Hay Field 101

A week later, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan remarked on X that Trump’s reference to blood poisoning was a “straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point.” Hasan was right. The theme of racial blood-poisoning1, and the idea that racial outsiders are vectors of deadly, contagious disease, was a mainstay of Nazi (and neo-Nazi) discourse. Hitler described the mixing of racially pure Germans with non-Germans as a “poisoning.” The Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “poisons the blood of others” and described them as “international poisoners”and expressed the view, as summarized by Felicity Rash in her book The Language of Violence: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that “it was inevitable that these ‘lower’ beings would try to poison the ‘higher’ Aryans or to develop a parasitic dependency upon them.” According to Hitler, this poses an existential threat because “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” Because blood-poisoning caused Germany to become diseased at the instigation of Jews, and the Marxists under their control, Hitler characterized Jews and Marxists as a “plague” or “epidemic” that is “worse than the Black Death of olden times.” In fact, we can find such references in My New Order—the book that Trump allegedly kept near his bedside. “Insofar as we devote ourselves to the care of our own blood—that blood which has been entrusted to us by destiny—we are at the same time doing our best to safeguard other peoples from diseases that spring from race to race, from people to people.” On the same day that the National Pulse interview was aired, Trump gave a speech in Michigan, near Detroit, courting the political favor of non-union automobile manufacturing workers. The speech is loaded with fascist-style rhetoric. He described Joe Biden as a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey.” On the face of it, this was a peculiar image, as vultures are scavengers, not predators, but it was rhetorically well-chosen, combining denigration of Biden’s age with a bird associated with death, disgust, and decay. “Under Biden,” Trump claimed, “instead of economic nationalism you have ultra-left-wing globalism.” The term “globalists” (and it’s cognate “globalism”) is a far-right dog-whistle referring to the supposed international Jewish conspiracy. It is a semantic descendant of the Nazis’ term “rootless cosmopolitans” which targeted Jews and their Marxist fellow travelers. The vulture, Biden, is also a vampire who has “backed every single blood-sucking attack on US auto workers.” References to vampirism and parasitism—ultimately derived from the Medieval conspiracy theory that Jewish people consumed the blood of Christian children2 —were standard Nazi rhetorical fare. As Rash summarizes, when Hitler wrote about Jews, Blood sucking creatures, parasites, and microscopic organisms appear in a number of guises, and are obviously intended to provoke revulsion in the reader….Hitler readily adopted images of parasitism, claiming that the Jewish parasite had to be destroyed if the host were too survive. After his speech in Michigan, Trump granted an interview to Newsmax during which, when asked about migrants crossing our border from Mexico, he responded that Democrats are “Marxists, communists, fascists” who are allowing border crossings that are “killing our country, they’re destroying the blood of our country.” Again, the poisoning and destruction of blood is a distinctively Nazi trope. I am not suggesting that Trump is a Nazi, or that he embraces an anti-Semitic ideology. Rather, I am suggesting that in light of his specific choice of imagery, the claim that he is influenced by Nazi rhetoric should not be dismissed out of hand. David Livingstone Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Maine. He has published nine books, including On Inhumanity and Less Than Human, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for contributions to the understanding of racism and appreciation of diversity. This post originally appeared on his Substack. See Chapter Three of my book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization for a discussion of the role of “blood” in racial discourse. ↩︎ See, for example, Masha Teter’s Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth. ↩︎ Need more? No Sir I just wanted you to prove my point.

you do you. Bet you cant stop there. Prove me wrong.

ohhh how cute.

Simply an old guy? He's the freaking President of the United States. You have absolutely nothing in your vocabulary that could cause me to explode into flames. Maybe have a laughing fit but not flames my boy.

A liability to Biden? That made my coffee shoot through my nose. That dude is a walking, sorry, shuffling liability all on his own.

I will take the original NWO when they were called the 4 Horsemen.

Mrs. Howell for the win. Elegant, sophisticated and rich. Just as soon as I knock Mr. Howell she's mine.

I would rather put the figure 4 leg lock on the idiot who said yea, lets hire him. But I feel ya.

Take that Harsin. well, I guess you can take it along with your 15 mill.

actually, he played us if you want to know the truth to get money from bama.

or, or maybe he just wants to leave. Ever think of that?

It’s Great to be an Auburn Tiger I say it’s Great to be an Auburn Tiger

absolute and total domination. Next.

Good book author.