Tag Archives: americans

Rick Santorum Just Defended Donald Trump’s Plan to Ban Muslims From Traveling to the US

by AileenBrodney3 Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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In what could be his final appearance on the GOP debate stage this election cycle, Rick Santorum (who’s polling at 0.3 percent, which is second to last) ramped up his rhetoric on Muslims and terrorism. “We have entered World War III!” he declared.

Asked about Donald Trump’s widely condemned proposal to ban Muslims from traveling to the United States, Santorum set himself apart from his undercard rivals by defending the GOP front-runner. “What Donald Trump was saying was nothing against Muslims,” Santorum claimed, faulting President Barack Obama for Trump’s position.

“The fact of the matter is that not all Muslims are jihadists,” Santorum said. “No one—including, I suspect, Donald Trump—would say that. But the reality is all jihadists are Muslims. That’s a reality, and we have to stop worrying about offending some people and start defending all Americans.”

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Rick Santorum Just Defended Donald Trump’s Plan to Ban Muslims From Traveling to the US

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6 Signs the NRA Is Losing Its Stranglehold on Gun Policy

by ChristiBriley Posted on December 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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For gun control advocates, this year’s doom has been compounded by an ample dose of gloom. Even after a series of high-profile mass shootings and a reported death toll from gun violence topping 12,000 last year, Congress remains deadlocked and unlikely to pass any laws aimed at reducing gun deaths.

But beneath the morass of bad news are glimpses of progress. In schools, communities, states, and even in the federal government, people are taking action to curb the gun violence epidemic. Here are six areas in which gun control is actually advancing in America.

1. The Supreme Court opted not to expand Second Amendment protections.

On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case that could have cemented an even wider interpretation of the Second Amendment into national law. The decision came less than a week after shooters in San Bernardino, California, used semi-automatic weapons to slaughter 14 people at an office party in what the FBI is now investigating as an act of terrorism.

In the case, the Illinois branch of the National Rifle Association argued that a Chicago suburb’s ban on semi-automatic weapons and high-capacity magazines violated the Second Amendment. Although there was no official ruling, the court’s decision to turn down the case effectively affirmed the lower court’s decision not to expand Second Amendment protections—thereby opening the door to further local regulation.

In its last two gun cases, in 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court had significantly expanded the reach of the Second Amendment. In 2008, the court overturned a ban on handguns in the District of Columbia; in 2010, it did the same for a handgun ban in Chicago.

Now, by contrast, the court may be indicating that the much-contested right to bear arms should have its limitations.

2. States are taking action.

The court’s decision looks even more significant in light of the fact that state governments are already taking many of the steps that Congress won’t.

In the year following the tragic 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, eight states passed major gun reform laws. The momentum has continued into 2015: Voters in Washington state last month resoundingly approved universal background checks for gun purchases, and several states have moved to restrict domestic abusers’ access to firearms.

Next November, Nevada residents will also vote on a background-check initiative, which made it onto the state ballot with the support of Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. In California, which already has some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country, a gubernatorial candidate is working to put even tighter legislation on the ballot.

Want to see how your own state ranks on gun control? The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has created this handy scorecard.

3. Most Americans, including gun owners, support some degree of gun control.

Congress may not be able to come to a productive compromise, but Americans do agree on some key gun control policies. A survey last month found that a striking 83 percent of gun owners, including many NRA members, support requiring all prospective gun buyers to undergo a background check. A Gallup poll released in October—after the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon but before last week’s attack in Sen Bernardino—found that 55 percent of Americans favored stricter control of gun sales.

Support for gun control has traditionally peaked following mass shootings, only to subside later. Recent polls suggest that fear of terrorism has edged out fear of guns in the popular psyche—despite the fact that jihadist terrorists have killed just 45 people in the United States since September 11, 2001, compared with the more than 12,000 people killed last year alone by gun violence.

4. More and more people say gun violence should be researched as a public health issue.

Last Wednesday, mere hours before the attack in San Bernardino, 2,000 doctors publicly urged Congress to repeal an amendment that has blocked government research on gun violence for nearly two decades.

The so-called Dickey Amendment was propelled through Congress by Republican legislators in 1996 under pressure from the NRA. Due to the provision, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health have been unable to put any federal funds toward gun violence research, leaving attempts to curb gun violence hogtied by a lack of information.

But opposition to the amendment is growing. Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate have appealed for a return to federal gun violence research in recent months. Even the amendment’s author, former Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), has publicly called for it to be overturned.

