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President Donald Trump is coming off his worst week in the White House that is, if youre not counting at least the nine other weeks since his January inauguration when the media has also declared the Republican to have hit rock bottom.

The worst week clich has its reasons: this time its Trumps controversial response to violent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia. But for the reporters and political analysts who make their living covering Trump, theres always something (or many things) to merit such a categorical description for such a chaotic president.

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Its a subjective measurement by any definition. Nonetheless, heres a POLITICO review of the 10 weeks (out of 30 so far) where journalists have dubbed Trump as having his worst week in office.

1. August 14-20

What happened: Trump started the week condemning the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists for the fatal violence in Charlottesville but then reversed course and doubled down on his earlier argument that many sides were to blame for the weekends events spinning out of control. Republicans and Democrats alike criticized him, as did corporate leaders who forced the White House to shutter several of its business advisory panels. White House senior adviser Steve Bannon was fired.

Who called it: NBC reporters including Meet the Press host Chuck Todd wrote that the president is more isolated than ever after worst week yet and that was hours before the news broke that Bannon was ousted. FOX News Bret Baier said that Bannons departure made it clearly the worst week yet. ABC News political analyst Matt Dowd had this to say of the Bannon news, Worst blow so far of his presidency, coming at the tail end of probably his worst week as president. MSNBC, meantime, noted the number of times the worst week description had been used in recent weeks and made a comparison to a scene from the 1999 film, Office Space.

2. August 7-13

What happened: The Charlottesville melee was in its first 24 hours when Trump gave his first stumbling response, blaming many sides for the violence. He improvised on the nuclear threat from North Korea, warning that the country would face fire and fury if it attacked the U.S. or its allies. Speaking from his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club where he was on a working vacation, the president told reporters a military operation, a military option, is certainly something we could pursue in Venezuela. He also jokingly thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for booting more than 750 U.S. diplomats from Russia. Trump carried on a feud with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for not passing an Obamacare repeal bill.

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Who called it: Helene Cooper, a Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, said on Meet the Press in the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville that Trump may have just had his worst week because hes not been able to detach himself from these white supremacists who got him elected and who he has put in his government and in the White House. She also called him out for his North Korea response. Max Boot, writing for Foreign Policy, called Trump the WWE president as in the "worst week ever" adding, "that has become even more of a leitmotif for his administration.

3. July 24-30

What happened: The Senate by one vote killed a Republican bill to repeal Obamacare. The military was caught unprepared when Trump tweeted out his plans to ban transgender troops. The Boy Scouts of America apologized after Trump gave an explicitly political speech at their annual jamboree. Trump publicly humiliated Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Senate Republicans came to Sessions' defense. White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci gave a scathing, expletive-laden interview to the New Yorker criticizing Bannon and then Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. Priebus was fired and John Kelly was named as his replacement.

Who called it: Washington Post opinion writer Kathleen Parker opened a column this way, Donald Trump had his worst day since he was elected president well just call it Friday and his worst week since the last one. In the same newspaper, Charles Krauthammer pointed out the checks and balances that had pushed back at Trump, noting his worst week proved a particularly fine hour for American democracy. Dowd, appearing on ABCs Good Morning America, said Kelly began as chief of staff probably after the worst week of Donald Trumps presidency. The Australian Financial Review reported that Trump faced skepticism in Washington that he can recover from arguably his work week on Capitol Hill.

4. July 10-16

What happened: The New York Times over several days reported on a June 2016 meeting between Trumps oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., senior campaign aides, and a Kremlin-linked lawyer who had promised them dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Who called it: Times reporters Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman described Trump as being in a buoyant mood during a visit to the press cabin on Air Force One, following a quick trip to Paris that came while he was suffering one of the worst weeks of his political career.

5. June 12-18

What happened: The Washington Post reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had expanded his investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election into an examination of whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice. Trump himself seemed to confirm the news on Twitter, with a Friday morning missive that launched a wave of speculation he may be getting ready to order the firing of Mueller: I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt.

