When the Nazis were elected into power in 1933, they controlled less than 3 percent of the German Press. The dominant media entity at the time was the Ullstein publishing house, created in 1877 by a prominent Jewish family. It grew to become Europe’s most successful publisher. By 1927 the firm had erected the newest and near-tallest building in Berlin as its headquarters, called the Ullsteinhaus.
Needless to say, chief Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels had his sights set on the firm from day one of the Reich’s ascendance. Through a process that would be called “Aryanization” the Nazis first forced the Ullstein family to resign from the company’s board of directors. They then coerced the sale of the publishing empire, valued conservatively at $60 million, for less than a tenth of its market value.
By 1937 the Ullstein Verlag had become the Deutscher Verlag (German Publishing House) and would operate as the central publishing organ of the Nazi Party for the rest of the Third Reich’s existence. Goebbels et al would enjoy the full resources built meticulously through decades by the Ullsteins, employing Europe’s most advanced information platform to ennoble and normalize a catastrophic agenda and the crimes against humanity it was created to pursue.
History is clear about how ruthlessly the Nazis persecuted German media to conform reality to their nefarious worldview, to make lies truth. Certainly, Jewish journalists understood from day one any facts about the Reich would have to be sent out from abroad, publishing within Nazi-ruled confines was suicide. Those who courageously tempted fate in the regime’s early days were quickly made examples of, showing how merciless jackboot violence would be.
It becomes tragically more accurate as the weeks pass to compare Nazi Germany’s descent into totalitarianism’s abyss with America’s current slide down MAGA’s nihilist slope. The previously unfathomable eagerness of US corporate media to normalize most all of Trumpworld’s stench, from the overt corruption of ridiculous Presidential pardons and Bitcoin receptions to the outright atrocity of disappearing immigrants to foreign hells, provides a vile point of comparison to Pre-WWII Nazi Germany. Nothing since last November has been more disheartening for patriots desperately in need of a daily rallying point to confront what can’t be allowed to stand.
MAGA, like the Nazis, Soviets, Chinese Communists and every other regime who, as the great diplomat and historian George Kennan observed, share a pathological insecurity about the legitimacy of their rule and standing among other nations, fixates on validating its hatred toward an enemies list that only expands. Those who help it do so darken the future. Fox/AM created Trump, but ABC, NBC et al now sustains both him and the servile MAGA political class that works only to codify his rabid impulses.
Every day we now witness the comfortable routine our craven press corps has fallen into: incite an unstable maniac with the latest criticisms his unhinged actions generate, roil all of his pathological insecurities like hostage negotiators daring the criminal to harm his captives, and then present the “policy” that results as normal. Meanwhile, the MAGA (formerly Republican) Party “crafts legislation” geared solely to legitimating a fascist kleptocracy. Really nothing too different from the Nazi consolidation of total power.
Legislation gets no worse than the Tax Bill of 2025, passed last week in the dead of night by one vote in the House. Following up on its predecessor from the first Trump Administration, it needlessly extends tax breaks while the nation is at full employment, adding trillions to the national debt. This time, however, it does so while stealing from the poorest sector of America, and harming virtually every area meant to help those without. It’s been accurately described as the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history, quite literally robbing from the poor to further enrich the upper brackets, all while adding between 4 and 6 trillion dollars to the national debt.
What has changed radically this go-round is the press coverage of both content and process. In September of 2017, before owner Jeff Bezos decided soulless oligarchy was for him, The Washington Post editorial board did not mince words opining on the first Trump tax package:
“This is tax reform, in other words, for dishonest political cowards. It is not a legacy that members of Congress should want to leave to their children.”
Contrast that indictment with what the new and detested WaPo had to say last Sunday about what emerged from the House and how it passed:
“In the past week, as never before, Donald Trump showed mastery of the legislative process…The President is savvier about working the Hill today than he was eight years ago… The hard, sometimes dirty work of legislating might not be the easiest way to govern, but it is the most legitimate… This is how the legislative process is supposed to work.”
During Memorial Day weekend Trump’s mental illness was on display wherever he went, whatever he did. He dishonored sacred West Point and military tradition by wearing a MAGA hat as he delivered an incoherent commencement address that slurred about everything from trophy wives to how he “rebuilt” the military and declaring that a less than 2-point 2024 election victory was “a great mandate… to do what we want to do.” Yet AP, who we’ve always counted on for truth in real time, cherry-picked the few innocuous stanzas of Trump’s address, telling its readers the President “lauded graduating cadets,” while mixing “praise, politics and grievances.”
Later, Trump vomited an all-caps Memorial Day Truth Social post for the country:
“HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT MINDS, WHO ALLOWED 21,000,000 MILLION PEOPLE TO ILLEGALLY ENTER OUR COUNTRY, MANY OF THEM BEING CRIMINALS AND THE MENTALLY INSANE, THROUGH AN OPEN BORDER THAT ONLY AN INCOMPETENT PRESIDENT WOULD APPROVE, AND THROUGH JUDGES WHO ARE ON A MISSION TO KEEP MURDERERS, DRUG DEALERS, RAPISTS, GANG MEMBERS, AND RELEASED PRISONERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN OUR COUNTRY SO THEY CAN ROB, MURDER, AND RAPE AGAIN — ALL PROTECTED BY THESE USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK, AND VERY DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY.”
It feels necessary to cite the rant in full, since network news sites like ABC News relegated it to an ancillary sidebar of Trump’s Arlington Cemetery speech, yet another fully politicized self-congratulation fest.
Around the world brave journalists are persecuted every day. Reporting the truth in an authoritarian country is one of the most dangerous professions on earth. At our current rate of descent, American jail cells likely will soon house those courageous enough to challenge MAGA’s growing ability to clamp down on dissent.
When it happens they will be martyrs created by the cowardice of the mainstream media bosses who couldn’t bend the knee fast enough as they calculated that going along was best for shareholder well-being or increased personal wealth, or simply avoiding the unpleasantness that standing up to Trump assures. A lawsuit here, nasty post there. The promise of a lost federal contract here, an IRS investigation there, maybe the threat of FCC malevolence. It took appallingly little effort, but most all have now fallen into line and present the unimaginable with routine bylines and stifled modifiers, national ruin as “a bid to reshape government.” History will condemn them. We can never forgive or forget their betrayal. BC