On Thursday, a Manhattan auction house will be accepting bids on one of the more disturbing books to come onto the U.S. antiquarian book market in some time: Adolf Hitler’s personal copy of a city-by- city, state-by-state guide to the location of America’s Jewish population.
The book includes detailed data on towns like Peabody and Brookline, Massachusetts, the boroughs of New York City, as well as the farther-flung population clusters in states like Arizona, Arkansas, Minnesota and California. I t also provides details of several hundred Jewish organizations, including B’nai B’rith and the Anti- Defamation League, along with names of key individuals and their addresses.
In light of the Holocaust, it is a disquieting compendium.
The 137-page report, “Statistik, Presse und Organisationen des Judentums in den Vereinigten Staaten und Kanada” (Statistics, Media, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada), was compiled in 1944 by Heinz Kloss, a German linguist who specialized in minorities and visited the United States in the early 1930s.
Like many Nazi-era publications, the Kloss report, printed on cheap, highly acidic paper, is brittle and chipping. The cover, which bears a diagonal warning “For Official Use Only,” has become detached. On the verso is a bookplate with a stylized eagle perched on an oak branch clutching a laurel-wreathed swastika in its talons. It is framed, in bold-face type, “Ex Libris Adolf Hitler.”
The Hitler book was among the thousands taken by American G.I.’s from the Nazi leader’s alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden in the spring of 1945. Most have ended up in attics, basements and bookshelves across America. One of the more notable examples I have seen is Hitler’s personal copy of Shakespeare’s collected works, 10 volumes bound in fine Moroccan leather with a swastika and the letters AH embossed on the spine. On occasion, these war trophies find their way onto the antiquarian book market.
The Kloss report is being sold Thursday by Kestenbaum & Co., a Manhattan auction house that specializes, according to its Web page, in “fine Judaica” and “rare kosher and vintage wines.” The owner, Daniel Kestenbaum, observes that he would normally not auction a Hitler book, or any other object from the Nazi era for that matter, unless it related somehow to “the Jewish experience.”
“It is less about the bookplate or the owner and more about the book,” Kestenbaum said. He has estimated the sales price between $3,000 and $5,000. “I have been in this business since 1986. If I haven’t seen it before, it is rare.”
The price is rather high for a Hitler book. Most such volumes go for a few hundred dollars. But this particular volume, given its provenance and disturbing historical resonances, may be worth the price. The book underscores with stark statistical data how assiduous the Nazis were, even as late as 1944, in pursuing their goal of world domination as well as their designs for extending the geographic compass of the “final solution.” That such a volume found its way into Hitler’s personal library is as understandable as it is chilling.
“When a person gives they have to take,” Hitler once said. “And I take what I need from books.” Hitler was an obsessive reader from childhood, and his understanding of America was shaped in great part by his readings, in his youth, of the cowboy-and- Indian stories of the adventure novelist Karl May, and later in life of the anti-Semitic writings of Henry Ford. Hitler kept copies of Ford’s “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” on a table outside his office and included it in a list of books “every National Socialist should know.”
After reading “America in the Battle of the Continents,” a screed about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s alleged war mongering written by the German- ophilic Norwegian explorer Sven Hedin, Hitler sent the author a three-page letter thanking him for setting the record straight.
Hitler’s most valued book on America was “The Passing of the Great Race,” by a Columbia-educated eugenicist, Madison Grant, who claimed that American greatness, built on the Nordic stock of its founding fathers, was being eroded by the allegedly inferior blood of immigrant races. Hitler quoted liberally from Grant in his speeches and is said to have sent him a letter describing “The Passing of the Great Race” as “my bible.”
The Kloss report is a fitting addition to Hitler’s American reading list, but this particular book comes with a double-barbed moral hitch. What kind of price tag belongs on a book that would have, but for the defeat of the Nazis, provided a blueprint for the horrific consequences of similar data-collecting efforts across Europe? More problematic still, who would want to own such a book that was almost certainly perused and quite likely studied by Hitler during one of the ritual nocturnal reading sessions, usually with a cup of tea, in his upstairs study at the Berghof?