5. Schools across the country are talking to their students about guns.

Tens of thousands of students across the country have signed their names to an anti-gun-violence pledge this year, promising not to bear arms at school and to resolve conflicts by nonviolent means.

The pledge was born in the mid-1990s, when creator Mary Lewis Grow realized that the conversation about gun violence rarely reached the nation’s youth. Determined to change that, she founded the Student Pledge Against Gun Violence in 1996. It enjoyed a decade of popularity before fading from public view.

Widespread dismay at the lack of government action following the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary rekindled interest in the pledge, Grow told gun news website The Trace. “I think people started looking for other ways to address gun violence,” she said. Students in at least five states have taken the pledge this year, including 59,000 in Georgia and 21,000 in Louisiana.

The pledge goes as follows: “I will never bring a gun to school. I will never use a gun to settle a personal problem or dispute. I will use my influence with friends to keep them from using guns to settle disputes. My individual choices and actions, when multiplied by those of young people throughout the country, will make a difference. Together, by honoring this pledge, we can reverse the violence and grow up in safety.”

6. Gun control is now firmly part of our national debate.

President Barack Obama now calls for gun control legislation after every major shooting. The New York Times last week published a pro-gun-control editorial on its front page—its first page-one editorial since 1920. And while she shied away from the issue eight years ago, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has made curbing gun violence a central plank in her 2016 platform.

America’s gun violence crisis has clearly made its way into the highest levels of our national debate. What comes of that debate remains to be seen, but a whopping $229 billion a year—and, more important, thousands of lives—depend on it.

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6 Signs the NRA Is Losing Its Stranglehold on Gun Policy

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Americans Seem to Have Given Up on Retirement Plans

by OpheliaSlattery Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This chart gets filed under things that leave me scratching my head. It’s from a survey published in the latest EBRI newsletter, and it shows how much people value certain kinds of job benefits. Health coverage is #1, unsurprisingly. But the perceived importance of retirement benefits has plummeted over the past couple of decades. This applies to both traditional pensions and 401(k) plans. Retirement benefits are still considered “very important” or “extremely important” by three-quarters of those surveyed, but fewer than half rank retirement benefits as one of the two most important benefits. That compares to nearly 90 percent who did so in 1999.

I’m really not sure what to make of this. Is it because Americans have given up on retirement plans they think are too cheap to make much difference? Do lots of Americans not plan to retire, for either good or bad reasons? Do they think Social Security will be sufficient? None of these explanations makes much sense. But what does?

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Americans Seem to Have Given Up on Retirement Plans

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Vandalized Mosques, Threats of Violence—Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes on the Rise

by IsmaelUhrzw Posted on November 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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One day after the deadly terror attacks in Paris, a woman in Michigan went on Twitter and threatened to “send a message to ISIS.” How? By violently targeting Dearborn, Michigan, a Detroit suburb where more than 40 percent of the population is of Arab ancestry. In response, the head of the FBI’s Detroit office announced an investigation into a string of recent threats in the city. (Sarah Beebee, the woman who sent the tweet, publicly apologized.)

Since the Paris attacks, there have been similar incidents across the United States, from vandalized mosques to threats of violence, rattling Muslim Americans.

Based on the latest FBI hate crime figures, these incidents are on the rise. The most recent FBI data, released last Monday, indicates that hate crimes based on race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation have dropped across the board—with the exception of crimes against Muslim Americans. In 2014, even as the total number of hate crimes dipped nearly 8 percent from the year before, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 14 percent.

While anti-Muslim incidents have risen, they trail behind incidents targeting Jewish Americans. Last year, 609 hate crime incidents were reported against Jews, the highest number of crimes based on religious beliefs—and four times the number of anti-Muslim crimes. As Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post points out, these figures are likely undercounted, since police departments’ participation in the FBI’s crime assessment is voluntary and some departments track figures better than others.

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Some bright spots can be found in the FBI data: Crimes against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity dropped from 1,264 in 2013 to 1,115 in 2014. And recorded incidents against Hispanic and black Americans dipped nearly 13 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

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The uptick in crimes against Muslim Americans, though, signals a troubling trend that lingers more than 15 years after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, described the climate in the aftermath of the Paris attacks as “increasingly bleak.” “There’s been an accumulation of anti-Islamic rhetoric in our lives and that, I think, has triggered these overt acts of violence and vandalism,” he recently told the Chicago Tribune.

