They didn't know because the press didn't tell them

My Sunday movie was The Boy Next Door, a Korean comedy. It was recommended by Krotor of the Boys Love column at Daily Kos. The video (at least the version with English subtitles) is embedded at the bottom of the Boys Love post that describes it. The film is a series of 15 episodes now as one 1:35 film. Kyutae and Gijae live in adjacent efficiency apartments. They meet on the outdoor hallway between the two. They frequently get into situations that, when an outsider sees them, they appear to be a gay couple. There’s a fire in Kyutae’s apartment and the landlord asks him to move in with Gijae and will cut the rent in half. They are Asia’s version of The Odd Couple. In spite of the perception the lads say they are straight. Gijae has been dating Mina, who is also a friend of Kyutae. She frequently sees them in the compromising positions. Krotor, in his review, said he laughed so hard his dogs howled along with him. He wrote a big source of the humor is the way this film keeps using and twisting the tropes that frequently appear in these sorts of stories (Krotor provides a link to an article where he discusses these tropes). I didn’t laugh as much (actually, barely at all), but I did grin through the whole thing. I guess the Korean sense of humor doesn’t translate so well. I did enjoy it. The news this evening included the report that Democrats in the Texas House are returning home, which means Republicans will be able to vote on their Congressional redistricting plan to give themselves five more seats. An Associated Press article posted to Kos reported last Thursday that California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proceeding with revising its maps to give Democrats several more seats. The California legislature is drawing new maps and will vote on them next week. They have a supermajority in both chambers. They will also vote to declare a special election (or is it a special proposal in the regular November election?) for the voters to approve the new maps. These maps will be good through the 2030 election when redistricting returns to the state’s independent commission. California has some of the most competitive House seats so gerrymandering them could be easy. Mike Luckovich posted a cartoon on Kos showing an elephant with one gun squaring off with a donkey with two guns for a redistricting fight. The elephant says, “Wait, you’re only supposed to bring a knife!” Thom Hartmann of the Kos community and an independent pundit did a specific comparison of the US now and Germany in the Nazi era. We’ve heard about the deportation flight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Did you know there have been over 1,000 deportation flights? Did you know ICE is planning to open or expand 125 detention facilities, including ones to hold families? This expansion will give the US the largest prison system in the world? Well, did you know? Don’t feel bad if you didn’t. I didn’t either. Hartmann then discussed a good German friend, who was a part of Hitler Youth when WWII ended. Hartmann asked him how Germans were okay with Nazis shipping millions of Jews to death camps. The answer was simple: “We didn’t know.” They were told the camps were for the worst criminals. They were told the innocent Jews were being resettled to make room for urban renewal projects. They were shocked at the images when Americans liberated the concentration camps. They didn’t know the truth because the press didn’t tell them. That’s because...

By the end of 1933, Hitler had largely neutered Germany’s free press; not by market competition, but by bankrupting writers and outlets with libel lawsuits, unleashing police raids for “slander” claims, vigilante “Brownshirt” militia violence against reporters, arrests of publishers for “publishing anti-German propaganda,” the outright seizure of progressive newspapers, and a sweeping Schriftleitergesetz “Editor’s Law” which criminalized journalism that exposed government excesses. Nazi loyalists and party-friendly oligarchs took over the press outlets that remained in a massive media consolidation project, ensuring that every headline and every radio news report served the regime much like Fox “News” and rightwing hate-radio/podcasts do today for Trump. ... There were literally no public reports in Germany about mass killings or illegal detentions between 1934 and the end of the war in 1945.