Who called it: CNNs Chris Cillizza, author of a weekly column awarding an unlucky pol for having the worst week in Washington, bestowed the honor on the president. Donald Trump hasnt had a lot of good weeks since being sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. But this was his worst one yet, he wrote. This was the week the investigation of Russias involvement in the 2016 election reached the Oval Office and Trump himself.

6. June 5-11

What happened: The cable networks go wall-to-wall with coverage of former FBI Director James Comey testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he confirmed reports the president demanded his loyalty and pressured him to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Who called it: The Daily Show had some fun with this one. Opening his Monday broadcast with a look back at the Comey hearing, Trevor Noah, the Comedy Central host said, Last week was probably one of the worst weeks of Donald Trumps presidency, which, by the way, is something we say every week now. Yeah. Trumps presidency is basically like global warming. Every week is the worst week on record, and the Republicans are also trying hard to deny it.

7. May 15-21

What happened: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Mueller to investigate Trump campaign ties to Russian tampering in the 2016 election. The New York Times reported Trump told Russian officials visiting him in the Oval Office that Comey was a real nut job. The Washington Post published an article saying a senior White House official had become a significant person of interest in the Russia investigation. Sen. John McCain said the Trump scandals had reached a Watergate size and scale. On Twitter, Trump fired back, This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!

Who called it: Reporters outside the U.S. pinpointed Trumps troubles, with a Toronto Star columnist noting before the week was even over: At the midway point of Trumps worst week in office and thats saying something his travelling band of surrogates, liars, bootlickers, enablers, brown-nosers and excuse-makers are in quite a bind. A Canberra Times editorial in Australia also jumped into the action by suggesting Trumps witch hunt tweet could even be seen as a successful attempt to divert attention away from his worst week since entering the White House. Back in the U.S., a CNN report with Jake Tapper sharing the byline said Trumps tweets appeared to be an attempt by staff to calm the raging political storm over Russia which has resulted in Trumps worst week in office so far. Reuters, meantime, went with this headline to sum up the weeks news: Donald Trumps Worst Week as President?

8. May 8-14

What happened: Trump fired Comey on a Tuesday, citing recommendations from Rosenstein and Sessions. He sat down for an NBC interview on Thursday with Lester Holt and said hed already made up his mind to fire Comey regardless of recommendation from the DOJ officials. Trump started his Friday on Twitter by posting: James Comey better hope that there are no tapes of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

Who called it: Republican strategist Ed Rollins on one of FOX News Sunday morning shows called for some deep thinking in this White House, and added, This was the worst week, I think, this president has had, and its all self-inflicted. Cillizza, meantime, awarded Trump the worst week in Washington honor for all-things Comey.

9. March 20-26

What happened: Comey, appearing before the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed for the first time publicly that the FBI has an open investigation into potential Trump campaign collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. In a major defeat, House Republicans dropped plans for a floor vote on legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Who called it: ABCs George Stephanopoulos opened his Sunday show this way, And for all of you who had a rough week, just think about how President Trump must feel after the worst week of his young presidency.

10. February 13-19

What happened: It was a messy Valentines Day in Trump land. The president fired Flynn amid a spate of media reports hed had undisclosed conversations with Russias ambassador during the transition and misled Vice President Mike Pence in the process. The New York Times reported about phone records and intercepted calls suggesting Trumps campaign and his associates had made repeated contacts with senior Russian officials. Two days later, the Wall Street Journal published an article that U.S. intelligence officials were holding back sensitive material from Trump because of concern about leaks.

Who called it: Teasing a video about the news of the week, the U.S. News and World Report declared Trump has just endured his worst week in Washington yet and asked who was is in charge of his White House. Over at the Miami Herald, columnist Fabiola Santiago took note of Cuban-Americans in Congress who were silent about Trumps Russiagate. The headline: On his worst week in office, Trump gets a boost from Cuban-American pals in Congress.

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Trump just had his 'worst week' again - Politico

Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed by a car at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, says she wont be speaking to President Donald Trump.

I have not [spoken to Trump], and now I will not, Bro said on ABCs Good Morning America Friday.

