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Allison Siegelman| Erie Times-News

U.S. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been responsible for circulating wacky QAnon conspiracy theories that have dark, satanic themes that are reminiscent of those believed in ancient times. She and those associated with alt-right and QAnon groups target the Jewish people in the same way the Nazi Party did: They spread stump rhetoric, written propaganda and images all weaving the fiction with horrifying false characterizations and conspiracies about how the country is being destroyed by people amongst us.

What is most concerning is that Holocaust revisionism and denial has been embraced by some in academics with an agenda. It is so extreme that the genocide of 6 million Jews (along with many other minorities) throughout Europe is being questioned, especially by the younger generations who did not live through World War II.

We are in times that leaveus with few of those who lived through the WWII period. The elders today are mostly those who were babies to toddlers at the time of the war. Soon, they, too, will be gone. History has recorded in video and text the wars atrocities as they occurred and retrospectives. These archives have been maintained in Holocaust museums in Israeland the U.S., along with the U.N., and many other government archives, museums and archival organizations.

Todays conspiracists who wish to diminish or discredit the history preserved through videos, publications and testimonials of the millions who lived through that time are attempting to erase the Holocaust, and for what purpose? It appears to be a radical political agendaor delusions from mental illness that are responsible.

The hatemongers are attracted to provincialism. They are willing to use any tactic to keep America from being a diverse democratized nation that today offers humans of all races, religions, ethnicities, genders and sexual persuasions freedom from persecution and oppression.

However, the U.S. has a jaded past that is filled with slavery, racism and segregation. It is no surprise that our nation birthed a movement in the late 1800s, known as eugenics, that led to the sterilization of over 64,000 disabled or impoverished (mostly of dark-skinned) Americans. Hitler and the Nazi Party subscribed to this ideology disguised at the time as science. The desire to propagate a superior race lead to the insanity of the 20th century Holocaust which is still recorded as the worst genocide in history it eliminated two-thirds (67%) of the worlds Jewish population, or 6 million Jews.

Genocide is the deliberate killing of a people with the intent of eliminating them from existence.

The Jewish people had endured many battles and oppression since their tribal identity was created by the father of monotheism (the belief in one God), Abraham. It was Hitlers Nazi fascism that targeted death to all Jews throughout the world not just to drive them out of a land. The Nazi Party was able to formulate conspiracy theories that relied on demonizing Jews bycirculating tales of Jews plotting to deceive and destroy the non-Jewish population. They played on arousing fear in a demographic group who were provincial, gullibleand eager to find a scapegoat for the ills of their nation.

Today, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and those like her are doing exactly the same thing. These extremists are looking to instill fear and anger in Americans who see anyone other than white and Christian as a threat to the U.S. They wrap their falsehoods with patriotism and glorify the quest to attack the Jews as if Jews are not trustworthy and upstanding citizens.

Ironically, those who participate in such defamation can be seen as the real enemy of a democratized nation. Those who remain indifferent or dismissive of the trend in radicalized American patriotism and the militia cells that we today call domestic terrorism are as much to blame for the threat to our nation.

If we are to survive as a democracy, we must put party politics aside and look to history for an understanding of what gave rise to democracy. George Santayanas iconic words spoken in 1905 could not be more relevant, Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. It was in 1948 before the British House of Commons upon the end of WWII that Winston Churchill revised the quote as, Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. I ask that we, as Americans, embrace the most basic tenet of democracy to avoid a horrific slide into fascism and worse: immorality.

Allison Siegelman of York Township is a member of Central PA American Israel Public Affairs.

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QAnon and the alt-right draw from the Nazi playbook - GoErie.com

On Feb. 10, Fox News was in lockstep with other cable news channels and major broadcast networks in presenting more than four hours of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

But at 5 p.m. Eastern, Fox News pulled away from the most graphic video evidence of violence during the insurrection by pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and switched to its popular daily roundtable show The Five.