It would be best if the Kloss report were acquired by an individual or institution willing to donate it to a public collection, ideally, the Rare Books and Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress. There it could join 1,200 other surviving volumes from Hitler’s private library and not only be readily accessible to scholars and historians but also occupy appropriate shelf space with an equally sinister companion book from Hitler’s private book collection, a 1925 German translation of Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race,” bearing a personal inscription to Hitler.
Timothy W. Ryback is author of “Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life.”
The New York Times Published: Dec. 7, 2011
I was the target of a neo- Nazi ‘troll storm'
As told to Lois Beckett
Tanya Gersh was targeted by the ‘alt-right’ for being Jewish after getting caught up in the notoriety surrounding Richard Spencer. She tells Lois Beckett about the trauma of her experience and the antisemitism leveled at her.
The Guardian|20 April 2017
I came home one night and found my husband sitting in a completely dark house, and he had suitcases on the floor of our bedroom and he said: “Tanya I need you to pack, we need to go.”
“Where we going?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“How long are we going for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are we leaving right now?” And he said: “I don’t know. I think we should probably go wake the kids. I don’t think we should spend the night here tonight.”
He showed me the website on the computer. That was how I found out I was the target of a neo-Nazi “troll storm”.
The post on the Daily Stormer last December claimed I had been trying to extort and threaten the mother of Richard Spencer, a white nationalist whose family has a vacation home in our town. It had a photograph of me and contact information: phone numbers, email addresses, and links to social media profiles for me, my husband, my friends, my colleagues. It had my son’s Twitter handle. He is 12 years old.
“Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm?” Andrew Anglin, a neo- Nazi internet troll, asked his followers, talking about my family and me.
“Just make your opinions known. Tell them you are sickened by their Jew agenda,” he wrote. “And hey – if you’re in the area, maybe you should stop by and tell her in person what you think of her actions.”
I felt fear for my life – just fear, absolutely fear, for our lives. We had no idea what this meant. I had never heard of the Daily Stormer, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says is now “the most popular English- language website of the radical right”, a site with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.
My husband and I sat on our bed in our bedroom and cried, thinking: what are we supposed to say to the kids when we wake them? That we’re running in the middle of the night and could possibly be in the greatest of dangers?
Do we tell our children that we’re running in the middle of the night because we’re Jewish?
Ultimately, we decided to lock all the doors and shut all the shades and go to sleep and figure out what to do in the morning.
I had never, ever encountered antisemitism until Andrew Anglin launched his troll storm. Since December, I’ve received more than 700 threatening, hateful, harassing, antisemitic communications from Anglin’s followers at all hours of the day and night, and it hasn’t stopped.
I’ve been told: “You really should have died in the Holocaust with the rest of your people.”
Sometimes, when I answered the phone, all I heard were gunshots.
I’ve received emails, texts and voicemails threatening my life.
I was told I would be driven to the brink of suicide. There were endless references to being thrown in the oven, being gassed. There were even suggestions: “Call her up, get her to take you on a real estate tour and get her alone.”
I’m a realtor, but I’m no longer working. I can’t expose my clients to potential harassment. I’m in trauma therapy twice a week. Most nights I go to bed crying.
I broke when I realized that Anglin was also urging people to direct these attacks on my kids, my son. They made an image with photographs of me and my 12-year-old son on the entrance gate to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
My son is currently studying for his bar mitzvah right now, and devastation like this is so hard to describe.
I desperately worry for my son and my children. Can you imagine going through this as a child? Our dinner conversations at home now include assuring them that they don’t have to fear being Jewish.
Andrew Anglin and his troll army have attacked me and my family at the very essence of who we are.