Between 1996 and 2000, according to the Washington Post, the FBI recorded between 20 and 30 hate crime incidents against Muslim Americans. In 2001 alone, the figure skyrocketed to nearly 500. Even before the terrorist attacks in Paris, the number of anti-Muslim hate crime incidents remained roughly five times as high as it was before 9/11.

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Vandalized Mosques, Threats of Violence—Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes on the Rise

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The Meat Industry Is Killing Kids, Say Pediatricians

by HarrisLilly775 Posted on November 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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According to the National Pork Producers Coalition, the way the meat industry currently uses antibiotics is no problem. “Existing FDA regulations are increasingly strict and provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance,” the group insists on its website.

But Jerome Paulson and Theoklis Zaoutis disagree. Pediatricians who serve on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Environmental Health, they have published a blunt report in the journal Pediatrics, arguing that systemic overuse of antibiotics in livestock production is a key driver of the resistance crisis, which, they show, sickens 2 million Americans every year, kills 23,000, and runs up an annual healthcare bill of $21 billion annually.

With their developing immune systems, children are particularly vulnerable—salmonella alone causes more then 120,000 illnesses, 44,000 physician visits, 4600 hospitalizations, and 38 deaths annually among kids younger than five, the authors report.

They point out that US livestock producers uses a staggering 32.2 million pounds of antibiotics in 2012 (the last year for which data exist), more than four times the amount used to treat people. Fully 60 percent of the those farm-dispensed drugs “are considered to be important in human medicine,” they add. This annual bombardment of farm antibiotics, they show, kills susceptible bacteria and allows resistant ones to proliferate. Of the Salmonella that commonly show up in the US meat supply, 5 percent are are resistant to 5 or more classes of antibiotic drugs—and 3 percent can withstand ceftriaxone, the “first-line therapy for salmonellosis in pediatrics,” the authors note.

Paulson and Zaoutis then run through the various ways these superbugs move off of farms and threaten people. “Increasingly, food animals are raised in large numbers under close confinement, transported in large groups to slaughter, and processed very rapidly,” they write. “These conditions can cause increased bacterial shedding and contamination of hide, carcass, and meat with fecal bacteria.” Resistant bacteria can also escape the farm through farmers, farm workers, and farm families, and casual visitors, who then can spread the germs throughout the communities. Then there’s the vast concentrations of manure from these facilities, which “can contaminate foods when manure containing resistant organisms is applied to agricultural soils and the organisms are then present in farm runoff.”

They end with a critique of what those pork producers claim are “increasingly strict” FDA rules on farm antibiotic use. Currently, the rules allow farmers to use antibiotics not only to treat to disease but also “prevent” it—a loophole that, as I and others have shown, allows meat producers to maintain current practices. That practice “can harm public health, including child health, through the promotion of resistance,” the authors warm. Who are you going to believe—the folks charged with keeping your kids healthy, or the ones charged with profitably churning out billions of meat animals each year?

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The Meat Industry Is Killing Kids, Say Pediatricians

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Ben Carson Says Honesty Is More Important Than Political Experience

by AlmaBarbacbv Posted on November 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson’s improbable presidential campaign took a big hit on Friday when Politico reported that a key story Carson has long told—that he was offered a “full scholarship” to the prestigious US Military Academy at West Point after meeting a prominent Army general—was false. It turns out that Carson never sought admission to West Point. There was no offer of any scholarship. (In fact, there are no scholarships to West Point; cadets attend free). Carson’s campaign acknowledged to Politico that his account was inaccurate.

With Carson faring so well in the GOP contest—especially among evangelical Christians who admire his Christian faith, character, and biography—how might this news affect his presidential bid? Perhaps when it comes to evaluating this revelation, his supporters and fans should take their cue from Carson.

In a recent email solicitation—headlined, “I’m not a politician”—Carson, while asking for donations, explained what he believes are the most important qualifications for the job of president. Political experience (of which he has none) was not at the top of the list. Instead, he prioritized the moral fortitude of the candidate. And he claimed that the success of his campaign showed that a large number of Americans were forming a movement demanding strength of character over policy know-how. Here’s how Carson put it:

Many in the political class don’t seem to understand it, but something historic is happening across America. We’ve been told that only politicians can fix our problems, but I believe that traditional “political experience” is much less important than faith, honesty, courage, and an unshakable belief in the principles that made America the greatest nation in the world.

And Carson does tend to depict himself as a teller of truths. In one of his books, he pointed out that he was always advising youngsters to be honest:

When I talk to young people, I urge them, “Tell the truth. If you tell the truth all the time you don’t have to worry threemonths down the line about what you said three months earlier. Truth is always the truth. You won’t have to complicate your life by trying to cover up.”

