Elise Stefanik, the congresswoman from New York State, ran as a moderate problem solver in 2014, but long ago exposed her rottenness of character, absence of integrity and willingness to do anything for political power.
Elise Stefanik is a fascist, and like all fascists, a liar. She is dogmatic, blustering, unpleasant. She is also self-satisfied, particularly with regard to the self-immolation of Ivy League presidents after her questions on antisemitism that she brags are “the most viewed congressional testimony in the history of the United States Congress.”
Stefanik is deeply cynical and fully committed to the MAGA|GOP extremist mission. There is no place to compromise with the Elise Stefaniks of the world. They must be defeated at the ballot box by the people they represent, who must be exhausted by the tediousness of a government employee that treats them with such high-handed disdain and disrespect. Perhaps Elise Stefanik’s constituents don’t mind her venomous rhetoric and appalling behavior, but the majority of the country finds it both repelling and appalling.
Elise Stefanik is an apologist for the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher. How dare she claim to be a champion of justice and human rights when she is indifferent towards the very same concepts that led to the slaughter of millions within a human life span? She is an apologist for Donald Trump, and a leader in a party filled with white nationalist allies, including Nazis like Nick Fuentes, who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Here is what Nick Fuentes thinks about the Jews:
On a livestream episode, Fuentes “jokingly” denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven.
He has called for a “holy war against Jews.”
He has said that “the Jews had better start being nice to people like us, because what comes out of this is going to get a lot uglier for them…”
When fascist paramilitaries and Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, and chanted “Jews will not replace us,” Donald Trump infamously said, that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
There weren’t, and there aren’t.
On yesterday’s edition of Meet the Press, Elise Stefanik called the convicted felons, who are incarcerated in federal prison after pleading guilty or being convicted by a jury of crimes, “hostages.”
This includes those that have been convicted of seditious conspiracy like the very dangerous fascist leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
Stefanik’s comments are beyond reprehensible and deserve denunciation, but they should not be confused as revelatory. There was nothing new learned from them. What the moment Elise Stefanik belongs to has been clear for some time. She is not on your side — just like Trump.
NBC’s Kristen Welker did a superb job behind the MTP desk with Elise Stefanik. A spotlight shown clearly on a national danger who exposed herself with tin-eared glee. There is no excuse whatsoever for not appreciating exactly who all of these people are. They must be defeated in 2024. Losing is not an option.
Dorothy Thompson was a brilliant foreign correspondent, who distinguished herself by being the first American journalist deported from Nazi Germany. She also wrote “Who Goes Nazi?” It is the greatest column on extremism that has ever been authored.
She testified before the United States Senate in 1937, five years before the “Final Solution” would be planned at Wannsee, and talked about how democracies collapse. The subject at hand was the FDR proposal to pack the US Supreme Court, but her observations go much deeper than the transient political debate.
What Dorothy Thompson understood in 1937 has existential importance in 2024. Read what she said in her opening statement. It will help you appreciate just how dangerous Elise Stefanik is. By the way, hypothetically, of course, but since Trump is talking about collective punishment, retribution, deploying the military domestically, and creating vast deportation camps, does anyone doubt Elise would lock up an opponent?
Below is what Dorothy Thompson said in 1937 (excerpted). It is well worth the read, and it should help understand this moment a bit more. When you read Ms. Thompson’s words one thing is clear and that is the utter degradation of deep thought that has taken place between then and now when it comes to public discussions about the fate of the republic.
I am not an expert on constitutional law, and my only justification for taking your time is that I have been for some years, as a foreign correspondent, an observer at the collapse of constitutional democracies. You might say I have been a researcher into the mortality of republics. The outstanding fact of our times is the decline and fall of constitutional democracy. A great need of our time is for more accurate analysis of the pathology of constitutional government, of why constitutional government perishes. A great deal of such analysis has been made, but the more thoughtful students have not made much impress on public opinion. And there are a great many people in the United States, for instance, who think that fascism is completely described as a plot of big business to seize government and run it in their own interests, through a dictator who is their stooge. Or they think that fascism has come about through some evil man, perhaps an evil genius of overwhelming ambition, bent on personal power, who suppressed free institutions by violence. Or they think that fascism is a peculiar institution of certain peoples, arising from special and limited conditions. For instance, that Germany became national socialist because of the Treaty of Versailles; or that Italy became fascist because she did not get what she expected to get out of the war. Or they think that constitutional democracies have fallen because they “failed to meet human needs” and pass adequate social legislation…
Gentlemen, I have come to a quite different conclusion about why democracies collapse, and give way to tyrannies of one sort or another. This blanket definition of fascism is not very descriptive of what is going on. Italian fascism, German national socialism, the military dictatorship of Pilsudski and of his successor in Poland, the monarchial dictatorship in Yugoslavia, the Catholic and semi-military dictatorship in Austria, the brain-trust dictatorship in Portugal, and the dictatorship of Comrade Stalin in Russia cannot be described as belonging to any one system of ideas. In hundreds of respects they are completely dissimilar. But each of them was the answer of a particular people, with particular mores and particular traditions to governments which were failing, not to meet human needs — if by that you mean failing to pass social laws — but failing in the first function of government: Failing to keep order and social cohesion and respect for principles. And each of these dictatorships has the same essential function. Its function is to impose social disciplines; to impose those social disciplines by the edict and coercion of a single man and regime of men, because the people themselves had ceased to accept the discipline of law.