Most of the panelists dismissed the Democratic impeachment managers presentation, defended the former president and moved on to other topics including the viral Zoom cat lawyer video despite the historic nature of the events in Washington. Viewers who wanted Fox News journalists take on the proceedings had to wait until anchor Bret Baier showed up at the top of the 6 p.m. hour.

The editorial judgment to cut away was met with derision on social media, where the conservative-leaning news network is often hammered by critics. On screen, Juan Williams, the lone liberal on The Five, angrily chastised his co-hosts for ignoring the evidence presented.

What played out that day demonstrates the pressure Fox News is under, as the network faces growing scrutiny over its role in supporting Trump and his disinformation claims that many believe helped to fuel the deadly insurrection attempt in the Capitol.

The profit engine of Rupert Murdochs Fox Corp. presents itself as a news network, but its often defined by its opinion hosts, such as Sean Hannity, who pay fealty to Trump and the former presidents devoted followers.

Those followers now have multiple options to feed their fix for right-wing opinions some of them far more extreme than what is delivered on Fox News. Satisfying those viewers while also reporting information that does not fit their worldview has become a challenge for an organization that faces vocal detractors on the political center and left, a potentially expensive lawsuit from one of Trumps baseless voter fraud targets and an increasingly outsize role in the parent companys financial performance.

I have friends who dont watch Fox anymore because they see it as untethered from reality, said Richard Goodstein, a Washington attorney who has appeared on the channel as a liberal guest. The question for Fox is balancing losing viewers like that to losing viewers who switch channels rather than watching someone like me who forcefully brings facts and opinions that they cannot tolerate.

Chris Stirewalt, the former political editor for Fox News, said in an op-ed column for The Times that he faced anger from the Trump multitudes after defending the networks election night call of the once reliably red Arizona for Joe Biden.

When I defended the call for Biden in the Arizona election, I became a target of murderous rage from consumers who were furious at not having their views confirmed, he wrote.

Giving the benefit of the doubt and often full-throated support to a president whose lies led to an attempt to overturn an election in turn led to voting software maker Smartmatics $2.7-billion defamation lawsuit against the network and three of its hosts.

The suit filed Feb. 4 alleges that Fox News and its hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro damaged Smartmatics reputation and business by spreading Trumps conspiracy theories about the election being rigged to elect President Biden. (Fox News and the hosts have filed motions to dismiss the suit, saying the Trumps claims were newsworthy, even if they were false.)

A more immediate question hanging over Fox News is the same one the Republican party is grappling with: What is the next move for Trump? Just as Republican legislators fear Trump will support primary challengers back home if they take him to task, Fox News has to determine how to navigate his expected re-emergence following his acquittal in the second impeachment trial.

Joe Walsh, a former tea party movement congressman from Illinois and conservative radio host, said the right-wing audience remains enthralled with Trump.

Thats the only thing thats going to satiate the folks who turn on Fox, Walsh said. Right now they are going on about big tech censorship and immigration. Thats not going to be enough.

The challenges come as Fox News has emerged as the most significant piece of Fox Corp., which slimmed down after selling most of its entertainment assets to the Walt Disney Co. for $71 billion. During the current fiscal year, Fox News is expected to contribute 80% or more than $2 billion to Fox Corp.'s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, an industry-wide measurement of profitability.

Fox News has been the most-watched cable news channel for 19 consecutive years, thanks to its effective positioning as a right-leaning alternative to other TV news outlets. As the rest of the traditional TV business declined in 2020, the channels audience grew. Fox News became the most-watched network in all of cable TV, according to Nielsen.

The network expected an audience falloff once Trump lost the White House, as it had seen viewers tune out after Barack Obama, a Democrat, defeated his Republican opponents in 2008 and 2012.

But Trump remained the main story in the weeks after the 2020 election with his unfounded charges of voter fraud, leading to the insurrection at the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters that killed five people, followed by the second impeachment trial. Depressed Trump supporters tuned out of Fox News during coverage of those events, while the ratings for MSNBC and CNN surged as viewers who dont habitually watch cable news were tuning in.