Bro said the White House tried to reach out to her multiple times the day of her daughters funeral, and she simply missed the calls.But after seeing video of Trumps Tuesday press conference, during which he defended white supremacists and railed against counterprotesters, Bro said she doesnt wish to speak to him.

I hadnt really watched the news until last night, and Im not talking to the president now, she said. Im sorry. After what he said about my child, and, its not that I saw somebody elses tweets about him, I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. Heyer with the KKK and the white supremacists.

During hisremarks Tuesday, Trump argued both sides in Charlottesville were responsible for violence.

You had a group on one side who was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that, but Ill say it right now, Trump said before also commenting that there were very fine people on both sides.

Bro said shes not forgiving Trump for the remarks.

You cant wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying Im sorry, Bro said.

Original post:
Susan Bro, Heather Heyer's Mom, Won't Speak To Donald Trump - HuffPost

HARI SREENIVASAN, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: In the wake of the violence and tragedy in Charlottesville, Virginia, last Saturday, much of the past week has been spent examining the so-called alt right the ideology, based on white nationalism, rejects Jewish people, people of color, those in the LGBTQ community and immigrants, and its typically seen as a movement made up of white men.

However, as reporter Seyward Darby writes in the September issue of Harpers magazine, there is a disturbing trend worth paying attention to. Seyward Darby joins me now.

The women, the women have not really been in the imagery that weve seen just in the past week, but as you find out, they exist, and theyre growing in numbers.

SEYWARD DARBY, REPORTER, HARPERS MAGAZINE: I went into this story with a simple question, and that was, where are the women? And I started to think of this question last winter around the time that, you know, millions of women around the country were organizing for the womens march on Washington, and simultaneously, the alt-right was celebrating Trumps victory and being portrayed as a movement of young white men.

And I went looking for these women, and they very much exist. And there is a cluster of them that are very vocal on YouTube, Twitter, sometimes in real life at conferences and events. And they are very keen to let other women know that theyre there, and that the alt-right is a place where, if theyre white women of a certain mind, they would be welcome.

SREENIVASAN: So, whats the allure? I mean, when you see the displays of sort of bravado that some of these men exhibit, why would women want to be there? Is it because they like that sort of manliness of manhood, or do they see a place for them in the organization?

DARBY: The short answer is yes. They very much like the idea of alpha men who embrace a very sort of aggressive form of masculinity. But in terms of the place women see for themselves, they dont believe that these men are misogynistic in the way that people looking from the outside might.

They think that the men of the alt-right just understand biology and that men and women are fundamentally different, not equal, but equally important, and that men should be alpha, macho, fighting battles, running countries, making policy, whereas women have an equally important role on the home front, nurturing family units, inculcating the beliefs of this movement. They would say they dont see that as, you know, submission or subjugation. They would say that its equally important, almost like a yin and yang.

SREENIVASAN: So, what kind of numbers are we talking about here?

DARBY: Its really hard to say. And I spoke to many academics who have studied right-wing extremism for a long time, and they said because the alt-right is ultimately this movement from the Internet, very motley, very disparate, from comment boards and various social media platforms, its really hard to get a sense of precise numbers. In terms of women within it, the number you hear bandied about is 15 percent to 20 percent. But theyre not necessarily the ones youre going to see in Charlottesville.

SREENIVASAN: Lets talk also about the network effects here. How do these women congregate online? How do they meet each other? How do they get recruited?

DARBY: I think it is a deeply, deeply inside the Internet in a way that can take a while if youre an outsider to find, to see the patterns of connection. They will say that there are meet-ups happening in real life that, you know, women are organizing in ways you cant see, but I do think fundamentally most of this is happening on these various Internet platforms.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a moment that they see coming? I mean, do they see their influence increasing?

DARBY: They will say that they do. They would say that the moment is now, that were seeing it. They dont necessarily see Donald Trump as alt-right. Lana Lokteff, for instance, when I met and interviewed her, she pointed blank said, hes not one of our guys.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

DARBY: But hes got the coattails that they felt they needed to be pulled more so into the mainstream. And what were seeing in Charlottesville and other places where the alt-right is, you know, stepping out into the world to show themselves. I think that they very much see this as the moment when they can garner more followers.

