Horst Wessel Moment

Summary of the list by Lawrence Britt, 2003, which I've used for Trumpery for a while now. More elaborated version here.

Jill Filipovic at Slate, with one of the most inevitable reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, the fear that it might serve as a kind of Reichstag moment for the authoritarians who are already in such a commanding political position—that this uncharacteristic new trend of violence-from-the-left, if that's what it is (and there's a good deal of reason to suppose it isn't—in the morning it was reported that the newly arrested suspect, Tyler Robinson, presented as antifascist, even though he's a kid from Utah, but by afternoon he was getting tagged as a groyper adherent of smiling fascist Nick Fuentes who regarded Kirk as a "fake conservative"), perhaps going back to the attempts on Trump's life during the campaign, or Luigi Mangione's killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December, will serve as the spark for legitimizing and institutionalizing the Trumpian attack on democracy, like the Enabling Act that permitted Hitler to assume dictatorial powers in 1933:

It has also enraged the MAGA right, and they are now demanding revenge—not just on Kirk’s killer, but on Democrats, liberal advocacy organizations, the news media, and progressives more broadly. We are still in the early hours after this appalling murder. But many conservatives are trying to make this into their Reichstag fire: the moment the movement has been waiting for to use as a pretext to suspend democratic rules, crush their opponents, and put themselves fully in charge.

In part because some of them have started saying so themselves, very explicitly.

“THIS IS WAR,” declared Libs of TikTok. On his Fox News show, host Jesse Wat[t]ers warned, “They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it?”

“If they won’t leave us in peace,” wrote Elon Musk, “then our choice is fight or die.”

Some right-wing influencers straight-up said that this is their Reichstag Fire: “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire,” wrote one. “It is time for a complete crackdown on the left. Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO. Every libtard commentator must be shut down. Stochastic terrorism. They caused this.”

That last is from a tweet by a fairly marginal hack writer called Matt Forney who figures on ADL's list of white supremacists and antisemites, and who clearly doesn't mind if he sounds like a Nazi, and I'm not sure there's any reason to take him seriously at all. He doesn't even live here, but in the Philippines. But there is a disquieting tendency on the right to move from blaming intemperate rhetoric directly for the crime, taking the concept of stochastic terrorism literally (as some of us on the left do on the regular) to proposing to criminalize and punish it in a form of Gleichschaltung, as with whoever wrote the text for Trump's (possibly AI-created?) video address:

"For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now," Trump said.

Trump said his administration would find "those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country."

I suppose Stephen Miller, who does get compared to Nazis more than anybody else in the administration, and whose feelings may be hurt more than he lets on, even though the comparisons are justified. It's funny having Trump attack "those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order" given the president's own relationships with the federal judiciary (SCOTUS excepted) and the pre-Patel FBI. Miller wouldn't be thinking about that at all, of course, but about attacks on the anti-immigration forces he has directed, "bringing order", with Kirk's enthusiastic support.

The thing is that the implied threat of Gleichschaltung isn't just rhetoric but real action that we've been experiencing over recent months, the repression of broadcast media public and private (MSNBC just fired old Matthew Dowd, of all the incurably inoffensive people, for suggesting that Kirk's inflammatory rhetoric might have contributed to the violence we are living with), and of tertiary educational institutions and public libraries, and of government institutions from the armed forces and the Justice Department to the CDC (shot up by an anti-vax terrorist last month, bureaucratically terrorized by the anti-vax HHS secretary at the same time) and NOAA, IRS and State Department. It's not by any means at a Hitlerian level, there are no labor camps for citizens or summary executions for anybody, just people getting driven out of the country, or losing their jobs and livelihoods by the thousands if they don't comply with ideological directives, and the poison of falsehood when they do, and the government not working properly, and Trump and his people getting inconceivably richer while we ordinary folk get poorer. The National Guard troops that occupied Los Angeles and still occupy the District of Columbia never actually do anything—there isn't really anything for them to do, since the crime emergencies declared to justify the occupations don't actually exist, and the Guard wouldn't know how to cope with them if they did; they're not allowed to participate in law enforcement on US territory and obviously not trained for it. 

But we can't tell how far it's going to go, as the Court continues to expand the president's ability to ignore the law and get his whims obeyed. There aren't any evident checks and balances any more, as the Republicans who rule the Court and the Congress seem to have no interest in stopping him (I do think the Court is trying very hard to keep its options open with its use of the shadow docket, allowing Trump to do what he wants but never ruling on whether it's legal or not, leaving that decision to the appeals court). It's as if our Reichstag had already burned without anybody noticing, or as if a Reichstag fire wasn't an obligatory element. You're afraid Trump might turn to emergency rule? He's already declared ten emergencies, all of them bogus, of course, but there they are (Elie Honig at New York Magazine, just this morning, notes that some of these emergency declarations have been collapsing in court, and it's likely the Supreme Court won't intervene).

Maybe the death of Charlie Kirk is their Horst Wessel moment, a martyred saint supplied just in time as the Epstein scandal is starting to sting the king.

I hate violence, myself. I hate murderers. I personally think Luigi Mangione is a prep school psychopath, and I don't belong to his fan club, though I'll protest when they sentence him to death (on the federal charges he faces after his New York state trial), as I assume they will in the current climate, because I don't think the state should murder anybody either. By the same token, I think the killing of Charlie Kirk was a truly bad thing to do, whatever you think of Kirk himself, and a serious political mistake as well. 

I've been noticing a certain amount of violence tolerance online, related to fascism as a kind of limiting case; it's OK to punch Nazis, it's OK to congratulate ourselves on winning World War II, and it honestly makes me a little uncomfortable, though I do get it, and as I was saying the other day I take a broad enough view of defensive violence, I don't think winning World War II was a mistake. I don't think violence is a good approach to seeking political change, though, not just for moral reasons but also because I don't think it's effective. Dr. King's and John Lewis's lessons have been resonating with me for a long time.

But I feel the frustration of living with fascism, as we are certainly beginning to do, in the terms of Britt's list at top of page, and our powerlessness to do anything about it, on our own or through our elected representatives, who seem paralyzed themselves, and I understand the attraction of violence, not least because it's responding to the increasing violence of the regime, as we see in the phone videos of the seizure of immigrants, and the moves to militarize cities with large minority populations, and Trump's acclamations of police brutality, and the big increase in aggressive moves from the "Department of War" from Yemen and Iran to Venezuela and perhaps the Mexican border country and who knows where else, and the promotion of officials with a reputation for violence against women, and the threats against demonstrators that sound like an appetite for a new Kent State massacre, and the regrouping of Trump's own January 6 Sturmabteilungen since their pardons.

Dark, dark times.