I’m a small business owner in a beautiful mountain community. I’m a realtor now. I used to be a wedding planner. I just told someone recently that I think Whitefish, Montana, might be the best place on the planet. Healthy, clean living.
I’m not an activist. I’ve never been an activist. In my personal life, I’m a natural peacemaker, and my friends tend to call me when they have problems.
Especially after Richard Spencer hosted a conference in Washington DC and said: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!”, our little town grew very concerned. It’s natural for people in my community to reach out to me and say: “This is so scary, what do you feel about this?” People were mad, they were were scared. It’s important to understand: tourism, in our town, feeds our children. It was frightening for our town. There was talk of a protest of a building Spencer’s mother owned. I actually witnessed people stopping to take pictures of Sherry Spencer’s building and that was really alarming for me. I made phone calls to the tenants in the building, who were friends of mine. I was very concerned for them. I worried for their business and their safety.
One of the tenants gave my phone number to Sherry Spencer and I received a phone call from her and she said to me: “What do I do? I don’t believe in the ideology of my son. I know that me having this building is causing turmoil. What do I do?” And I said, if this were my son, if I were in this position, I would probably sell the building, I would donate some money to a human rights cause, and I would make a public statement that I don’t believe in the ideology of my son. And she said to me: “Thank you, Tanya, you’re right, that’s what I need to do. Can you help me?”
I truly believed her. She even gave me the code to her building, and said: “Please, go take a look inside, I really want you to see it.” All along I was thinking what I was doing was helping my community.
I was so touched by the situation and felt for her, so for me to end up on a Nazi website after this was so out of left field and so shocking.
I actually wanted to go to lunch with her. I wanted to be able to sit down with her, mother to mother, and send some love, which is why this is even more painful.
If the phone call were to happen all over again, there’s nothing I would have said differently. I felt like I had handled it exactly the way anyone would have handled it.
After I spoke with Sherry, I was so relieved that the situation was going to be resolved that I shared what she had told me on a Facebook group for local activists. You forget how public Facebook is, that people can take a screenshot of anything you post. I just wanted to say: ‘Look, ladies, this part is handled, don’t worry about it. Don’t go protest.’ I was just so happy that I may have been able to be part of a peaceful solution.
Then I heard from a local reporter who had seen the Facebook post. I kept telling him there’s no story here, there’s no story here. He published one anyway, about a town torn apart by Richard Spencer’s notoriety. Then, with no warning, Sherry Spencer published a post on Medium attacking me and telling a twisted version of our interactions. And the neo-Nazi trolls picked it all up.
My husband is a lawyer, and he has gone back to work now. There was a time when we shut down the office because our paralegals weren’t able to conduct regular business or even answer the phone. That has lightened enough that they can go back to work as usual, but it is important for everyone to know that the attacks have not stopped completely.
My friends used to call me the happiest person on Earth. I know I’m not the first person that Andrew Anglin has victimized, and I’m filing a lawsuit against him because he and his white nationalist followers terrorized me and my family for months, and my life is forever changed. My sense of safety is forever changed.
When you go to synagogue or are part of the Jewish community, you almost always say a prayer for the 6 million people who died in the Holocaust and you always say out loud: “Never again.” It’s something instilled in us since we were children in Hebrew school. There’s no way that I couldn’t stand up and file this lawsuit. It’s part of the core of who I am as a Jew, and everything that I’ve been taught.
I want other victims of this bigotry to know that they aren’t alone.
The Guardian Published: April 20, 2017
When the Nazis Tried to Exterminate Hollywood (Book Excerpt)
Decades before today’s white nationalist movement, "the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles" fought a plan to assassinate film stars and studio heads by hanging them in the streets.