They want it to seem like they have a lot of momentum. Whether or not they do

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

DARBY: its hard to say.

SREENIVASAN: All right. Seyward Darby has this as one of the big stories in Harpers thanks so much for joining us.

DARBY: Thank you so much for having me.

See original here:
Why are women joining the 'alt-right'? - PBS NewsHour

The scores of people carrying flaming torches and chanting Jews will not replace us last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, bore the message of the alt-right, the name given to the white supremacist movement dedicated to eradicating religious and ethnic minorities from America. This racist uprising will be followed by at least nine rallies this weekendostensibly dedicated to free speech but sure to broadcast messages of hateacross the U.S., held by members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other groups.

The 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, VA, where white supremacists march with tiki torchs through the University of Virginia campus. Getty Images/Zach D. Roberts

Manyfind the sight of hundreds of racists chanting their intentions for a so-called "ethno-state" and the forceful removal from Americaof anyone who isn't whitehorrific. But othersnamely, some psychiatristssee these individualsas mentally ill. Which leads to a disturbing question: Are we seeing the emergence of a nationalist movement fueled by prejudice or a widespread personality disorder that requires psychiatric care? Answering thatdredges up long-held notions about racism in America.

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In the 1960s, Alvin Poussaint, now a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, was providing medical and psychological care to civil rights activists in Jackson, Mississippi. As a black psychiatrist in the South, he often feared for his life. He witnessed many acts of violence, cared for victims of racist acts and had frequent run-ins with state troopers. Once, when he told an aggressive police officer that he was a doctor, the officer continuedtocallhim boy with a hand onthe gun in his holster. I saw the malignancy of the racism much more clearly, and the genocidal element of the extreme racism where they wanted to kill you, Poussaint tells Newsweek.

He wondered if that hatred was an actual sickness that could be diagnosed and potentially treated. When he wasin his early 30s, anda prominent psychiatrist at Tufts Medical School, Poussaint and several other black psychiatrists approached the American Psychiatric Association (APA) with the idea that extreme racism wasnt just a social problem or a cultural issue. To these professionals, extreme racismthe kind that leads to violencewas a mental illness.

Poussaint and his colleagues wanted the APA to include extreme racism in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a delusional disorder. The DSM is the definitive guideline used by mental health clinicians to diagnose patients.

The DSM is not infallible. Over the years, it hasprovidedinsights into the countrys ever-changing values and belief systems. Homosexuality, for example, wasnt completely omitted from the DSM until the late 1980s. The last time the APA revised the DSM (in 2013) they declined the request by a group of psychiatrists to add pornography and sex addiction to the index. For psychiatrists updating the guidea process that can take more than a decadedoing so means wrestling with the very nature of humanity, what is normal and abnormal when it comes to behavior and beliefs.

Poussaint wasnt arguing about the relatively milder beliefs that cause a person to stereotype and classify groups of people negatively. Rather, he and the other psychiatrists were addressing the kind of racism that leads to violent behavior, like killing and injuring people by driving a car into a crowd, as happened in Charlottesville. That extreme form of racism, said Poussaint, could reasonably be classified as paranoid and delusional.

In July 2017, Ku Klux Klan protests planned removal of General Lee statue from park in Charlottesville, Virginia. Chet Strange/Getty Images

The APA was unreceptive. There was a lot of resistance to the idea, he says. The problem, Poussaint explains, was that those in charge saw racism as too ubiquitous to diagnose. They felt racism was so embedded in culture, that it was almost normative, that you had to deal with all the cultural factors that lead to this behavior,

Members of the APA also argued that the extreme racism is amental illness claim lacked hard science. That objection was weak, says Poussaint, because many mental health diagnoses listed in the DSM don't have a solid scientific premise, including personality disorders. Some APAmembers said classifyingextreme racism as an illness would excuse terrible beliefs and reprehensible behavior.