Both then and now the public is shielded from the magnitude of state-led oppression of targeted groups. That allows the “policies to continue without mass pushback.” Those 1,000 deportation flights – Hartmann, a voracious consumer of news, didn’t know. In 1944 the Nazis created a slick PR film about the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Things looked great. The foreign press assumed all the camps looked that nice and bought the propaganda. How long before we see Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi star in films telling us how “humane” those tent cities in 100F heat are? In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic. I’ll repeat part of the quote.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. ... The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

Eugene Daniels of MSNBC discussed Democrats leaving Texas:

It's too soon to tell whether any of this will stop the brazen Republican plan to keep power in the House amid polls showing GOP lawmakers are massively unpopular. But it has already succeeded at the real goal, which was to help voters realize what Republicans are attempting, understand the stakes and know that Democrats are trying to do something to stop it. The spectacle wasn't a tactic; it was the whole point. It's a lesson that Democrats have been slow to learn since President Donald Trump's first term, but one that may finally be breaking through. [...] That Texas grit has proved to be catching. As Democrats have rallied around the stand those dozens of state lawmakers have taken, they have decided to fight fire with fire, or at least talk about it that way. Instead of shaking their fingers at Trump and Texas Republicans for calling a special session to gerrymander, they've threatened their own. And that's really how spectacles change things. They grab voters' attention, which gives politicians a mandate to go further. That can happen even with politicians who aren't known for taking bold stances, as when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul threatened to have the state do its own gerrymandering. And it helps make an idea mainstream. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, two politicians who are fairly obviously thinking about presidential runs one day, both jumped on the issue.

In the comments paulpro posted a cartoon by Weyant showing a worker at Subway asking, “Is this to stay, to go, or to protest authoritarian military occupation?” Further down in the comments are two cartoons by Toonerman showing the nasty guy saying “Democrat controlled state’s crime is out of control! I need to send in my Army!” Toonerman points out that “8 of the top 10 highest murder rates are these red states,” pointing to Mississippi, Louisiana (where Speaker Mike Johnson is from), Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. The two Democratic states in the top ten are New Mexico and Maryland. In today’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor of the Guardian:

US administration goes from severe consequences on Russia if no ceasefire was agreed to Rubio on Meet the Press shutting down the option indefinitely. “I don't think new sanctions on Russia are going to force him to accept the ceasefire. They're already under very severe sanction.”

Shashank Joshi, defense editor of The Economist, added:

Extraordinary to see negotiators systematically destroy their own leverage at every turn.

Here are some numbers to go with Hartmann’s article above, which shows some of what Hartmann says is being hidden is getting to the public. Even so, Hartmann’s overall message is accurate. From the Washington Post:

When President Donald Trump took office this year, the United States already commanded the largest immigrant detention system in the world, with the capacity to hold close to 50,000 migrants. Right away, his administration set a goal of doubling it. An internal planning road map obtained by The Washington Post shows for the first time exactly how immigration authorities plan to reach that goal, including by opening or expanding 125 facilities this year. By January, ICE will have the capacity to hold more than 107,000 people, internal agency documents show.

Jamie Dupree tweeted photos of National Guard troops around Washington’s Union Station and Lincoln Memorial, neither is a high crime area. A tweet by Jordan Fischer showed that within three days of the Washington police takeover local restaurant reservations dropped 31%. “It couldn't come at a worse time. D.C. Summer Restaurant Week starts... tomorrow.” Toonerman posted a cartoon of a pastor “At the Victory New Life Calvary Apocalyptic Evanpedocal Church” where the preacher is saying “Let us now whip out or King Trump edition Holy Buybull and open it to page 47, Pedophilians 34:4-7.” A meme posted by exlrrp shows what might be a pair of news anchors. One says:

In America you call it the alt right. In Germany we call it “why Grandpapa lives in Argentina now.”

Also posted by exlrrp is a Doonsbury cartoon (alas, the Detroit paper hasn’t carried him in a long time, one can forget it is still running). In this one (and I forget the character names) a woman is making dinner as she tells her husband that her aunt’s caretaker stopped coming in, the farm stand is closed in the middle of summer, the cafe had only one cook, and the hedges haven’t been trimmed. She says, “I wonder what’s going on.” He replies, “It’ll come to you.”