I think the disciplines of law are particularly needed in democracies and are especially needed at any moment when a powerful majority is in temporary control of the current political situation almost to the exclusion of minority representation. We have such a situation in this country now. The men who designed the structure of this Republic realized this. They did not believe that the cure for the evils of democracy was more democracy. They believed that the prevention against a democracy running away with itself, the prevention against a powerful majority riding roughshod over the temporary minority and selling short the whole future of the country, the prevention against today’s majority mortgaging tomorrow’s majority, lay in a written constitution and an independent Supreme Court to interpret that constitution.
The dangers that threaten democracies are two: One is that the legal pattern should be too rigid; that the dynamics in society should shatter themselves against a Chinese wall which can be broken only by revolution. That argument is constantly advanced these days by the advocates of rapid and drastic change. That argument is implicit in the President’s speech at the Democratic Party rally. It is the threat of revolution. I am not impressed by that argument. I am not impressed by it because in the past 17 years I have attended the funerals of many democracies and I have not seen one in which the cause of death could so diagnosed. This danger confronts absolutist systems, where popular opinion is not allowed to function, where there is no representative government, where insurrection is the only outlet. Mr. Hitler faced such a danger the summer of 1934; in Moscow, recently, we have had trials indicating that Mr. Stalin has been facing such a danger, or the danger can arise in a sudden and acute crises such as occurred here, in 1932, when thousands of people were threatened by actual starvation, by bankruptcy, and by the complete break-down of economic life. Such emergencies from time to time hit all republics, and often, during them the constitution is tacitly suspended, by almost universal consent. Such an emergency occurred in France in 1926–27 when the franc fell catastrophically. For years, Poincaré was virtually a dictator. It happened here and elsewhere during the war. But wise democracies do not attempt during such emergencies to fundamentally alter the continuing structure of the State or set precedents for new procedures, and they return as rapidly as possible to the traditional pattern of procedure.
I think the second danger to democracies is far greater: It is that reforms, often very good and much needed reforms, should be rushed through at a rate in which they cannot be digested in society. It is the danger that eager and unchecked majorities should set up new instruments of power, before they are equipped properly to administer such instruments. It is that the will of powerful pressure groups, even when such groups embrace a majority of voters, should find expression in total disregard of the feelings, apprehensions, and interests of large and important minorities. All of those things, for instance, would hold true if you analyzed the pathology of the Austrian Republic. There is the danger that radical changes, affecting the social structure, should take place without the guidance or the check of any clear unequivocal principles. I think the greater the demand for popular franchises and rights, the greater is the need for constitutional control. Otherwise, this struggle for democratic rights — or, if you want call if that, for new economic freedoms — can very rapidly degenerate into a chaotic redistribution of privileges. That again is what happened in Austria. There are always hundred percenters for democracy, those who want pure democracy. They want to do away with every impediment and march at high speed toward what they call a real or modern democracy, or the democracy in harmony with the times. But precisely in such revolutionary times — and we live in one — it is most necessary to have a point of reference, a warrant, an instrument which confidently assures the legitimacy of what is being done. For without such a point of reference, there ceases to be a spontaneous social cohesion and what you then get as sure as fate is social cohesion by coercion.
