw side-by-side portraits of the president next to Hitler and Lenin, with the tag, “In troubled times the fearful and naïve are always drawn to charismatic radicals. We will never allow this Change to happen.” There was iconic Nazi-era imagery with President Obama pasted in as “the new face of national socialism.”

  The seeds of the association had blossomed into full-fledged acceptance by some people on Main Street. An Ohio couple didn’t understand why they were denied a permit to drive through the annual Fredricktown Tomato Show Parade on a float that showed President Obama with a swastika armband beside a Nazi flag.28 Richard and Jacqueline Ruhl said they found “strong parallels between what President Obama is doing and Adolf Hitler” and proposed the float as a way to get their neighbors to “wake up.”

  “It was the swastikas that seemed to be turning off most people,” reflected Jackie. “We are not extremists and we have not done anything like this before. . . . He denied us our First Amendment right. He is an extremist,” Jackie said, referring to President Obama. “If anyone thinks I like pulling a swastika around, they are crazy,” said Richard. “I hated it just as much as anybody.” 29

&n
bsp; With the growing use of the Obama-as-Hitler comparison, a few more GOP leaders started indulging as well.

  Former Bush administration official Ellen Sauerbrey—who served as assistant secretary of state and was a two-time GOP nominee for governor in Maryland—reportedly told a September Lincoln/Reagan dinner audience that the president was surrounded by “a cult-like following edging toward those of past dictators like Juan Perón and even Adolf Hitler.”30 When subsequently asked to clarify her comments by the County Times, Sauerbrey denied having dropped the H-bomb but acknowledged: “I think that we have a government that is following policies that are socialistic and fa scist.”31

  Georgia Congressman John Linder, a member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, decided to make his Hitler comparisons in op-ed form, penning a condemnation of progressivism for Politico that tied together Robespierre, Woodrow Wilson, Hitler, Mussolini and Obama: “All believed in the minimum wage, state control of private property for the public good, unionization and environmentalism. And they believed in eugenics to purify the gene pool.”32

  All these Nazi comparisons made me wonder what actual Nazis thought of the hype—it must be bittersweet for them to have the first African-American president referred to as Hitler, a curious mix of pride and prejudice. I hunted down the phone number of the northeast Nazi chapter (apparently, they are fussy about being called the American National Socialist Party) and got someone who called himself SS Corporal Schneider on the line.

  “The people who are referring to him as a Nazi know very little or nothing about authentic Nazi-ism,” Schneider stiffly said. “I’d laugh if it wasn’t so ludicrous. The last thing in the world I would ever call President Obama—and I hesitate to call him president—is a Nazi. I most certainly would not refer to him as a Nazi. It seems to me that if he was successful at what he was doing, he’d be more of a communist than a Nazi. A Nazi is completely at the opposite end of the spectrum where he is concerned . . . and his is not a Nazi health plan, not by any stretch of the imagination.” So we’ve got that creepily cleared up.

  I couldn’t resist pressing Schneider on how self-styled Aryans feel about the Obama comparisons: “Having the first African-American president being the one who’s been called Nazi the most—that’s got to get under your skin.”

  “Well, you’ll find no blacks among the ranks of the National Socialist movement, for obvious reasons,” Schneider understated. “It gets under members’ skin, not so much because of his color, but because of his ideas and some of the things that he’s been saying. . . . The concept of color in the movement here is not quite the issue that it was.”

  In Schneider’s world, the Nazi party is “comprised of taxpaying, law abiding, nine-to-five working people who are very devoted to their families, pay their taxes, stop for red lights, respect the police and the law and basically are out to support their own country and save it from the ruination of the corrupt politicians that are destroying and undermining this entire system.” But are there any politicians he likes? “Reagan. And if that man came back from the dead, I’d vote for him again. It’s just a shame that the man passed away and it’s just a shame that man couldn’t have been president for life.”

  Perhaps the best response to all this Wingnut distortion of history came from one seventy-year-old man, a classically trained musician by the name of Henry Gasparian. His family had experienced real Nazis—not metaphorical ones—in Armenia during the Second World War.

  They’d killed his uncles and sent a cousin to die in a concentration camp. When he saw the Obama-as-Hitler posters at a sidewalk protest near his home in Seattle, his reaction was “personal and emotional.” A heated conversation turned into a shoving match, and the cops came and took Gasparian away. His son, who bailed him out of jail eight hours later, was shocked, saying his father had never received more than a speeding ticket. But Henry was unrepentant. “I saw Hitler’s soldiers. I saw swastikas every day,” he said. “To call Obama stupid, even criminal—okay, that’s politics. But Hitler? It’s hurting to anyone no matter who is president.”33

  Obama as Communist

  “There is no doubt that he is a Marxist, but he is much more than that, much more dangerous than that—and this is the reality that should make all Americans very very nervous and fearful.”34

  No, it’s not Barack Obama they’re referring to. It’s Bill Clinton being called a Marxist Manchurian candidate back in the 1990s.

