Bigotry, Hatred, Authoritarianism and War

Monday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a date chosen based on the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camps. It's an appropriate time to reflect on bigotry, hatred, authoritarianism and also war. This year, I find myself thinking about Donald Trump, conservatives, and the Republican Party; Elon Musk and oligarchs; and the Israel-Hamas war.

Against all wisdom, Donald Trump was reelected as president in 2024. He started his campaign for the 2016 election based on bigotry, and has consistently made hateful, ignorant, bigoted statements since, including language echoing Hitler and other fascists. For the 2024 election, Trump once again put fear and hated of immigrants and racial minorities at the center of his campaign, and also targeted LGBT people, being particularly vicious toward transgender people (and spending a ton of money to do so).

Since taking office, Trump has issued a slew of executive orders targeting those groups. His actions against immigrants include an attempt to repeal birthright citizenship, which is his administration pretending it can overturn the 14th Amendment of the Constitution by decree rather than the actual process. Detaining people suspected of being undocumented immigrants has already begun, and has included people with no criminal record. Predictably, these edicts encourage racial profiling and other harassment. Trump has likewise issued orders attacking transgender people and their rights. (At least he hasn't proposed that they be forced to wear pink triangles yet.) The cruelty is a feature, not a bug.

Elon Musk, one of Trump's most prominent supporters and certainly the richest, has received widespread criticism for making two Nazi salutes at a Trump inauguration event on 1/20/25. Musk predictably has had his defenders, claiming he was misunderstood. But Musk has received notable criticism from Germans and historians of fascism, who judged it as a Nazi salute. Neo-Nazis and other white supremacist and hard right groups also thought it was a Nazi salute, and celebrated it. Rather than apologizing, Musk tweeted a joking post of Nazi puns. Musk's most notable defender was probably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization founded to combat antisemitism, but Jewish outlet Forward questioned the ADL's "bizarre and baseless rush" to exonerate Musk rather than "calling balls and strikes" as it claims to do, and for not asking Musk about the incident first rather than leaping to his defense.

More importantly, Musk, who helped Trump get reelected, has also supported the hard right German political group Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and on 1/26/25, Musk appeared on video at an AfD rally, gaining applause as he told the party members, "I think you really are the best hope for Germany," and that there was "frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that." Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk responded, "The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about 'Great Germany' and 'the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes' sounded all too familiar and ominous. Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz." (Meanwhile, Musk has also attacked transgender rights for years, possibly because he has an estranged transgender daughter, who incidentally wrote a sarcastic post mocking the defenses of Elon Musk's Nazi salute.)

It's almost impossible to keep up with everything the Trump administration, the Republican Party and conservatives are doing to hurt the United States, but for a few lowlights: like a petty dictator, Trump has been abusing his power for personal vendettas against people who put the U.S. ahead of personal loyalty to him. He canceled Dr. Anthony Fauci's much-needed security detail. Trump also removed the security detail for former Joint Chiefs Chairman, retired General Mark Milley, and is even trying to get him demoted in his retirement to hurt his pension. The Trump administration fired career lawyers at the Justice Department simply because they were doing their jobs when they worked on special counsel Jack Smith's investigation into Trump. Most importantly, the Trump administration has illegally fired about 17 inspectors general at government agencies without the required 30-day notice. Like many other civil servants but more prominently and explicitly, inspectors general are tasked with performing oversight and fighting corruption and abuses of power.

The Trump administration has also tried to halt federal funding approved by Congress, actions that are completely illegal. (The Trump administration received considerable pushback and has been stopped for now, thankfully.) Federal employees have also received odd, threatening emails from the Office of Personnel Management pressuring them to accept buyouts to resign. These maneuvers have been linked to Elon Musk and his DOGE commission, who have also "gained access to sensitive Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems, according to two people familiar with the situation." Besides the massive privacy issues, as Senator Ron Wyden, Democratic member of the Senate Finance Committee said in a letter to the Treasury Department, "officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs." All these actions are illegal, anti-democratic and authoritarian, and could fairly be called another coup attempt by Trump and his allies. (Meanwhile, Trump pardoned over 1,500 people charged and convicted for one of his previous coup attempts, the January 6th, 2021, insurrection. The pardon included violent criminals.)

Joe Biden's farewell address warned the American people that "Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy. Our basic rights and freedoms. And a fair shot for everyone to get ahead." The Trump administration predictably seek to renew $4 trillion in expiring tax cuts heavily skewed toward the rich and to gut the social safety net. U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party have been fighting to make America increasingly oligarchic for decades now, unfortunately with some success. Those actions are extremely harmful if not new. The Trump administration's authoritarianism isn't entirely new, either; the Nixon and George W. Bush administrations made similar moves. Regardless, authoritarian takeovers do take time and need to be fought every step of the way.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, the Israel-Hamas war has a welcome ceasefire as of this writing. The war itself started with Hamas and allied groups attacking Israel on 10/7/23, although the conflict has decades, centuries and even millennia of history. The attacks killed about 1,200 people and Hamas took about 250 hostages. Hamas also committed sexual assaults and other atrocities, although some false stories also made the rounds – Haaretz reported, "Most [accounts of atrocities] are supported by extensive evidence, but a few have been proved untrue, providing ammunition to deniers of the historic massacre."

In response to the attack, the Israeli coalition government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu of the hard-right Likud Party, extensively bombed Gaza and forced its population to flee south. By December 2024, the death toll in Gaza was reported as more than 45,000. But a study published in The Lancet in January 2025 puts the death toll at 64,260. Several organizations called the Netanyahu administration's actions a genocide and urged investigations. Many buildings in Gaza are mere rubble now, including hospitals and schools; the Associated Press has called Gaza "an apocalyptic landscape of devastation." The 200,000 or so Palestinians now walking home to northern Gaza mostly have no houses to go back to.

Back on 11/12/23, John Oliver provided a useful primer on the war, among other things explaining why both Hamas on the one hand and the Likud Party and Netanyahu administration on the other are awful. Whatever their other differences, they both oppose a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, both have a history of bigotry, and both are not actually helping the people they claim to serve. The people don't necessarily approve of them, either; Palestinians in Gaza have not had an election since 2007, when Hamas took power. Meanwhile, since the October 2023 attacks, Netanyahu faced increasing criticism from Israelis over his decisions, especially his failure to free the hostages (. . . although his approval numbers have been improving since autumn 2024).

Israel is home to many of the last remaining Holocaust survivors, and many Israelis have family history connecting them to the Holocaust, be those living survivors, survivors who have since passed away, or family members murdered during the Holocaust. That genocide remains within living memory. Antisemitism continues to be a problem in the Middle East and the entire world. Meanwhile, some Israelis protested the war in Gaza. In the U.S., most visibly on college campuses, Palestinian and Jewish-led groups likewise protested the war and spoke out against antisemitism, but also against bigotry toward Arabs, Muslims and Persians. Several U.S. Jewish groups oppose the idea of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

The situations in the United States, the Middle East and much of the rest of the world aren't rosy by any means. But some people are working to make them better, by opposing bigotry, hatred, authoritarianism and war.