I have spoken occasionally of the dangers of dictatorship and been roundly trounced for it by my friends who call themselves liberals. I no longer know what a liberal or a conservative is. They say that I go around seeing bogeys. Perhaps I go around seeing bogeys because I have seen, in the last 15 years, so many bogeys suddenly take on flesh. In Germany in 1928 you could hardly find a civilized man who thought that the Republic was in serious danger. I remember in 1928 there was an election, and the German Social-Democrats, who were somewhat “new dealers” in Germany, came into power by a big majority, and Hermann Müller became Chancellor. I remember sitting in his office and talking with him about what I thought was the feeling in the country, a feeling of hostility and of disappointment and of rage, because they thought things were going too far, and he laughed at me. “Why,” he said, “the Republic was never safer in the world than it is at this moment.” Well, it was as dead as a doornail five years later…
The modern coup d’état, by which so many democratic systems have fallen, does not destroy the legal apparatus of the State. The modern revolution is not made by violence. It keeps it, for the coup d’état wishes to appear legal. It only alters its spirit and its aim. Mr. Hitler took an oath to the Constitution of Weimar, and he has never offered another constitution. He has just obliterated it by a series of decrees backed by a supine parliament. He has just changed the rules under which it meets and made race and sedition laws which have caused the expulsion and arrest of part of its membership. You say this couldn’t happen here, but it has happened here.
It happened in New York State during the war, when the Socialists were expelled from the State assembly. The courts are all there, in Germany, but they are packed. And Hitler calls his system democracy — you can be put in jail in Germany for saying Hitler is a dictator — and from time to time subjects its ruling to a general plebiscite and gets a mandate from the people. But we call it dictatorship. There is a systole and diastole, an ebb and flow in the life of democracies. Radical or liberal regimes, particularly if they move very fast and introduce a great deal of legislation which is not based always on any very clear principles but is chiefly designed to meet emergencies of the moment and the demands of powerful groups, and which lead to considerable redistributions of wealth and power, sometimes with chaotic accompaniments — such regimes are almost invariably succeeded by conservative regimes, and the vigor and tempo of the retreat are usually in direct ratio to the vigor and tempo of the advance.
I would like to ask a question: Did the German Republic fall because it failed to meet human needs, because it was slow in extending the responsibility of government for the public welfare?
It did not. The German Republic came into being in a moment of national disaster. It was not the result of a revolution. Nobody shed his blood for it. You might say it was a “new deal” in German politics. The Weimar Republic had all the things, did all the things, that the New Deal wishes to accomplish. It had universal sickness and old-age insurance; unemployment insurances and federal relief; vastly extended public parks; playgrounds and sports arenas, subsidized housing for the poor, general trade-unionism guaranteed in law, with wage and hour agreements worked out by collective bargaining, and having the force of law. It raised the standard of health in Germany and more evenly distributed the economic gains. It finally came to control something like 40 percent of the national income. It had machinery for controlling both prices and wages, and it used that machinery; but found, as other democratic governments have done, that that machinery was no guarantee of prosperity. The failure of the German Republic was not a failure to respond to the demands of the masses, but it failed to create loyalty to its own basic principles. Perhaps if there had been a real revolution, for which men had died, the Republic might have survived. But the Republic made no such demands on its citizens. And the masses never regarded this Republic as holding the charter of their liberties, as being something in itself for which they were willing to make sacrifices. They regarded it as the instrument for their well-being; and it perished not because it failed to meet human needs, but rather because it guaranteed to meet them, and there came time when it could not possibly meet them on the scale to which the people had become accustomed.
The German people were never prepared, psychologically or otherwise, to fight for the constitution and political freedom. They were prepared to fight for minimum wages and maximum hours and social insurance; and finally parliamentary government was first suspended, not under Hitler but under Brüning, a democratic Chancellor. He invoked an emergency decree, giving President Hindenburg power to govern by edict, because Germany was facing an inflation that required Government retrenchment; and Brüning couldn’t get a parliamentary majority for retrenchment, because it would mean cutting in too many things that the people needed to have. Hitler came in and used the precedent that Brüning had established. Germany has been governed by decree from that day to this. The masses under the German Republic, in other words, cared more for what they could get out of it than they did for the Republic itself or for the principle of republican government; and when hard times came and neither the republican government nor any other could go on meeting those demands, it found no one was loyal to it. And then it found something else — it found that the German Republic had cut itself off from many old and deep traditions and codes of social behavior, which in an emergency came again to the surface and proved to have much more vitality and moral strength than the leaders had dreamed. And eventually the German people followed a leader who promised them neither shorter hours nor higher wages, but who demanded sacrifice, and in return promised only one thing: Order and the establishment of a unifying principle — the principle of a unified Germany.