By Steven J. Ross|Sept. 21, 2017
The Hollywood Reporter
In March 1934, Leon Lewis, a 44-year-old lawyer and former executive director of the Anti- Defamation League, invited 40 of Hollywood’s most powerful studio heads, producers and directors — men like Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and Jack Warner — to a secret meeting at Hillcrest, the elite Jewish country club in Cheviot Hills. For nearly a year, Lewis had used a network of spies (including the son of a Bavarian general) to keep tabs on Nazis and American-born fascists in Los Angeles. Some in the group knew a bit about what Lewis had been up to, but few knew the full extent of his work. As the group settled into the Club Room after dinner, Lewis rose to share what he had learned: Anti-Semites had invaded their studios. Foremen sympathetic to the Nazi and fascist cause had fired so many below-the-line Jewish employees that many studios had “reached a condition of almost 100 percent [Aryan] purity.” Scarier still, Lewis told them his spies had uncovered death threats against the moguls.
He pleaded with them for money to continue his operations so they could keep track of not only how the Nazis were trying to influence the studios but also their plans for sabotage and murder in Southern California. Would the moguls help?
Thalberg promised $3,500 from MGM. Paramount production head Emanuel Cohen matched it. RKO’s David Selznick contributed and said he would canvass the town’s talent agents for additional contributions. By the end of the evening, the group had pledged $24,000 ($439,000 in 2017 dollars) for the spy operation.
Lewis was elated. The money would allow him to recruit more spies and continue his undercover operations. “For the first time,” he wrote an ADL colleague, “we have established a real basis of cooperation with the Motion Picture Industry, and I look for splendid results.”
Over the next decade, until the end of World War II, Lewis, whom the Nazis called “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” used the money raised from Hollywood to recruit World War I veterans — and their wives and daughters — to spy on Nazi and fascist groups in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, this daring group of men and women foiled a series of Nazi plots — from hanging 24 Hollywood actors and power figures, including Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, to blowing up defense installations on the day Nazis planned to launch their American putsch.
Even though Nazi plans for murder and sabotage failed, as with today, we need to take this homegrown extremism seriously. Lewis certainly did. While local and federal officials were busy monitoring the activities of communists, his operatives uncovered enough evidence of hatred and plotting to be concerned about the fate of Los Angeles Jews and American democracy. Were it not for Lewis and his spies, these plots might have succeeded.
As he paced his downtown office on Seventh Street waiting to meet his first potential recruit in late July 1933, Lewis reflected upon the events that had led him to embark on a new career as spy master. On the evening of July 26, 100 Hitlerites, many dressed in brown shirts and sporting red, white and black swastika armbands, held their first public meeting at their spacious downtown headquarters in the Alt Heidelberg building. Hans Winterhalder, handsome propaganda chief of the Friends of the New Germany, told the crowd of plans to unify the 50 scattered German-American organizations of Southern California and their 150,000 members into one body. It had been seven months since Adolf Hitler had become the Reich’s chancellor of Germany in January 1933 and five months since Berlin had sent Capt. Robert Pape to Los Angeles to build a Nazi organization in the area.
For Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, no American city was more important than Los Angeles, home to what he deemed the world’s greatest propaganda machine, Hollywood. Although many people in the U.S. and around the globe viewed New York as the capital of Jewish America, Goebbels saw Hollywood as a far more dangerous place, one where Jews ruled over the motion picture industry and transmitted their ideas throughout the world. And Los Angeles seemed the perfect place to establish a beachhead for the Nazi assault on the U.S. Not only did Southern California have a long history of anti- Semitism and right-wing extremism, but the Los Angeles port also was less closely monitored than New York (or “Jew York,” as Nazis often referred to it), which made it easier to use as the central depot for sending spies, money and secret orders from Germany.
What really frightened Lewis was a small paragraph in a Los Angeles Record story about the rally describing how Los Angeles-based Nazis had turned the Alt Heidelberg basement into a barracks for unemployed Germans who would be fed, bathed and housed at no cost other than being instructed in National Socialism. Lewis understood that this was not done out of kindness. The Nazis were raising an army from among the unemployed and discontented, especially targeting veterans, just as Hitler had done in the 1920s to fuel his rise.
