Beware of Republicans bearing false fear

Reaction to the New Orleans attack raises worries about what’s ahead.

Most Americans saw the New Orleans terrorist attack as a tragedy. Republican propagandists saw it as an opportunity.

That’s what extremists do. They exploit public fear to further their political ambitions – and too often news outlets help them. We’ll see a lot of this under the coming Trump regime, and it will be vital for us to push back. MAGA authoritarians want us to surrender our rights and give them more and more power. We have to tell them no.

After last week’s attack, Fox News issued a false report suggesting an immigration link to the crime. This wasn’t a departure for Fox – it’s in their playbook. Remember, Fox had to pay a $787 million settlement for spreading lies about the 2020 election. Twisting the news is what they do.

Either the Fox report or Donald Trump’s own imagination led him to rant on social media about immigration. Soon after, we learned that the attacker was an American-born citizen. Trump’s rant included a false claim that immigrants pose a bigger crime problem than native-born Americans (research shows the opposite) and that crime in the United States is “at a level that nobody has ever seen before” (in fact, crime is falling and is nowhere near an all-time high).

Even when it was clear that the terrorist attacker was not an immigrant, Republican leaders kept talking about the border in the context of the attack, intent on erasing the facts with rhetoric. And the media’s tolerance for Republican dishonesty makes their disinformation all the more effective.

MSNBC said Trump "wouldn't admit he made a mistake in his initial post." But that was the wrong takeaway. It wasn’t a “mistake.” Instead of responsibly waiting for verified information, Trump spread disinformation to further his hate campaign against immigrants. Major media know this. Will they ever stop pretending that Trump makes honest mistakes when, in fact, his chief operating principle is to lie all the time?

Politico’s response to Trump’s lies was to cast him as a crime fighter, with a headline reading, “Trump talks tough on crime after attack.”

Fear-mongering is dangerous. People who are afraid make poor decisions. They surrender their rights in exchange for the promise of protection. History offers many examples of this, including one 92 years ago called the Reichstag Fire.

Yes, I’m talking about Germany in the time of the Nazis. And I know, Nazi comparisons seem unfair to some people. In deference to that, I promise to stop comparing MAGA to Nazis as soon as MAGA stops acting like Nazis. Right now, the echoes are loud. A radical leader has attempted a coup, received ridiculously lenient treatment, and come back to claim power. A rising fascist movement promotes violence, tells big lies, bans books, intimidates the media, and demonizes vulnerable minority groups with absurd smears. But so far in America, there has not been a Reichstag Fire.

In February 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler was named chancellor, arson struck the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament. To this day, it’s unclear who set the fire. A lone-wolf Dutch construction worker arrested near the scene? The Nazis? In any case, the Nazis exploited the incident by lying that the fire was part of a communist attack on the government. That led to the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended the right to assembly and freedom of speech as well as other constitutional protections. Dictatorship followed.

We’re about to see a blatantly dishonest Republican Party assume sweeping power through an election just four years after it tried to retain power through violence and law-breaking. Trump has selected election-denying toadies such as Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to take charge of law enforcement. If there is another terrorist attack, can we count on Republicans to accurately identify the perpetrators? Can we be sure Republicans won’t seize upon a Reichstag Fire to gain public acceptance of authoritarian measures? No, we cannot.

In fact, Republicans invent enemies all the time. When Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating the dogs and cats of Springfield, Ohio, it wasn’t just a silly distraction from real issues. It was a dramatic fabrication designed to make gullible white people think dark-skinned foreigners were out to ruin their version of America. The right wing has built an entire fear industry around immigration, including the great replacement theory, the racist idea that leftists are bringing in immigrants, especially those of color, in a scheme to “replace” the culture of white people.

Of course, neither the Nazis nor Trump invented hype and abuse of power. American history is full of official falsehoods to justify government overreach. The George W. Bush administration’s hoax about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction served as a pretext for a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. And a century earlier, the supposed mining of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor pushed the country toward the Spanish-American War. Many historians now believe the explosion was caused by a design flaw that caused a fire in the ship’s coal bunker, not by a Spanish mine. But the mine theory was convenient to American conquest.

If a new Reichstag Fire happens, or a new battleship Maine explosion, journalism will be vital. There will be a temptation to accept the official version, as so many journalists did in the run-up to the Iraq war.

A national crisis, real or imagined, will not be the time to accept Republicans’ version of reality. It will be time for the media and the American people to ask questions and demand answers – to be ruled by documented facts, not panic and paranoia.