Fox News has managed to ride out ratings fluctuations in the past, but it took longer this time. The network has ranked first in viewers since Bidens inauguration, although it still trails CNN in the 25 to 54 age group important to advertisers.

The dip was significant enough for Fox Corp. Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch to calm the waters. On Feb. 9, Murdoch told financial analysts that the company extended the employment contract of Fox News Media Chief Executive Suzanne Scott and praised her performance.

Arnon Mishkin, director of the Fox News decision desk, explains his call of Arizona for former vice president Joe Biden.

Scott took over the operation in 2018 after it had been rocked by sexual harassment scandals and racial discrimination lawsuits related to the reign of the networks founding chief executive, Roger Ailes. After maintaining the networks ratings leadership for two years, she is now jiggering the networks lineup and will add at least two more hours of right-leaning opinion programs, which have always been the most reliable ratings performers.

Murdoch also tried to counter the notion that Fox News has veered too far to one end of the political spectrum.

We dont need to go further right, Murdoch said. Well stick where we are, and we think thats exactly right and thats the best thing for the business and for our viewers.

Despite the younger Murdochs assurances, there is a sense among some politicos and people inside Fox News that the network has already moved further right to stave off the insurgence of new outlets that are courting their audience. Even veterans of past Republican administrations, such as Matthew Dowd, who worked for George W. Bush, believe there has been a shift.

We saw them as conservative and more likely to be more friendly than others, but we never saw them as like, Oh, lets do Fox because theyre basically a propaganda arm, Dowd said. You always thought of it as a conservative outlet, but it was rational conservative.

A Fox News insider not authorized to speak publicly on the matter said the conservative bent of the network is reflective of where the Republican Party has gone under Trump.

This past year, Fox News saw the rise of a pesky new rival in Newsmax, which kept up a steadfast defense of Trumps voter fraud claims through President Bidens inauguration. Last fall, the Boca Raton, Fla.-based channel averaged as many as 1 million viewers at 7 p.m. Eastern on some days with host Greg Kelly, who on Trumps last day in office said, I miss him already.

Newsmaxs ratings have faded in recent weeks. Since the inauguration it has averaged 226,000 viewers compared with 2.5 million for Fox News.

The other right-wing Fox wannabe is the more strident San Diego-based One America News Network, which does not have enough distribution in cable and satellite homes to be measured by Nielsen.

But the new breed of conservative outlets know how to attract attention. After Fox News Media canceled Dobbs Fox Business Network program where many of Trumps election fraud falsehoods were promoted OAN founder Robert Herring asked in a tweet for the host to give him a call. We may have a position available for you in which you wouldnt be censored for speaking the truth! Herring wrote.

Dobbs remains under contract to Fox News and still gets an annual salary in the seven figures.

Neither of the upstart channels has the financial resources or infrastructure to knock Fox News off its perch. Nevertheless, Fox News is entering an era where a multitude of new contenders will try to nibble away at the conservative audience it once had to itself.

Theyve gone from having zero wing-nut competition to aggressive wing-nut competition, said Mike Murphy, a former Republican consultant and current political analyst for NBC News.

In addition to watching on cable, viewers can stream Newsmax and OAN without a pay TV subscription. There are also more digital conservative channels such as the First, which carries a nightly show from former Fox News host Bill OReilly, and Glenn Becks Blaze Live. Both are available on free ad-supported streaming services such as Pluto.

Social media has provided new outlets for right-leaning voices as well. The Facebook page of Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, a former cop and Secret Service agent turned pugnacious Trump-defending pundit, has more monthly engagements than any major mainstream news organization on the platform.

Jon Klein, a digital media entrepreneur and former CNN president, said audience fragmentation is inevitable now that streaming has reached critical mass.

Ten years ago conservative audiences were not that digitally savvy, Klein said. The early adopters of digital media were younger, more liberal, educated, et cetera. None of this digital technology is a mystery anymore to the older white males who watch Fox News and certainly not a mystery to the alt-right young men they want.