  The same Wingnut Web site, WorldNetDaily, has been pushing the same paranoid argument against President Obama complete with epic pre-election screeds with titles like “Barack Obama really is a Manchurian Candidate.” 35 (I love the “really”—in their italics. It’s vaguely apologetic in a boy-who-cried-wolf sort of way—they might have been wrong about Bubba, but they’ve got the real Marxist Manchurian candidate this time.)

  The slippery slope from socialist to communist attacks on Obama began during the campaign. It focused first on economics. When Barack Obama met “Joe the Plumber” in Toledo, Ohio, and uttered the phrase “spread the wealth,” socialism became an omnipresent Hail Mary campaign tactic. Sarah Palin enthusiastically dove in, repeatedly saying, “Now is no time to experiment with socialism.”36

  Former Republican House Majority leader Tom DeLay hammered home the theme a bit harder: “Unless he proves me wrong, he is a Marxist.”37 On CNN’s Larry King Live, conservative radio show host Lars Larson recommended that McCain needed “to tag Obama as the Marxist that he is.”38

  But for most conservatives, calling Obama an outright communist seemed a stretch. The defamatory door was opened with examinations of his family history. Writing on National Review Online, former Dan Quayle speechwriter 39 Lisa Schriffen wondered whether Obama’s parents had first met through a love of communism: “How had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.”40

  Allegations of Obama’s influence under “communist and socialist mentors” while growing up in Hawaii and later Chicago occupied a chapter in the best-selling Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. Written by WorldNetDaily senior staff reporter Jerome R. Corsi, author of the anti-John Kerry tome Unfit for Command, the book concluded that Obama “is a likely communist sympathizer.”

  Down the stretch, Ohio-based conservative radio host Bill Cunningham went into full communist-revolution-is-coming mode, telling his 200,000 swing-state listeners, “Much like Castro took over Cuba, Mao Zedong took over Red China, and the Communists took over Russia, Obama now is poised—according to many of my good friends on the left . . . to seize power in America, and I hope [it will] be a bloodless coup.”41

  Shortly after the election, Michael Savage managed to tie the communist and birther crazy all together for his audience. “We’re getting ready for the Communist takeover of America with a non-citizen at the helm—I love it.”42

  All this remained festering on the fringes, until Glenn Beck’s new show debuted on Fox in January. Sixteen days into the new administration, Beck featured a graphic showing America galloping down the road from capitalism to socialism and then to communism—and then began offering a regular “Comrade Update.”43

  At the Tax Day Tea Party in ’09, Obama-as-communist signs first started to pop up in the crowd, next to the protestations of patriotism and fidelity to the Founding Fathers. At the City Hall Park rally in New York, I went up to one guy impassively holding a giant placard that read “Hussein = Commie.” He was wearing a hoodie and sunglasses and holding an iPod—a hipster irony outfit by way of the Unibomber—so I asked him if the sign was serious. Oh, yeah.

  “Every time he opens his mouth he spouts textbook Marxism, communism, socialism,” said the man who initially gave his name as “
Barry Soetoro”—Obama’s name when he lived in Indonesia as a child. After some prodding, it turned out the protester was a Manhattan real estate executive with a degree in economics from Georgetown. This was a high end kind of crazy.

  Likewise, Alan Keyes has a pedigree that would seem to counter off-the-rails accusations. But Keyes can be considered patient zero in the spread of Obama Derangement Syndrome. The one-time protégé of Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and three-time presidential candidate was recruited to run against then State Senator Barack Obama in 2004 for the Illinois U.S. Senate seat, despite the fact that Keyes lived in Maryland. (That the GOP could not find an African-American candidate to run in all of Illinois, the Land of Lincoln, is its own evidence of the Party of Lincoln’s problems.) In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama angrily recounts Keyes’s campaign claim that “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama.”

  Keyes has only ratcheted up his rhetoric since then, both in his 2008 third-party campaign for the presidency alongside Wiley Drake and in comments outside a Nebraska anti-abortion fund-raiser in the spring of 2009. “Obama is a radical communist, and I think it is becoming clear. That is what I told people in Illinois and now everybody realizes it’s true,” Keyes told a reporter from local station KHAS-TV. “He is going to destroy this country, and we are either going to stop him or the United States of America is going to cease to exist.”44