But Poussaint wasnt interested in excusing or stigmatizing behavior;he wanted to help people he believed were sick. Inclusionin the DSM, he insisted, could allow individuals suffering from extreme racism to access services such as state-mandated psychiatric counseling, and therefore benefit society because, it could protect people they might otherwise attack.

Poussaint still believes extreme racism is a form of paranoia and should be treated that way. In therapy, a psychiatrist would help the patient understand the origins of their racism. Like any psychotherapy or treatment you would try to tie it all together, he says. Other psychiatrists have testified and acknowledged such individuals may improve from treatment when they come to understand these beliefs and why they are projecting them onto other people and acting out.

Racism as a Symptom

The question of whether extreme racism is a mental illness still haunts psychiatry. About 15 years ago, Carl Bell, a psychiatrist at Jackson Park Hospital Family Medicine Clinic and professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicagos School of Medicine, resurrected Poussaints attempt to convince the APA to classify racism as a mental disorder. But Bell tried a different tack from Poussaint. He viewed extreme racism as a type of pathological bias that signaled an underlying personality disorder.

Bell proposed adding pathological bias to the DSM as a trait of personality disorder. With that addition, extreme bigotry would be a majorcriterionfor the diagnosis. The broad term could also apply to individuals who direct violence and hatred toward other groups, such as gays or women.

But again, the APA said no. When I raised this issue for the personality disorders working group they shut me down, says Bell, they were like, Hell, no. As in decades past, the APA justified their objection on the grounds that racism is and always has been entrenched insociety.

The difficulty is that if you are in a racist society, how do you tease that out from biology or personality? says Bell, whocould not even convince the APA to study why racist thoughts and action manifest in some people during manic episodes.

The Association did finally issue a statement in 2006 acknowledging that some psychiatric factors cause a person to become racist,although further research would be needed to explore this hypothesis. The group also noted that racist beliefs and behavior often cause depression and psychiatric illness in people who are subject to them. In a statement provided to Newsweek about its approach to prejudice-based violence, Saul Levin, CEO and Medical Director of the APA, said,"The APA has a longstanding policy noting the negative impact of racism and mental health. APA policy supports public education efforts and research on racism and its adverse impact on mental health."

Bell and other experts continue to view some instances of racism as a symptom of other disorders. Racist thoughts and actions are often a manifestation of some other established and diagnosable mental disorder, says Bell. People with narcissistic personality disordera mental condition many experts have claimed Trump has often have fixed valuesrooted in racism. Dylann Roof, the teen white supremacist convicted of killing nine black people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, had been diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. People with conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder often experience extreme paranoia related to race or ethnicity, though not always violence.

Outside the court hearing for James Alex Fields, the suspect who drove his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Heinbach, of the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party, shouts at journalists. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There is also evidence that most of us harbor prejudices, leading some experts to believewe are hardwired to discriminate in some fashion (though not specificallyagainst others). The Implicit Association test (IAT), a tool used to understand the roots and extent of bias, measures impulses of subconscious racismfor example, whether we associate certain types of people with negative or positive feelings. The test, which was developed by social psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginiaand the University of Washington more than two decades ago, has been taken by more than 17 million people. The results show that at least 90 percent of Americans are at least slightly biased against people unlike themselves. Psychologists remain split on where to draw the line, though. Some say discrimination requires a diagnosis when thoughts become actions. But others doubt whether acting on racist beliefs warrants a label of its own.

This Is Not Normal

The fact that many people who act on extreme racist beliefs leadhigh-functioning lives may also stand in the way of labeling this demographic as mentally ill. In the early 1960s, Jewish author and journalist Hannah Arendt covered the trials of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann for theNew Yorker. She was shocked that half a dozen psychiatrists had certified Eichmann as normal, despite the fact that he orchestrated the mass murder of millions of Jews. One psychiatrist described his familial relationships as not just normal but desirable.

In the decades following the Holocaust, the idea that someone who commits crimes against racial and ethnic minorities could still be considered sane by psychiatrists was unsettling, says James M. Thomas, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Mississippi. Many people turned to the explanation that there must be something wrong with the German psyche to have allowed this to happen.

