Terror alert level: orange

 New York -- yes, John Lindsay's Fun City of blessed memory -- is reeling from a one-two punch today.  First and least, there's an empty rectangular space where Sean Hannity used to be.  The oracle of Fox News has decamped to Florida so he can interview Trump more often and do something about his upsettingly pasty complexion, but mostly because the Apple is rotten.  "Law and order, better education, more freedom, better quality of life, and guess what, no state income tax" are the reasons he listed on a special BLUE STATE EXODUS CONTINUES edition of "Inanity with Hannity," although I assume it's mostly the tax.  (Southern states prefer to support themselves with high sales taxes, predatory traffic stops and outright confiscations of vehicles with out-of-state plates, not to mention shared revenues from prosperous states like California, New York...never mind.  It's what the Founders wanted.)  If New York is deflating like a Tom Brady football, why are rents still high?  (Maybe because Governor Paresis keeps busing frightened immigrants there, now that Texas no longer recognizes US laws?)

But Hannity's bid to become King of the Orange Bowl -- honestly, I don't know if there is one -- was overshadowed by exciting news from Trump, who still thinks he can and should win New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and even Minnesota.  He wants to hold a rally -- get this -- in Madison Square Garden.  He calls it "the belly of the beast," which is deeply complimentary.

New York needs him.  It's dying.  "You have migrants living on Madison Avenue," he told Breitbart, sounding like Mrs. Astor spotting a beggar in front of her mansion.  "You can't get into a hospital.  You can't get into a school."  He forgot the giant ape clinging to the top of the Empire State Building.  Skull Island is not sending its best.

Dean Obeidallah thinks the rally is meant to link up with history:  "Trump wants a rally at MSG because there was a famous Nazi rally there in 1939 and MAGA is a modern version of that movement."  Is it?  Or is that a coincidence spotted by fearful but lazy journalists?  When Trump says he never read Mein Kampf I believe him.  He has never read a book in 77 years and that one is a chore even for historians.  White nationalism has been around a lot longer than the NSDAP.  It's enshrined in our damn Constitution.  Trump's promise to deport immigrants was first articulated by the American Party (Know Nothings) in the 1850s, along with mandatory Bible study and the disenfranchisement of Catholics.  If your father marched with the Klan, chances are you absorbed this kind of thing without ever opening a book.

We were the pioneers of white nationalism, as Hitler always acknowledged, sending law students here to examine Jim Crow laws which could be adapted into the Nuremberg Decrees.  Germany turned to slave labor in the 1940s.  In America slave labor officially ended in 1865; unofficially, it continues to this day as convict labor.*  Lenin probably based the gulag on it.  German Jews were at the height of cultural and political assimilation while the Land of the Free was creating laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882, repealed 1947).  Given all this, and much more, it's amazing any white man didn't grow up racist (looking at you, William Lloyd Garrison).  If this be critical race theory, make the most of it.

If Trump holds a rally at the Garden -- and given his record, they'll want payment up front -- it won't be because of something that happened in 1939.  Few MAGAts are old enough to remember it, and they're not readers either.  It will be because the same mephitic gases fill the air, after dissipating for a few decades.  They drift from every "town hall" and hatefest, damning "leftists," immigrants, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ people, and they have nothing to do with Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Fritz Kuhn or other quaint figures from the past.  Before long covid there was long fascism, and the cure has yet to be found.

  

*Unable to negotiate their wages or working conditions, convict laborers are used for everything from agriculture and manufacturing to fighting wildfires.  Why else would we need to imprison so many people?