Now, if you are interested, you might go to the explanation of Mussolini. It is to be found in the governments which preceded him. Really, fascism was brought about by a deadlock between capital and labor, whereby no one of the two could win. And that deadlock had been brought about by political policies. Labor was becoming more and more irresponsible, because the labor leaders at the top had an eye on political power, and the leaders of the rank and file were without adequate experience or the discipline of long trade-union training. The employers were frightened to death, both of the strikers and of the Government, which they considered hostile, and they were afraid to invoke old-fashioned methods of suppressing the strikes. At the same time, the government of Giolitti was trying to be clever and extend political power over powerful economic interests by using the militant workers as pressure from the country. The Giolitti government was not willing to break the deadlock, and so this went on until somebody who had been patronizing and advocating the most radical methods of the workers offered his services to the employers and broke it. That man was Mussolini. But Mussolini could not have gone as far as he eventually did if he had not won the collaboration of the last and highest point of reference in the state, or in Italy, the Crown. In other words, Mussolini had to have support in the masses plus the constitutional power in order to effect a legal coup d’état.
Now, I know that many people will say that these are very poor analogies, and they are right. The United States is not Germany and not Italy. This country has a long tradition of free government. And those critics are correct. One must not push analogies too far. Analogies as well as metaphors are always dangerous. But neither can one divorce events in this country from ideas and tendencies which are manifest throughout the world. The problems which we face are not unique. Everywhere constitutional democracies have had to face the question of how to make new integrations between economic and political power.
The whole world today has a new vision of freedom; economic freedom. That actually means a redistribution of wealth which will diminish the privileges of the few for the sake of the under-privileged many. From both a moral and an economic viewpoint that demand is justified and made inevitable, by our era of mass production. But that economic freedom — I do not think this can be said too often — will prove a complete mirage unless it is accomplished with the maintenance of political freedom. Political freedom is the condition of all freedom, as the people of Russia have learned, as the people of Italy have learned, and as the people of Germany have learned. They gave up political freedom to get something else which they thought at the moment was very much more important, and then they found out that there is not anything more important. And the first condition of political freedom is that we should stick to a regime of law, and not move off the path toward a regime of men.
“NBC’s Kristen Welker did a superb job behind the MTP desk with Elise Stefanik. A spotlight shown clearly on a national danger who exposed herself with tin-eared glee. There is no excuse whatsoever for not appreciating exactly who all of these people are. They must be defeated in 2024. Losing is not an option.”
Agreed Steve, excellent points. I would argue that Stefanik is just another example of greed, opportunism and of power going to her obtuse head.
She saw an opportunity to move to the head of the line in her party, and grasped tightly to Trump’s coattails. She exemplifies the worst of human behavior, yet, she is in good company. It’s said that Thomas joined the Republican Party after being minimized in the Democratic Party. Another example of opportunism gone amok.
Furthermore, I wouldn’t hand out medals to Welker for the interview. She allowed Stefanik to rail against the establishment, and claim the J6th defendants are all hostages. Never mind hundreds pleaded guilty and hundreds more were convicted.
Welker and the MSM have turned into cowardly fools, whose quest for ratings supersedes their fourth estate mandate. They are not the free press; they themselves are the hostages; deadly afraid of their captors.
Instead, they focus their vitriol on the democrats since they know democratic administrations would never ever consider destroying their first amendment rights.
If Trump wins, the MSM could be said of doing the same things the citizens of Italy and Germany did when they elected fascists; except in this case, they will be one of the root causes for democracies collapse.
Sadly, Stefanik is t the only defender of white nationalism and their decisive rhetoric. I know too many Jewish people who have fallen for Trump’s nonsense. However, I remember Nazi Germany well; and many rich Jews who initially supported Hitler, learned the hard way of their folly!
"NBC’s Kristen Welker did a superb job behind the MTP desk with Elise Stefanik."
By what metric steve? No push back when Elise called the insurrectionists 'hostages' - no asking " is Enrique Tario a 'hostage'? Is Steward Rhodes a ' hostage'? Congresswoman, can you please define 'hostage' as you define it?"
Did she push back on not accepting the last election? Not willing to say she will accept the next one? Did she ask if there were so many 'questions' about the last election in PA - how come some republicans won? Was it only 'questionable' for Biden? For other dems? Does she have examples?
No Steve - Welker failed miserably. You defense or rather praise of her - shows either your blindness or your bias. You should know better