Social scientists knew that creating a clinical definition was critical. They understood that stigmatizing extreme racism could help society wake up to the abnormality of this pathology, and possibly prevent other genocidal acts. Three psychologists devised the California F-scale F stands for fascista test used to evaluate a person for authoritarian personality type. They thought understanding how people wereseduced by Adolf Hitlers rhetoric could help prevent future such movements. Although the F-scale fell out of favor, it enabled psychologiststo identify common traits of people who cling to dangerous ideologies. They included an inflexible outlook, strong allegiance to leadership, a tendency to scapegoat others and a willingness to lash out in anger and violence.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, on July 8, 2017, members of the Ku Klux Klan gesture during a rally calling for the protection of Southern Confederate monuments. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

Sander Gilman, who teaches psychiatry at Emory University, and co-authored with Thomas the book Are Racists Crazy?, agrees that dangerous racists leadingseemingly normal lives are hard to identify. Racists, sadly,cope quite well with daily life, says Gilman. They have a take on the way the world should be, and that take functions in the world they live.

Gilman does not favora standalone diagnosis of extreme racism, and believes that attempts to categorize such people as mentally ill masks the greater problem of society allowing them to commit vengeful acts. Those people are evil. Theyve made bad choices, but theyre not choices you can then attribute to mental illness, says Gilman.The minute you do that you let people off the hook.

Link:
Alt-Right: Are Racists Mentally Ill? Some Psychiatrists Say Yes - Newsweek

Last weekend, a group of neo-Nazis marched alongside other white supremacists and far right activists in Charlottesville. The chants and visual tools they used from swastikas to wooden shields to blood and soil chants revived rhetoric and imagery that many in America believed to be entirely eradicated: so beyond the pale of common morality that no reasonable person could possibly seek to revive it.

That belief, and the complacency it engendered, was erroneous. If anything, the sheer taboo nature of Nazi imagery how thoroughly outside the window of acceptable discourse it is has, to its supporters, only added to its appeal. Its very transgressive nature has made it easy for propagandists to market it as sexy and forbidden.

This is not new. The sexualization of fascist and, specifically, Nazi imagery precedes even World War II. In his The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written against the backdrop of the Nazi rise to power in the late 1930s, critic and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin warned against the aesthetic dangers of fascist imagery, as it was predicated on eroticized notions of power and submission.

"The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life, Benjamin wrote, latter adding: [Mankinds] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

In other words, we culturally fetishize both absolute power and our own apocalyptic destruction, and fascism capitalizes on that fetishism to win supporters. And certainly the success of Hitlers own propaganda lay in part in the Nazis ability to harness that erotic undertone to gain support. Consider German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahls Olympia documentary series, which celebrated (Aryan) German masculine beauty at the 1936 Olympics. (Riefenstahls conscious complicity with Nazi ideology has long been a subject of debate she strenuously denied it but its undeniable that her lens captured how Germans of the time saw their Germany identity, and their Fhrer.)

The taboo nature of Nazi imagery made it even more of an eroticized phenomenon after World War II. Cultural critic Susan Sontag noted this in her 1974 essay Fascinating Fascism, pointing out how the trappings of fascism (particularly here, too, Nazi fascism) gained a cultural potency from being illicit and forbidden.

"To those born after the 1940's, Sontag wrote, fascism represents the exotic and the unknown. ... Right-wing movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface. ... Certainly Nazism is sexier than communism.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, likewise, commented in an interview that Every shoddy erotic fantasy is now attributed to Nazism. Arent we witnessing beginnings of a re-eroticization of power, taken to a pathetic ridiculous extreme by the porn shops with Nazi insignia that you can find the United States?

Plenty of films about World War II made in the second half of the 20th century echo those tensions. On the high culture front, there was Liliana Cavanis The Night Porter, about a sadomasochistic relationship between a concentration camp survivor and her old guard. On the pulp side, there was 1975s Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS, one of so many Nazisploitation movies that treated the Holocaust as Eli Roth-style torture porn, complete with a sexual frisson. In Ilsa, the main character and her contemporaries were leather-clad, whip-wielding Nazi dominatrixes.