Fox News does have an internal image problem resulting from the Arizona election call, which it stood by, despite an angry response from the Trump campaign and his supporters.

Stirewalt was fired from Fox News in a company restructuring on Jan. 19. Bill Sammon, the longtime executive in charge of the Washington bureau, which has long fought to remain independent from the networks opinion side, announced his retirement a day earlier.

Both moves were seen as responses to their roles on election night, leaving some of the journalists at the company stunned and concerned that the network is lessening its commitment to straight news.

Rupert Murdoch recently told the Washington Post that Stirewalts exit was not related to the Arizona call. It was known among Fox News executives that Murdoch was not a fan of Stirewalt, who declined comment.

Even the perception that Fox News ousted journalists over reporting an election result that was ultimately accurate could damage one of the foundational constructs of the channel. The integrity of the Fox News polling unit and the precision accuracy of its election decision desk has helped define the divide between news and opinion.

But keeping the core conservative Fox News viewer happy is the companys primary goal. Rupert Murdochs U.S. newspapers the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post have been highly critical of Trumps actions on their editorial pages since he lost the election. Any personal political convictions he has on the matter are not worth alienating fickle TV viewers who could ultimately have an impact on the companys balance sheet.

They are not sentimental about their programming decisions, Klein said of the Murdochs. They do what they need to do to get an audience.

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Fox News tries to satisfy Trump fans, but at what cost? - Los Angeles Times

Over the past month, the world has watched the United States in the throes of a struggle over a democratic system that they thought was invincible. Then more recently, in Myanmar we saw the borrowed false accusations of a corrupted election succeed in overthrowing a democracy, at least temporarily.

It's felt for many of us as if the foundations of democratic processes are on trial, and democracys source in the ancient world has been looked to for answers. But the widely accepted story that democracy was a brilliant, even miraculous, invention of 5th-century BCE Athens, and that the West is the heir to that moment in time, has obscured the universal hard work that's required to make democracy work well.

My research, among others', suggests that the struggle to create social and political systems that serve the wider populace existed long before, and in regions far distant, from classical Athens.

From armed mobs descending on the US Capitol, to the cleansing installation of a new American president, the world peered with a mixture of horror and bemusement as the self-professed greatest democracy in the world played out its internal battles. Democrats'Twitter was awash with teary American exceptionalism citing the victory and drawbacks of the worlds greatest deliberative body.

People around the world wanted to rejoice, but felt themselves balking at the only-in-America stance of the rhetoric.

At the same time, another more bizarre thread ran through all of this: The mobs descending on the Capitol wore the insignia of a variety of Greek and Roman fictionalised histories, and on the other side a Democratic senator condemned the chaos by citing Roman history, only minutes after regaining the Senate floor from the mob attack.

This equivalence between American democracy and the ancient world has a very long and problematic history the so-called founders evoked the Roman republic in defence of both their representative democracy and their adherence to slavery. By and large, the academic world has been willing to concede the parallels if Athens and Rome were the progenitors of democracy, the US was their most prominent heir.

The discipline of classics the study of ancient Greece and Rome has been undergoing some serious soul-searching in the past few years, just as classical history was increasingly picked up and distorted by the alt-right. The events of the past few months have brought this scholarly argument into the public forum, with the increasingly heated debate coming to a head in the past week.

Scholars have pointed out the huge fault lines in Athenian democracy (most of the population of Athens could not participate), and the largely manipulated history of the early Roman republic.

Many (but not all) classicists have balked at the myth of a legacy of an exclusive Western civilisation, but the origins of democracy have remained fairly stubbornly rooted in classical soil. That ultimate arbiter of history and culture, Wikipedia, tells us that the concepts of democracy originated in ancient Athens circa 508 BC. There's been surprisingly little push-back in classics to challenge that idea.

American exceptionalism has been uncannily mirrored by ancient Athenian exceptionalism.