There was little in Lewis’ background to suggest that the modest Midwesterner, 6-foot-1 with light brown eyes and black hair, would come to this. After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School in 1913, Lewis, committed to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam (world repair), became the ADL’s first national executive secretary. In 1923, after serving in World War I, he added the ADL’s international division to his portfolio, and keeping track of Hitler and the threat he posed to Jews became an obsession. Within days of the local Nazis’ first meeting, Lewis, convinced American authorities were too obsessed with communists to take the Nazi threat seriously, started his spy operation from his small downtown law office.
His initial recruits to his spy ring included an unlikely array of non-Jews. He wanted experienced soldiers (and their wives) who would not be prone to fear or exaggeration so government agencies could not accuse Lewis of engaging in Jewish paranoia. First to join was John Schmidt, the German-born son of a Bavarian general who had moved to the U.S. around 1903, joined the Army and been wounded in World War I. After Lewis appealed to his patriotism and promised the cash-strapped veteran a modest monthly stipend, Schmidt — who operated under the code names Agent 11, 74 and Elf — agreed to pose as a Nazi sympathizer, and his wife, Alice (Agent 17), joined him, becoming president of the FNG’s Ladies Auxiliary. Others followed, including Charles Slocombe, a former Long Beach KKK member who penetrated deep into the leadership ranks of the Klan and fascist groups like the anti-Semitic American National Party, Silver Shirts and the American Labor Party’s military wing, the Lode Star Legion. Lewis also enlisted Neal Ness, an engineer turned journalist turned spy who became the American right-hand man and confidant to FNG leader Herman Schwinn.
As millions of Americans prepared to welcome in the New Year on Dec. 31, 1935, Slocombe warned Lewis of an outrageous plot to assassinate a number of Hollywood’s leading figures. Ingram Hughes, a failed attorney and founder of the ANP, was working closely with local Nazi leader Schwinn to rid the nation of its “Jewish menace.” The 60-year-old fascist planned to assassinate 20 prominent Angelenos, including Busby Berkeley, Superior Court judge Henry M. Willis, entertainment lawyer Mendel Silberberg and Lewis himself. “Busby Berkeley will look good dangling on a rope’s end,” the ANP leader quipped. Hughes hoped the hangings would spark a nationwide uprising against Jews. He recruited Nazi propagandist Franz Ferenz (distributor of German films and newsreels on the West Coast), four Nazis from the FNG and several other trusted accomplices.
This was no hasty killing fantasy but a carefully planned terrorist plot. To hide their identities, he ordered the kidnappers to wear cotton gloves and heavy wool socks over their shoes. “Every man will have a perfect alibi,” Hughes explained, and “several weeks will be spent in developing the minutest details to the nth degree.” The police, Hughes’ friends on the force had assured him, “will not interfere but will give a sigh of relief.”
Lewis knew all this because Slocombe had penetrated the ANP. Lewis’ spy impressed Hughes at their first meeting when he insisted the KKK and Silver Shirts “were not militant enough” and that he “wanted to have action and not a lot of talk.” The 28-year-old Long Beach water-taxi driver soon became the fascist’s most valued assistant.
Hughes’ slaughtering of Jews did not proceed as planned. He and Schwinn suspected that Lewis’ spies had penetrated the operation; they just did not know who was spying for the Jews and did not wish to risk being arrested for murder until the traitor was revealed. “We must watch our step as we proceed,” Hughes confided to Slocombe. Fearing Lewis’ reach, Hughes postponed the killings.