So what will it mean for Carson that he has been dishonest about an important element in his from-rags-to-riches-via-neursurgery narrative, which is a bedrock of his political appeal? Pundits rushed to Twitter to declare that this would—or could—be a fatal blow for Carson, who recently has been mocked for having once said the pyramids of Egypt were built not to house the remains of the Pharaohs but to store grain. But Carson is no conventional candidate, and the support he has drawn has defied political norms. So there’s no predicting how Carsonites will absorb this news. They might start to question Carson’s character. Then again, they might see him as a victim of persecution waged by the godless liberal media and embrace him even more.

God only knows what they will do if forced to choose between facts and faith.

Here’s the full Carson email:

—–

I’m not running for President to build my resume, and the last thing I want to be is a politician.

I’m doing this for our children and grandchildren. Our Constitution was written for them — to empower them and to ensure that they’d have the opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential.

My jump to first place in the critical early-voting state of Iowa is humbling, and I’m encouraged that so many of my fellow Americans are open to embracing a true outsider.

October has been a month of real momentum, but before it ends I ask you to join me by making a donation to my campaign of any amount.

Better yet, if you donate before midnight on October 30th you’ll be automatically entered for the chance to join me on the campaign trail for a private, one-on-one lunch.

This will be a great opportunity to get to know one another and talk about our shared desire to heal and revive America — and my campaign will be handling all accommodations.

Many in the political class don’t seem to understand it, but something historic is happening across America. We’ve been told that only politicians can fix our problems, but I believe that traditional “political experience” is much less important than faith, honesty, courage, and an unshakable belief in the principles that made America the greatest nation in the world.

Thank you, and I hope I can count on your support before the end of October.

Sincerely,

Ben Carson

Update: Carson’s campaign tells the Daily Caller that “the campaign never admitted to anything” and called the Politico story “an outright lie.”

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Ben Carson Says Honesty Is More Important Than Political Experience

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Ben Carson on Americans: "Many of Them Are Stupid."

by KristianNeff Posted on November 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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When retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, the current GOP 2016 front-runner, campaigns, he routinely pitches “common sense solutions from We the People.” But it seems the candidate who celebrates a cheerful and straightforward populism has a fair bit of disdain for many of his fellow citizens, for at a videotaped event last year, while discussing the American people, he declared, “Many of them are stupid.”

Carson made this observation while speaking at the Richard Nixon library on October 19, 2014, as part of a book tour. After a fifteen-minute talk—prior to a book-signing—Carson was asked if he might run for president as an independent. He vowed not to do so, noting this would fracture the Republican vote. He then pivoted to another topic: unnamed political foes—presumably liberals, progressives, secularists, Marxists, or whatever—penetrating key elements of American society to gain control of the nation:

They can twist and turn things as much as they want. But what they don’t understand—and they miscalculated. They were doing a great job in terms of fundamentally changing this nation. In terms of infiltrating the school systems. In terms of infiltrating the media. All of this—they’ve done a great job. Everything was perfect. Except they underestimated the intelligence of the American people. The people are not as stupid as they think they are. Many of them are stupid. Okay. But I’m talking about overall.

The crowd laughed when Carson made that crack about dumb Americans, and Carson let out a loud guffaw.

In answering the same question, Carson also noted that he could escape the corruptions of conventional politics by deftly using social media, and, with no apparent sense of hyperbole, he suggested that Fox News was preventing America from becoming a totalitarian state:

Even if all the media tries to shut you down—which they have tried very much to do with me. But they can’t because the good Lord has provided me with mechanisms like my syndicated column and like Fox News. We’d be Cuba if there were no Fox News.

This was another applause line for the crowd of Carson fans, who had greeted Carson’s arrival with shouts of “run, Ben, run.” According to the financial disclosure form Carson filed in June that covered the preceding 12 months, he made $492,115 as a Fox News commentator and $137,148 as a columnist for the Washington Times.

Carson’s remarks about stupid Americans and the insidious plotting of unidentified elements to sneakily seize key American institutions were in sync with previous statements from this political novice who recently vaulted to the front of the Republican pack. Carson has long noted that he’s a fan of W. Cleon Skousen, who in 1958 wrote a book called The Naked Communist, a dark and paranoid screed that maintained that commies had “penetrated every echelon of American society”—from PTAs, art salons, media entities, social program offices, and entertainment companies to the “highest offices of the United States Government.” Skousen believed that the civil rights movement, acceptance of homosexuality, the rise of abstract art and modernism, and the advent of Medicare and Social Security were all part of a clandestine scheme mounted by communists and others to destroy the United States. Twelve years later, Skousen expanded his conspiracy theorizing to claim that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes.

