Alabama Congressman Quotes Mein Kampf While Criticizing Democrats and the Media
Mo Brooks, a five-term congressman from Alabama, cited an anti-Semitic argument pushed by Adolf Hitler while condemning Democrats and the press for their “big lie” about collusion during a speech on the House floor Monday.
It appears Brooks was attempting to draw parallels between President Donald Trump’s critics and Nazis. But the language he used, directly citing Mein Kampf, instead positioned himself, the president, and his party as the Nazis in his analogy and the Democrats as the Jews—victims of a vilification effort rooted in part in the Nazi insistence that Jews were malicious liars.
While the “big lie” is now thought of as a propaganda technique used by the Nazis—the propagation of a lie so enormous it is given credence because of its brazenness—the term was actually coined by Hitler and his followers. The big lie, according to Hitler, was by traitorous Jews who blamed the violently anti-Semitic German Gen. Erich Ludendorff for Germany’s defeat in World War I.
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Brooks is not the first Republican to falsely describe the Nazis, a fascist and right-wing political party, as a socialist, leftist one, and many in the GOP have gone out of their way to emphasize the “socialist” part of the party’s name.
And it’s not the first time Brooks has made historically dubious and racially charged claims about a group of people. He has compared border crossings by Latin American immigrants to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, and he has accused the Democratic Party of launching a “war on whites.”
