UC Davis targeted by antisemites because fascists are scared of places where people think

Once again, University of California, Davis police are investigating antisemitic incidents — in this case, hateful banners flung over a campus overpass over the last two weekends. One of these said, “The Holocaust is an anti-white lie.” The other said, “Communism is Jewish.”

Haters can’t think very hard, or think for themselves ever, because if they did, then their whole world would disintegrate. So instead, they keep repeating the mindless, propagandistic slogans that seed violence against the innocent and lock in the limitations of the guilty.

Since education is the natural enemy of fascism, it’s not too surprising that Nazi adherents and admirers would target universities. This isn’t the first time that UC Davis has been subjected to antisemitic messages. In 2019, neo-Nazi and white supremacist flyers were posted at various locations on the school’s main campus. A year earlier, flyers calling Jews “anti-American” were passed out in at least three lecture halls.

In a statement released on Sunday, UC Davis Chancellor Gary S. May said, “We are sickened that anyone would invest any time in such cowardly acts of hate and intimidation.” Cowards have nothing but time for intimidation, because doing anything to contribute to humankind might also get them thinking, and who knows where that might lead.

But here’s one thing the sad souls who traffic in such poison do accomplish in spite of themselves: They keep proving the absolute necessity of the Holocaust and genocide education that they hate so much.

And unfortunately, those who spread antisemitism aren’t all anonymous lawbreakers like the “four white men wearing black clothing and masks” who threw those banners over the Highway 113 bicycle overpass.

After former President Donald Trump’s refusal to relinquish highly classified documents forced the FBI to retrieve them from Mar-a-Lago, Republican Rep. Mike Garcia of Southern California likened the Biden administration to the Third Reich. GOP Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona likewise demanded “the dismantling and elimination of democrat brown shirts known as the FBI.”

Other elected officials in what used to be the law-and-order party, including U.S. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, blithely compared the FBI to the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police.

Each one of these officials has been told again and again why these comparisons are so offensive, but either because they really are hateful or because they want their base to think that they are, they persist all the same.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the anti-vax and MAGA talking point likening simple public health measures to the actions of the Nazis has caused real pain to people and done violence to history, too.

Yet Republican Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio made the comparison anyway, as did John Bennett, the chairman of the Oklahoma Republican Party. MAGA Republicans Boebert and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia repeatedly did so. Republican Rep. Mary Miller of southern Illinois, who represents the then conservative, now radical rural district where I grew up, quoted Hitler approvingly shortly after being sworn in last year.

On Fox News, commentator Lara Logan went so far as to liken our country’s top infectious disease expert, Tony Fauci, to Josef Mengele, the Nazi ghoul who experimented on Jews. “People all across the world are saying this,” Logan said, in true Trumpian “people are saying” fashion.

Trump’s 2016 New York campaign chair, Carl Paladino, who was endorsed by the No. 3 House Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik, in the congressional primary race he just lost, found a lot to like about Hitler in a radio interview last year: “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him,” Paladino said of Hitler. “I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.” A doer and inspirer of what he didn’t say.

Not all of this torrent of vitriol has come from the right: In speaking out against vaccine mandates, the anti-vax loon Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

But Kennedy’s odious remarks were so widely condemned on the left that even his own wife immediately called them “reprehensible and insensitive,” while only a handful of GOP officials, like party personae non gratae Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, plus Peter Meijer of Michigan and all too briefly, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — have stood up and said that the murder of 6 million Jews, along with the attempt to annihilate the Roma, the gay and the disabled, is not at all like having to put a piece of paper over your face to limit the spread of a deadly virus.

‘Post-truth is pre-fascism’

A July Tikkun Magazine piece headlined “The Republican Problem with the Holocaust” made the case that “White supremacy has become integral to Republican messaging. A Twitter employee in 2019 argued internally that getting rid of racist content would involve deleting Republican Party messages, including Trump’s. … Prominent Republicans who have openly promoted the ‘white replacement theory’ that Democrats are trying to replace real Americans with ethnic minorities in order to win elections include Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson,” Stefanik and more than anyone else, Fox News entertainer Tucker Carlson.

Naturally, Republican officialdom is outraged that Biden even dared to flick at this threat to democracy when he said recently that our country is seeing “either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.”

Holocaust historian Timothy Snyder, whose “On Tyranny” is a tiny book that all of us who care about democracy need to absorb, wrote that “post-truth is pre-fascism” and “to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”

The recognized markers of fascism include powerful nationalism, disregard for human rights, identification of enemies as a unifying cause, widespread sexism, censorship, the suppression of unions, hostility to education and the arts, corruption, and the willingness to thwart the outcome of fair elections.

So if anything, moderate, mainstream Biden, president of an ungovernable country, who while we were all complaining has accomplished more for the average American than any president since LBJ, should have skipped the “semi” and said clearly that we are on the road to fascism and will either wake up to this threat or lose it all.

This absolutely does not mean that all Republicans are fascists. Those like Liz Cheney who care more about conservative values than about holding onto power are the kind of truth-tellers we need more of. But all of those untroubled by Trump’s possible violation of the Espionage Act and clear willingness to illegally hold onto power are on that road, whether they care to know it or not.

It can happen here, and very well may, unless we object.

In response to my recent column in support of farmworkers and their right to unionize, a Bee reader sent me this message, which I will quote in its entirety: “You Jew scum DNC presstitute c—-.”

I can’t even count all the times someone who disagreed with me found that the meanest thing he could think to call me was a Jew. But then, as I said, haters can’t afford to be very original.

This story was originally published August 30, 2022 at 5:00 AM.