A large part of this is definitional the Greek historian Herodotus first calls the political system of the 5th century BCE a democracy, and anything that doesnt fit that exact pattern is dismissed. (In fact, Herodotus puts the earliest use of the term democracy not in the mouths of Athenians, but in a speech debating the merits of different political systems by that notorious Persian, Darius I but thats another story).

Pedants will tell you that the US is a republic (after Rome) and not a democracy (following Athens), but that's a rhetorical ploy.When we say democracy, we mean a political system where decisions are made by the majority of its populace, or their elected representatives, in some kind of formalised way.

And that the practice of democracy plays out in a variety of ways across the world. Dont tell the protestors in the Republic of Myanmar that their stolen parliamentary system was not a democracy because it doesnt fit the Athenian model; they know better.

In large part, the legacy of Athens and Rome is the result of documentation. They're the models because they recorded what they did (or at least others wrote about them later). But if we look harder at the traces of world history, other examples emerge that indicate that the practice of democracy has wider roots and more diverse branches.

If the debate around the validity of the classical tradition goes anywhere, it will be to acknowledge that democracy wasnt the brilliant invention of an elite group of men in Iron-Age Greece.

My research on the Medes of the Zagros Mountains in Iran suggests that a few hundred years before Athens, Median communities responded to the encroaching Assyrian Empire by formalising their consensus decision-making; we dont have written confirmation for this transition, because the Medes probably purposefully avoided the record-keeping that would have made it easier for the Assyrians to extort taxes and tribute from them.

But archaeological excavations revealed a new Median form of columned meeting house that seems designed specifically for communal gatherings not unlike the famous Athenian hillslope meeting ground. My research team is now undertaking further analyses of the pottery and animal bones from these sites to find out just how far people were willing to travel to participate in these deliberations.

Early states in Africa also seem to have shared many components with the democratic tribal system of 5th-century BCE Athens, although, again, oral histories silenced by colonialism make it difficult to confirm details.

Larissa Behrendt has argued that Indigenous Australian communities used a variety of institutionalised democratic principles in their governance before colonialism imposed its own structure on them.

Jettisoning the exceptionalism of Athenian democracy isnt about rejecting that heritage. Athenian democracy, deeply flawed as it was, nonetheless provided a model for the benefits of a political system where decision-making was widely (but not widely enough) distributed. The fact that Athenians and later Romans wrote so convincingly of their reservations about this system may have been the best thing about it.

But if the debate regarding the validity of the classical tradition goes anywhere, it will be to acknowledge that democracy wasnt the brilliant invention of an elite group of men in Iron-Age Greece.

Democracy is an answer to an ancient question:How can communities serve all their members? Answering this question is an essential part of the functioning of human societies, and democracy is one solution that has both flourished and been quashed across history and around the world.

Greece and Rome are notable, but not exclusive, examples of the merits and failures of these systems. The false origin story of a democracy born in Athens with the West as its heir creates a barrier between democratic ideals and the establishment of enduring systems of governance around the world.

Its time to look more carefully for the democratic impulse in all our communities.

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The global roots of democracy matter if it is to flourish in the future Monash Lens - Monash Lens

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Letter to the editor: Impeachment and the First Amendment - TribLIVE

One of the cool things about Poynters beautiful offices in St. Petersburg, Florida, is something you see just before you step into the building. On the sidewalk, embedded in marble, is the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment also had a prominent place on another building. It was embedded on a giant wall at the Newseum the interactive museum in Washington, D.C., that celebrated the media, the freedom of the press and expression and the First Amendment. But the Newseum closed to the public at the end of 2019.

And now, in a heartbreaking symbol, the First Amendment on the Newseum building is being dismantled. A troubling reminder of how many Americans now view the media and the freedom of the press, wouldnt you say?

No announcement has been made, but there is hope it will be reassembled at another location.

Heres a little more information on the First Amendment wall by the company that built it.

This piece originally appeared in The Poynter Report, our daily newsletter for everyone who cares about the media. Subscribe to The Poynter Reporthere.

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The removal of the First Amendment from the Newseum building is a disheartening sight - Poynter