Back in 2017, I posted about a six-minute documentary A Night at the Garden that used archival footage about a rally that American Nazis held at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. Billed as a ‘Pro American Rally’, it was attended by 20,000 people and is truly chilling to watch because it looked like it could have been made in Nazi Germany by famed Nazi propagandist film maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Donald Trump had a rally on Sunday evening at the same venue and the speakers are making the same kind of appeals to white Americans to ‘take back their country’. The speeches of the early speakers tell you that they have all got into the spirit of the 1939 event..

Trump’s warm-up speakers appeared to feel particularly emboldened to take shots at Latinos and African Americans at the rally, in an apparent attempt to copy the former president.

From the very first speaker, Tony Hinchcliffe, the host of the Kill Tony podcast, there was a push to stoke racial animus. Latinos “love making babies … there’s no pulling out. They come inside, just like they do to our country.”

He added: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The radio host Sid Rosenberg leaned into attacking Democrats, using ad hominem slurs to describe Hillary Clinton – a villain to Trump supporters who lapped it up.

“Hillary Clinton. What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking party. A bunch of degenerates. Lowlives, Jew-haters and lowlives. Every one of ‘em. Every one of ‘em,” Rosenberg said.

And Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who lost his prime time perch in the wake of the network getting sued for defamation over promulgating false 2020 election fraud claims, went after Kamala Harris.

“As the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ, former California prosecutor to ever be elected president,” Carlson falsely said in a mocking tone of Harris’s racial background. “No, she’s not impressive.”

And of course, creepy Trump gave his usual tirade.

Jon Schwarz described the background to the documentary about the 1939 event.

On its surface, it’s simply about a rally held by the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan.
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The main speaker is Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized German immigrant and head of the Bund. On the one hand, everything about him screams that he’s a buffoon and a grifter. He declares they are there “to demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it” in a heavy accent that makes him sound exactly like Adolf Hilter.
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The next day the New York Times reported that the Bund had raised almost $8,500, the equivalent of about $150,000 now. Later that year Kuhn was convicted of embezzling all that and more — $250,000 in today’s money — from his devoted followers.

The parallels to creepy Donald Trump, of a grifter swindling his followers using xenophobic and racist rhetoric, is uncanny.

Schwarz continues:

[E]verything captured inside Madison Square Garden appears to have been shot by the Bund itself. The staging is done so skillfully it seems certain they had studied Nazi Germany’s cinematography.
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Several years after the events of “A Night at the Garden,” [journalist Dorothy] Thompson contributed a famed article to Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” In it she describes a “macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.”

“Nazism,” Thompson said, “has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. … The frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi.”

The veneer that creepy Trump and his acolytes put on that they are not Nazis, always a thin coat, is disappearing rapidly.