Carson has repeatedly—including last year on Fox News—cited Skousen, who died in 2006, as the key to understanding what has happened in the United States over the past half-century. The most recent edition of Skousen’s book trumpets Carson’s endorsement on the front cover: “The Naked Communist lays out the whole progressive plan. It is unbelievable how fast it has been achieved.” In 2007, the conservative National Review called Skousen an “all-around nutjob.”

Asked if Carson thinks that many Americans are stupid, a Carson spokesman said, “Sounds like he forgot to insert his usual ‘in Washington.'”

Carson does seemingly believe that for decades the American public has been slyly manipulated by an enemy from within. And he often decries political elites for adopting a condescending approach toward the citizenry and imposing their own views and positions upon the rest of the nation. On the campaign trail, he dismisses political experience as a qualification for office and contends that a candidate who demonstrates faith, honesty, and character can effectively govern by relying upon the wisdom of the American people. Yet at the Nixon library, Carson indicated he holds a significant number of voters in low regard. Presumably, they don’t count in his We the People.

Here’s Carson’s full talk at the Nixon library.

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Ben Carson on Americans: "Many of Them Are Stupid."

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Stephen Colbert Calls Out Donald Trump’s "Small" Million Dollar Loan with the Perfect Challenge

by Danae37X675619 Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is not a self-made billionaire.

But speaking before ordinary Americans on Monday, the real-estate mogul attempted to recast his widely known cushy beginnings by telling the story of a meager one million dollar loan provided by his old man, Fred Trump.

“It has not been easy for me,” he insisted.

On Wednesday, Stephen Colbert took Trump’s humble roots to task by daring him to pay it forward to the kids at Harlem’s Children Zone, a charity organization that helps disadvantaged youth in New York.

“Who knows, the kids you help might one day be so rich that they can blow their cash on a presidential campaign,” the Late Show host said.

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Stephen Colbert Calls Out Donald Trump’s "Small" Million Dollar Loan with the Perfect Challenge

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While You Were Watching Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders Just Called for Legalizing Weed

by GusBelstead Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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You may have missed Bernie Sanders’ town hall at Virginia’s George Mason University on Wednesday as the GOP presidential contenders duked it out in Boulder, Colorado. But he made some news. Sanders called for the full decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level, a move that would allow states to regulate the drug the same way they handle alcohol or tobacco. “Right now marijuana is listed by the federal government as a schedule-one drug, meaning that it is considered to be as dangerous as heroin,” Sanders said. “That is absurd.”

Sanders, while touting the possible civic benefits of decriminalization (such as providing a funding stream, through taxation, for treatment of more dangerous substances such as opioids) took pains to frame legalization as a matter of racial justice:

Let us be clear, as is the case in many other areas, that there is a racial component to this situation. Although about the same proportion of blacks and whites use marijuana, a black person is almost four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person. Too many Americans have seen their lives destroyed because they have criminal records because of marijuana use. That is wrong. That has got to change…A criminal record could include not only time in jail, but a criminal record makes it harder for a person to get a job, harder for a person to get public benefits, harder for a person to even get housing. A criminal record stays with a person for his or her entire life.

The legalization he proposed would also eliminate one of the roadblocks to decriminalization in places such as Washington state or Colorado, by allowing marijuana distributors to use the banking system like any other business.

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While You Were Watching Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders Just Called for Legalizing Weed

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Back to the Führer: This Guy Studies Baby Hitler Time Machine Scenarios

by EstherSweet Posted on October 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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A New York third-grader plays Hitler in a school production, 1942. Marjory Collins/FSA-OWI Collection

This morning, the New York Times Magazine tweeted the results of a survey of readers who were asked if they could bring themselves kill the baby Adolf Hitler. Forty-two percent said they could off the future Führer; 30 percent declined, and 28 percent said they were unsure.

The ensuing Twitter explosion reminded me of Gavriel Rosenfeld’s The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, a fascinatingly comprehensive look at pop culture’s obsession with counterfactual Hitler storylines, including the time-machine-baby-Hitler scenario. Rosenfeld is a professor of history at Fairfield University and the author of the recent book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. He also writes about counterfactual history, the study of “what if” events and their consequences.

