How we get back to Buchenwald

Edward R. Murrow vs. Kari Lake

Kari Lake, Republican candidate for Arizona governor

Once per week leading up to the mid-terms, I will focus on one individual member of the fascist menagerie of weirdos, criminals, wife abusers, liars, insurrectionists and conspiracy loons who have put themselves forward for high office and the life and death responsibilities that come with it.

So far, I’ve written about Herschel Walker and JD Vance, the California “Yale-billy.”

Time erases memories, not just in individuals, but within societies. It is astonishing that within the span of a single human lifetime one of the most famous and important voices of an era could fade to relative obscurity within a generation. It would have astonished Americans living in 1885 that the most famous man in the world, Ulysses Grant, a man who saved the Union, would at best ring a vaguely familiar bell for some Americans just two human lifetimes after his death.

The same is true of another American titan, though he died in 1965. His name was Edward Roscoe Murrow. He was a broadcast journalist. He was a truth teller in a world that was consumed by lies. He was a voice that the American people could trust in a moment of enormous consequence.

The collapse of trust in the American media is a result of the business decisions that destroyed Murrow’s ethic. Some say that the following is the greatest news broadcast in history. There were no pictures that accompanied the report. Only Murrow’s words. Close your eyes and listen to them. You will quickly move past the scratchiness of the recording, and be transported back to a relatively recent moment at a profoundly evil place. Below is Murrow’s report from Buchenwald. This is where the fascist road led.

The man describing the scene had chartered a plane to Vienna seven years earlier, as the Nazi Army rolled into Austria during the Anschluss of 1938. The justification for the Anschluss was a doctrine of racial purity that sought to unify Aryans and the Germanic people around a thousand-year Reich that promised freedom, prosperity and national greatness. His broadcast from Vienna was a historic occasion beyond its being a harbinger of the Second World War. It was Edward R. Murrow’s first live report, a multipoint broadcast of a live event over shortwave radio that reached seamlessly into millions of American homes. Here are the words that began the greatest career in modern American journalism.

“This is Edward R. Murrow, speaking from Vienna. It’s now nearly 2:30 in the morning and Herr Hitler has not yet arrived.”

Murrow surely could not have predicted the journey that would take him from Vienna to Buchenwald, but the American people could count on him to explain what was happening as the crisis grew into human civilization’s greatest test and catastrophe. Murrow was trusted because he earned trust.

Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. It seems an obvious point that the majority of America’s media mandarins are oblivious about. “This is London” meant something because the man delivering the news could be counted on to explain it, as well as trusted to deliver it. He built the greatest assemblage of broadcast journalists in world history. They illuminated the opaqueness, horror, truth and challenges of World War II. They looked over the edge of the abyss into the pit of tyranny, war, suffering and evil. They shared the experience without contempt, bombast, spin, exaggeration or a political agenda. They were truth tellers.

Listen to Murrow tell the truth about fascism before we jump forward into the present and talk about the political extremist, antisemite, deranged loon Kari Lake, the profoundly unfit MAGA nominee for governor of America’s 48th state, Arizona.

Listen to Edward R. Murrow describing Buchenwald:

If you are unable to listen to his news report, you can read it here.

Kari Lake is the fascist who just endorsed a religious fanatic and antisemite. Jarrin Jackson is a MAGA candidate in Oklahoma, who has repeatedly talked about his hatred of Jews and built his campaign around not being controlled by them. This is the type of candidate the crazed Lake finds irresistible, and can’t help reaching out to all the way from Arizona. After all, when someone sees a Nazi reaching for a hand up, who among us doesn’t want to help? Certainly not the election denier and delusionist Kari Lake.

That the loony Lake was a local news reader for so many years is not so much an astonishment as a confirmation. If “Idiocracy” turned out to be cinematic prophesy then Lake makes “Anchorman” appear like a dystopian Ken Burns documentary — one that future generations can use to chart the demise of reality as a general concept, buried under the weight of stupidity from the very worst people in a nation where there are 330 million eligible to compete.

Lake lacks the judgment and discernment to lead children safely across a street, let alone be the chief executive of an American state. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. If logic, gravity and common sense are to be defied with the election of the greatest buffoon possible from among the people of a state, and Mississippi and Alabama are ruled ineligible, that only leaves Arizona or Florida.

Arizona. The MAGA candidate who wants life and death responsibilities as governor just took the MAGA stage and regaled her audience. What did she talk about? What vision did she offer? What hope for a better future did she paint?

She talked about Donald Trump’s “dick,” while advancing American fascism under the MAGA banner.

The simple truth is this: Kari Lake is nuts. Her heart is full of menace, malice, anger and hate. She is also a weapons-grade imbecile.

The American states that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said were “laboratories of democracy” have become laboratories for extremism. That is what the contest in Arizona is about.

Kari Lake is an unfit political extremist, who has no business holding any position of public trust.

Kari Lake is easy to laugh at, but she shouldn’t be. She should inspire revulsion. She should inspire memories of Buchenwald.

National conservatism and national socialism are deeply related. The difference is that the national conservatives are just getting started. They are greatly benefitted by the lack of memory around what it is the national socialists believed.

They believed exactly what Viktor Orban preached in Dallas just a few short weeks ago. They believe in Hitlerism.

The difference between today and that era is that we lack a Murrow to explain it, and tell the common person what is happening.

“Calling Ed Murrow. Calling Ed Murrow.”

That was the old CBS contact call. When Murrow answered, the people got the truth. The truth and the lie were combatants in Murrow’s day — just like they are now. Kari Lake is a liar in a world with fewer truth tellers than is necessary.

Calling Ed Murrow, indeed.

During the report from Buchenwald, Murrow talked about the recently deceased Franklin Roosevelt. He talked about freedom and an American president. There isn’t a lot that is new to say about how terrible Trump is.

Listening to how great Roosevelt was, and the hope he inspired as a champion of freedom and liberty is spine-tingling stuff. That is, if the listener is an American patriot. American patriots love freedom.

Kari Lake is no patriot. She’s the precise opposite, and she should never hold power.

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Flip Arizona Blue: Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, is running against Lake for governor. Hobbs needs your help to flip Arizona blue. Take some initiative, volunteer, donate here, and get other people involved.