The Nazi Forefather Of Fox News (And The Rest Of Conservative Media)
History Has An Echo
This past year I read the book Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer. As I read it, it was impossible not to see the parallels between this horrible man’s techniques and actions in spreading antisemitism in Germany and the output of Fox News and their conservative media cohorts (Newsmax, One America News, the Washington Times, the Daily Caller, right-wing radio, and all of their cohorts).
Streicher was so dangerous and effective that he was convicted for the crime of inciting genocide at the Nuremberg trials and was executed via hanging in 1946. Unlike the better known Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Streicher was not a part of the official Nazi leadership and was kept at an arms length by Adolf Hitler.
But Hitler loved Streicher’s newspaper, Der Stürmer (The Stormer/Attacker) and encouraged its distribution throughout Germany. In fact, spreading the vile antisemitism in the paper was so important to the Third Reich that copies of the paper were put in town squares in glass enclosures to ensure that even those who did not subscribe to it would still be able to read its contents.
Certainly Streicher was not the first person in the world to spread hate. The Nazis learned so much about how to do what they did to Jewish people by studying what the American government has done to groups here at both the federal and local level by discriminating against Blacks, Latinos, Asians, LGBTQ, Jewish people and other groups. But Streicher used mass media to spread hate and demonization, publishing his newspaper from 1923 until Germany was smashed by the allies in 1945, working as a willful ally of the Holocaust that killed over 6 million innocent Jewish people.
The paper constantly hammered home the idea to readers that Jews were to blame for all of the problems in German society. Readers were told that despite what they may have personally experienced with good interactions with Jewish people in their daily lives, that nonetheless there was something wrong with these people and that they were constantly plotting to undermine and subvert German society.
Fox News does this all the time. Fox tells its viewers that the normal, traditional American life they love is under threat. Under threat from liberals, immigrants, transgender people, anyone who is even slightly different from the white, Christian, straight male that is the central target of Fox News programming. The network and the rest of the conservative media infrastructure sees this message as job one, every day and it is relentlessly on message in this respect.
“They” are always out to get you, conservative media tells viewers/readers/listeners, and to stop “them,” the right-wing media tells them they must vote and to be aware that “they” are also subverting the voting process if conservative candidates lose.
And like Der Stürmer the right-wing media frequently argues that hey, sometimes you have to bust a few heads to keep society clean. Sometimes that means encouraging police forces to be “rough” with criminals as Donald Trump said — and make no mistake, in the mind of most Fox viewers the criminal has black or brown skin, they aren’t white.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Der Stürmer was heavily interested in playing up crimes committed, or purportedly committed, by Jews in its pages. This is a good shorthand to tell a population how “they” are dangerous and definitely not like you, the fine upstanding white person, at all. Often Streicher’s paper would completely invent crimes to accuse people of, but like Fox they would also take great care to play up the lurid details of real crimes, repeatedly reminding their readers of the purported criminals Jewish background, no matter how tenuous that connection might be and unrelated to the crime.
Right now Fox News loves to talk about crimes allegedly involving transgender people, because they are the Fox villain of the moment (conveniently dovetailing with legislative attacks on transgender life by Republicans across the country). Never mind that sexual predators are far more likely to be straight white men than any other demographic, such thinking gets in the way of Der Stürmer — I mean, Fox News’ mission.
Der Stürmer became a victim of its own sickening “success,” because as Jews were mass murdered in Germany and German-held territories, it ran out of material to keep readers in an antisemitic fervor. It’s tough to blame Jewish people for your problems when they are literally not around anymore to supposedly cause them. The paper marched in lockstep with Hitler’s “final solution,” arguing that because of the supposed evil encased in the genetic code of Jewish people, the only way to help Germany was through their murder.
Conservative media is just a little more coy than Der Stürmer, and because of the negative connection with Nazism’s legacy, generally don’t call for killings. But to their audience they lead them right up to the line. They tell these people every day — and it is relentless — that the other is to blame. And at the same time Fox and their allies also extol the NRA-style virtues of gun ownership and violent resistance. It is not a coincidence that we have had multiple instances of conservatives making that connection, chosing violence either through mass shootings or attacking the Capitol.
For the official right-wing party organs, be they the Nazi Party or the Republican National Committee, they are able to maintain a veneer of respectability. For Hitler, official party publications and broadcasts did not express antisemitism in the same populist, mass appeal voice of Der Stürmer. It was far more high-minded in how it expressed hate, leaving Streicher to do the dirty ground work of whipping up the masses.
That’s also why you won’t see figures like Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy getting into the muck the way people like Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham will every night. Republican leaders in Congress will mouth words like “border security” while Carlson explains to his audience that Latino immigrants make America “dirtier.” They all know the roles they have to play in the system, just like Streicher and Hitler understood their place in the Nazi system.
Demonization paired with violence has over and over again wreaked havoc on mankind. In Europe, in Africa, in America. It must always be challenged, always countered, and never given aid and comfort.
Unfortunately the worst can happen right here and we need to learn history’s lesson: Never again.
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— Oliver
Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Twitter @owillis/Mastodon: @owillis@mastodon.online
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