Another plot surfaced a year later, hatched by the British fascist Leopold McLaglan, the estranged brother of 1936 Oscar winner Victor McLaglen (Leopold changed the spelling to differentiate from his brother). The 53-year-old World War I veteran had turned to teaching martial arts to rich Californians and Nazis (he had once taught at Scotland Yard) after his brother blackballed him from acting. Schwinn’s crowd loved McLaglan; not only had he built a fascist organization in England, but he was teaching Nazis and White Russians “how to kill through jiujitsu.” Soon after they met in September 1937 at the Nazi-run German Day Celebration (which attracted a crowd of 3,000), McLaglan invited Slocombe, longtime fascist Henry Allen and prominent Hollywood photographer and Silver Shirts leader Ken Alexander to dinner at his favorite restaurant, the House of Sullivan. Over Tom Collinses and scotch and sodas, McLaglan shared his “bloody good idea.” And bloody it was. To garner “worldwide publicity, we are going to have to do a wholesale slaughtering here in the city of plenty of the leading Jews.” He planned on targeting Jewish studio execs, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Christians who aided them. “I can get the Nazi boys and the White Russians who would do this for us,” he promised. White Russian leader George Doombadze, he added, has a “psycho” fellow “who does this stuff for him all the time.”
Slocombe sent Lewis 24 names on McLaglan’s killing list, which included some of the most famous people in the world, including Cantor, Chaplin, Goldwyn, Jolson, Jack Benny, James Cagney, Fredric March, Paul Muni, Joseph Schenck, B.P. Schulberg, Gloria Stuart, Sylvia Sidney, Donald Ogden Stewart, Walter Winchell and William Wyler. As they reviewed the hit list, McLaglan revealed he had spoken to FNG leader Schwinn about the assassination plot “many times.” Schwinn told McLaglan that his Nazi allies “were particularly interested in eliminating” the key leaders of the Anti-Nazi League.
Boasting that he “could get all the dynamite he needed through the police,” McLaglan would provide two dozen Nazi and Russian assassins with the bombs and the names and addresses of their targets, all
of whom would be murdered on the same night. Knowing that they would likely fall under suspicion, McLaglan suggested they spend the night of the killings in Santa Barbara to have “a perfect alibi.”
The plot unraveled when Slocombe convinced Allen and Alexander that McLaglan planned a double-cross in which he would pin the murders on them. So they double-crossed first, striking a deal with District Attorney Buron Fitts: sworn statements implicating McLaglan in return for immunity. Evidence in hand, the police arrested McLaglan on Oct. 26, 1937; but instead of charging him with attempted murder, the D.A.’s office covered up police involvement in the murder plot by charging the British fascist only with extorting money from millionaire Philip Chancellor (who had hired McLaglan to conduct an undercover operation). When the trial began six weeks later, McLaglan, dressed in a dapper suit and sporting a monocle, pleaded not guilty, but a jury found him guilty of extortion. Sentenced to five years in prison, McLaglan received probation on the condition that he take the first ship back to England.
Having saved Hollywood Jews a second time, Lewis and his spies turned to getting Schwinn deported. In September 1938, armed with evidence provided by Lewis and Ness, the U.S. Department of Naturalization and Immigration began steps to revoke Schwinn’s citizenship. Nine months later, federal judge Ralph Jenny ruled that Schwinn had perjured himself by providing false information on his application for citizenship. Although Schwinn told the court he had made “an honest mistake,” the judge, insisting that the Nazi was not of “good moral character,” revoked his citizenship. Two hours later, Lewis’ informant Jimmy Frost gave him more good news: The immigration service had begun deportation proceedings against the Nazi.
Despite their success, Lewis and his spies never received the recognition they deserved. It was not until after Pearl Harbor that the communist-obsessed FBI acted against Nazi spies. In the days and weeks after the attack on Dec. 7, 1941, J. Edgar Hoover’s men received nationwide acclaim for the speed and efficiency with which they rounded up Axis spies and fifth columnists. Yet, as Lewis’ assistant Joseph Roos later noted, the Los Angeles FBI “had scant security information of their own.” Government intelligence agents simply retyped the list of suspected German agents and subversive fifth columnists sent by Lewis and claimed it as theirs. As far as the FBI was concerned, its job was done. On Oct. 3, 1942, the L.A. bureau filed what it believed was its last report on Schwinn: “As no further investigation is contemplated … this case is being closed.”
