Trump's Fox & Friends Meltdown & House Republican's Attempt To Repeal Logan Act - Heather Cox Richardson

Trump and some of his people are afraid they are about to get outed as conspirators with Russian interests.

There was lots of mud in the water last week, but to my mind, the most notable things were Trump's meltdown when he called in to Fox & Friends on Thursday, and the next day's recommendation of the House Intelligence Committee that Congress repeal the Logan Act.

Taken together, they seem to me a pretty clear signal that Trump and some of his people are afraid they are about to get outed as conspirators with Russian interests, at least during the transition if not before.

The recommendation for repealing the Logan Act, coming from a committee that has been advocating for the president since the beginning, says more to me even than Trump's terrible habit of blurting out whatever is uppermost in his mind.

He is afraid Mueller's report will produce airtight evidence that he and his cronies conspired with Russia to win the 2016 election.

The full piece is available here 

No, Armed Jews Wouldn't Have Stopped Holocaust - Rabbi Jeff Salkin in Religion News

Jewish families surrender to the SS during the
suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943.

The idea that Jews with guns could have made any meaningful resistance against Nazi Germany and its genocidal crimes is the cruelest, most cynical, most ignorant alternative fact there is. It is an insult to the memory of the 6 million Jews who died in the holocaust.

There is an obscene suggestion that anti-gun control activists like to make: If the Jews had had guns, they could have prevented the Holocaust.

We know why they utilize these arguments. They are eager to use any argument, no matter how fallacious, that will suit their political purposes. 

But the idea that Jews with guns could have made any meaningful resistance is the cruelest, most cynical, most ignorant alternative fact there is. It is an insult to the memory of the 6 million Jews who died in the holocaust.

Yes, there were Jews who rose up in armed resistance against the Nazis. Though the stories of Jewish resistance militias are legendary, and all of these actions were heroic, they were also, alas, failures.

It's not realistic to think that, even if every German Jew was armed, that they would have been able to stand up against an army that would decimate the armies of France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Yugoslavia, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, Austria, Greece — and that would invade the Soviet Union and get within 70 km of Moscow.

And beside that, it was not just the Nazi armies that were arrayed against the Jews. It was the entirety of German society — its universities, its medical profession, its industrialists, its scientists. The Nazis had willing, eager and enthusiastic helpers in central and eastern Europe.

The full article is available here

Fact-Checking The Hitler/Gun-Control Analogy - Jeff Wiersma

Outside Germany, armed Jewish resistance to the Nazis merely underlined its futility, and the fatuity of the claims of anti-gun control activists. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the Spring of 1943 ended with 13,000 Jews dead, while the Nazis who crushed it lost just 20 lives.

Anti-gun control advocates are fond of suggesting that gun control enabled the rise of the Nazis and led to the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

Let's investigate some fact-checking done on this assertion.  First, let's turn to the work that Politifact did in response to this kind of assertion made by then-Presidential candidate Republican Ben Carson in October 2015. 

"While Hitler did attempt to take weapons away from Jews, Communists and Social Democrats, he also armed private citizens to better terrorize those same political opponents. To reduce Nazi gun policy to confiscation of weapons is to miss at least half the story.

Further, the gunowner registry from 1928 that Hitler relied upon was limited and far from comprehensive.  It was so incomplete, in fact, that many Jews retained their weapons.   

Dagmar Ellerbrock, an expert on German gun policies at the Dresden Technical University, states that, 'In my records, I found many Jews who well into the late 1930s possessed guns.'"

Next, let's look at some fact-checking The Telegraph did in response to the same assertion.

"Even if arms had been distributed to every member of Germany's Jewish population — which in the early 1930s numbered some 500,000 out of a total population of 65 million — they would have been severely outgunned by their vicious and far more numerous enemies. 

Outside Germany, armed Jewish resistance to the Nazis merely underlined its futility, and the fatuity of Carson's call to arms. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising in the Spring of 1943 ended with 13,000 Jews dead, while the Nazis who crushed it lost just 20 lives."

Somehow Trump Still Enjoys Support Of 80% of White Evangelicals - Amy Sullivan

Trump owes his continued high standing among white evangelicals to the Moral Majority’s decades of fear-mongering about Democrats and religious liberals.

Generations of white evangelicals have been conditioned to see evangelicalism as so synonymous with Republican politics that the idea of a non-Republican political option for religious voters simply does not exist.

Mr. Trump owes his continued high standing among white evangelicals to the fact that nearly 40 years after the Moral Majority’s founding, the partisan meld is complete. Decades of fear-mongering about Democrats and religious liberals have worked.

It feels like it has gotten to the point where 80% of white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as a Democrat.

Generations of white evangelicals have been conditioned to see evangelicalism as so synonymous with Republican politics that the idea of a non-Republican political option for religious voters simply does not exist.

The messages that have steadily cemented white evangelicals within both the Republican Party and the churches that marry traditionalist theology with Republican politics are so ingrained that - even those conservatives intellectually attuned and honest enough to lament the current state of American evangelicalism - can’t help reinforcing them.

The full article is available here