The more taboo the approach, the more powerful it became in the popular id. After all, Nazi prisoner-themed pornographic pulp, or stalags," were so popular in the newly created state of Israel the population of which was at that time 50 percent Holocaust survivors that the Israeli government had to ban the genre in 1963.

Even today, we fetishize the taboo nature of Nazi ideology. A November 2000 New York Times style article celebrated fascist chic as the in look of the season, quoting a magazine editor as saying: "Fascism I hate to say it, but it's sexy. ... It expresses the idea of taking and then relinquishing control. Often, the aesthetics of Italian fascism a more palatable aesthetic than the German version would make its way into pop culture. The article quotes a New York fashion designer who modeled her latest collection after architecture under Mussolini: Brutal granite and travertine structures, the dictator's pet mode of propaganda, are all about power, the article quotes her as saying, and power is the greatest turn-on.

The eroticization of Nazism was twofold, in other words. It relied on both a wider existing cultural fetishization of power and masculinity and a more recent fetishization of the forbidden. As scholar Laura Catherine Frost writes in her book Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, the politically forbidden and repudiated is just as likely to be the substance of erotic fantasy and the chosen political object. ... Images of sexualized fascism derive their meaning precisely from the distance mainstream culture puts between itself and deviation.

To admit the erotic charge of Nazi ideology openly may seem distasteful or outright immoral. But it is precisely the dialectic between repression and transgression that allowed Nazi ideology to flourish in certain corners of the internet: permitting the Twitter trolls of the alt-right to morph, slowly, into flesh-and-blood perpetrators of racial violence.

After all, as I wrote for Real Life magazine in November 2016, the loose coalition of alt-right that came to form the umbrella we know today wasnt entirely composed of conscious, intentional white supremacists. Some were, to be sure, but as many denizens of alt-right gathering places like 4chans /pol/ modeled themselves after British free speech firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos saying the most offensive thing possible to get a rise out of people, reveling in his disengagement as well as those who were committed white nationalists like Richard Spencer.

Many members of the alt-right and alt-right-adjacent I interviewed then spoke of the Overton window the field of culturally acceptable discourse and how they wanted to widen it as much as possible. Unchecked free speech, including the freedom to do a Hitler salute, was integral to how they presented themselves: as sexy, transgressive agent provocateurs.

And widen the Overton window they did. Capitalizing on those same erotic tropes that defined a 1974 genre of soft porn, or a sexy 2000 fashion trend, they managed to present themselves as the real underdogs: the most punk rock of us all, going beyond the boundaries of outrage, morality, and good taste. In so doing, they provided a culturally acceptable avenue for jokes about a pure ethnostate to become ideology, for the implicit racism underpinning so much of America to become explicit, and to reinforce itself through repetition the real meme magic so popular with the alt-right until irony became truth.

As long as the alt-right continues to be glamorized, we risk making more would-be rebels without a cause like the man who drove his car into the crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

Indeed, perhaps the most effective portrayal of Nazism is one that looks on its horrors with humor. Mel Brookss 1967 film The Producers so controversial when it came out culminated in the (Jewish) protagonists attempting to stage a schlocky propagandistic musical, Springtime for Hitler, a surefire (they hoped) bust. The film presents the musicals title number in its entirety: awkward goose-stepping and robotic salutes, Nazi Rockettes, and a drugged-out Hitler who can barely remember his lines. That film, created by Jews just two decades after the horrors of the Holocaust, smashed open the Overton window far more defiantly than Milo Yiannopoulos and his ilk could ever hope to do.

If the alt-right is correct about anything, its that we should in this one instance keep that very window of discourse open, to strip Nazi ideology once and for all of the taboo eroticism its had since Leni Riefenstahl captured some strapping Aryan boys on camera. And we should use that space to point and laugh.

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Sexualized fascism: how the taboo nature of Nazi imagery made the alt-right more powerful - Vox