The FBI may have closed its case on Schwinn and the Bund, but Lewis knew that the fifth-column movement remained alive and that hatred of Jews had grown stronger since Pearl Harbor. With the FBI focused on rounding up suspected foreign agents, it was up to him to expose any threats to the city’s Jewish community. Over the next several years, he relied on the mother-daughter spy team of Grace and Sylvia Comfort to keep tabs on — and foil the plots of — anti-Semites. One member of the California Women’s Republican Club told Sylvia Comfort that all Jews should be “hung from lampposts within five years,” while another complained, “that was too slow.” Knowing it would take only one crazy person to carry out these threats, Lewis and his operatives continued watching over the city with an eye to protecting Jews from Nazis and anti-Semites.
There are many ways to fight an enemy, not all of which require guns. The actions taken by Lewis and his allies require us to change the way we think about American Jewish resistance in the 1930s. From August 1933 until the end of World War II, with few resources at their disposal, Lewis and his courageous undercover operatives ontinually defeated a variety of enemies — Nazis, fascists and f ifth columnists — bent on violence and murder. Without ever firing a weapon, they managed to keep Los Angeles and its citizens safe.
Lewis and the men and women who aided him were heroes who never sought glory. He died of a heart attack at age 65 in 1954 mostly unrecognized, except by a few, and what happened faded from memory.
In the wake of recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the rise of neo-Nazi activities across the country, Lewis’ story offers a guide to what happens when hate groups move from the margins into the mainstream of American society and when an American government seems complacent or, as some would argue, complicit. Lewis understood that democracy requires constant vigilance against all enemies, internal and external. He and his network of spies showed that when a government fails to stem the rise of extremists bent on violence, it is up to every citizen to protect the lives of every American, no matter their race or religion. Only in a “unified America,” he said after the war, could the nation and its citizens achieve the true “realization of the American democratic ideal.”
A second Trump administration will ‘come after’ people in the media in the courts, an ally says
Associated Press Dec. 5, 2023 By MICHELLE L. PRICE
NEW YORK (AP) — A Donald Trump ally who worked in his Justice Department said Tuesday that if the former president is elected again, his administration will retaliate against people in the media “criminally or civilly.”
Kash Patel, who was also chief of staff in the Defense Department and held a role on the National Security Council, made the comment on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He said that, in a second Trump administration, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media,” over the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed the election was stolen, despite the fact that numerous federal and local officials, a long list of courts, top former campaign staffers and even his own attorney general have all said there is no evidence of the fraud he alleges. Trump has also promised “retribution” as a central part of his campaign message as he seeks a second term in the White House.
Trump’s campaign distanced itself from Patel’s comments, saying that proclamations “like this have nothing to do with” them. The campaign did not respond to questions about whether Trump is considering the plans Patel described.
“You mean like they’re using right now?” Trump responded to one question, alleging that the Biden administration was abusing power.
Patel is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank that is part of a network of conservative groups that is preparing for a possible second White House term for Trump or any conservative who aligns with their views.
In his interview with Bannon, Patel said: “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Trump has long targeted the media, labeling news organizations as “Fake News” and the “Enemy of the People,” a phrase linked to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
In a post on his Truth Social network in September, Trump repeated both phrases and vowed to investigate NBC News and MSNBC for “Country Threatening Treason” and try to curb their access to the airwaves.
“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events,” Trump said in the post. “Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country.”
Patel was a guest at Trump’s kickoff for his 2024 presidential campaign last year at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. In June, he attended Trump’s speech at his Bedminster resort following the former president’s appearance in court on federal charges he mishandled classified documents.
In the interview, Bannon suggested Patel might be a possible director of the CIA if Trump wins another term.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether Patel was being considered for a role as CIA director.
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