Rosenfeld, who is not on Twitter, was blissfully unaware of the latest baby Hitler hubbub. But he kindly agreed to talk about why we never get sick of Hitler assassination fantasies and why Nazi references keep popping up in our political discussions.

Mother Jones: When did people start floating this hypothetical idea of, “Hey, if only we could go back in time and kill Hitler, everything would be different”?

Gavriel Rosenfeld: Of course, the notion of killing Hitler and improving history goes back to World War II itself. The idea of going back in time and killing Hitler as a baby is less frequently explored than exploring the possibility of whether Hitler had been assassinated successfully in real life. But what’s interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you’re actually going to make history worse. So I’m surprised that 42 percent in the Times Magazine survey said they would kill Hitler as a baby. Of the 58 who said they wouldn’t do it, maybe they realize they wouldn’t make history better or they’re just ethically opposed to killing babies. And these are all Americans?

MJ: I don’t know, but I assume they are. They didn’t release any demographic info.

GR: The answers that you get to this question vary quite a bit by nation. British and Americans almost always say that you would make history worse, while German respondents are far and away inclined to say, of course, if you get rid of Hitler you make everything better. And the reason is that the Germans tend to like to blame the Nazi experience on one man who can be scapegoated. If you pile all the blame onto him, you exonerate the German masses from any responsibility. Whereas Americans and British respondents don’t want to let the German people off the hook. They make the case that if you get rid of Hitler, some other leader apart from Hitler would have emerged and, because of the structural constant of German nationalism, would have exploited German national feeling and produce the same kind of events no matter what.

Originally the premise of killing Hitler was fueled by deep traumatic feelings of wishing and fantasizing that if only things had been different, we could have spared ourselves all kinds of suffering. More recently it’s been turned into a comedic trope. As we go forward, tragedy plus time equals comedy, and that is what we’re seeing now.

MJ: In The World Hitler Never Made, you wrote about several books and shows that dealt with the scenario of killing baby Hitler. Do you have a favorite?

GR: My favorite, I suppose, is the British comedian and writer Stephen Fry’s novel Making History. It’s about a grad student in Cambridge who decides not so much to murder Hitler but prevent him from being born by sending, though a time machine, some birth control pills to the well where his mother was fetching water. By that process, his father, Alois Hitler, becomes sterile and Hitler is never born. That leads to a worse Nazi dictator emerging, a fictional guy named Rudolf Gloder. He’s much more rational than Hitler and he gets nuclear weapons and wreaks havoc around the world. He defeats the Soviet Union so there is no Cold War, but there is a cold war between the US and Nazi Germany. The irony is that the grad student then has to go back in time to make sure Hitler is born.

MJ: This baby Hitler moment follows Ben Carson saying the Holocaust could have been prevented if the Jews had been armed and Binyamin Netanyahu saying Hitler got the idea for the Holocaust from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Why do people keep trying to rewrite the history of Nazism and the Holocaust?

GR: We are in a “what if?” moment. In times of uncertainty, we tend to move away from deterministic world views. And when we try to find moral footing for our actions, we compare ourselves to the foil of all foils, the Nazi period. It’s a quest for moral certainty by saying, “Even if we’re not doing great these days, at least we’re not the Third Reich.” Which can be consoling or alarmist. There’s always a present-day agenda behind it.

MJ: As a historian, do you see any good coming from these counterfactuals? Do they result in more people learning the history?

GR: I feel mixed about it. It’s the same as climate change deniers who force scientists to waste their time having to refute nonsensical ideas. On the other hand, it does bring to public attention things that people might not understand. Counterfactual claims make awesome headlines. The first step to get people interested in history is to wonder how things could have been different. Most people experience history as one damn fact after another in high school. But if you can wonder, “Wow, what if the US hadn’t gotten involved in World War II?”, you can become enthralled by the imaginary possibilities. Maybe that’s a way of getting the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. And it’s why Hitler has become a meme. If you’re a website and you want to get attention, you can Hiterlize anything.

MJ: So if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you?

GR: I would be very tempted, but I wouldn’t have been born if World War II had never happened, which was caused by Adolf Hitler. My mother emigrated from Eastern Europe to America as a result of World War II. So for personal reasons, I would be a little hesitant. But far more broadly, what I have learned from studying counterfactual history is that the law of unintended consequences always kicks in no matter how secure you are in your plan. We have to live with the historical record as it is, like it or not.

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Back to the Führer: This Guy Studies Baby Hitler Time Machine Scenarios

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