Former President Donald Trump and MAGA ideology are corrupting family values and posing an existential threat to American democracy, according to a Salon piece published Wednesday that accuses Trump of unapologetically echoing fascist and Nazi rhetoric.
The essay, titled “The Trump generation problem: MAGA family values are corrupting children,” was penned by Salon politics staff writer Chauncey DeVega, who warns that “Trumpism and American neofascism” are corrupting societal norms and endangering democracy, thereby constituting a “national emergency.”
Trumpism and American neofascism are a national emergency. The mainstream news media has failed to adapt and even worse are normalizing it. My new @Salon: https://t.co/R8klPR7mfW
— chauncey devega (@chaunceydevega) December 20, 2023
Accusing him of following the “dictator’s playbook,” DeVega laments that the former president “has not been significantly punished or restrained by the courts, yet,” while calling “Dictator Trump’s Hitlerian plans” — including the deployment of American troops to secure the border and enforce immigration laws — “how democracies die.”
He also claims Trump continues to “channel” Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “with his promise to cleanse (White) American society of the ‘vermin’ and human ‘blood pollution’ he believes is caused by non-white undocumented immigrants and migrants.”
In those comments, DeVega claims the former president was not “flirting with” Hitlerism and Nazism, but “almost verbatim quoting Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ and other Nazi language and ideology.”
“Trump knows exactly what he is saying — and like other autocrats and dictators he means it,” he writes, as he accuses the news media of repeatedly attempting to “downplay and normalize Trump’s increasingly unrestrained evil.”
Citing political writer Jill Lawrence, DeVega warns that Trump presents a “massive challenge today to parents across the ideological spectrum who believe in old-fashioned virtues like respect and civility.”
“Other parents, those who admire Trump, are enthusiastically introducing their kids to the cruel and dangerous MAGA culture, and they appear blind to the harm Trump is doing—both to their families and to the nation,” he continues.
Claiming that Trump “idolizes gangsters and criminals” after the former president made a reference to the indictments of American mobster Al Capone, DeVega declares Trumpism a “generational challenge” that requires “[h]ealing, renewing, and then immunizing American democracy against such forces.”
“The growing and existential danger that such forces represent to American democracy and freedom should be the leading story across the news media,” he writes.
He concludes by urging major news organizations to take a stand against “Trumpian fascism,” suggesting front-page editorials declare that a vote for Trump is a vote against democracy.
The matter comes as progressives face accusations of attempting to divide children from their families and supplanting traditional values with “woke” ones.
The senior Salon writer has a history of expressing radical anti-Republican rhetoric.
In March, DeVega claimed today’s Republican Party and larger “conservative” movement are “waging a fascist war against multiracial pluralist democracy and human freedom.”
In June, he accused the GOP of being a “de facto terrorist organization” as well as the “world’s largest white supremacist” group.
Last year, he said Democrats don’t want unity with the GOP “fascists,” as he accused Republicans of seeking to create a society in which black people “have no rights the white man is bound to respect.”
The senior politics writer also claimed the GOP has morphed from an “evil insect” into a full-blown “terrorist organization,” while accusing Republicans and Trump supporters of seeking a war against American democracy, encouraging widescale violence against the left and minorities, and using “stochastic terrorism” to achieve their aims.
Previously, a shockingly anti-white and anti-Christian Salon piece by DeVega referred to “the Republican fascist movement” as “objectively evil,” hoping that “people of color” die out in the battle against “multiracial democracy,” while accusing “white Christians” of embracing lies, terrorism, white supremacy, and fascism.
In another essay penned by DeVega, the left-wing writer accused Republicans of resembling “good Germans” of the Nazi era — wishing to believe they are decent people while hiding behind “fictions of plausible deniability for the evils committed by their leader,” as he described today’s conservatism as seeking “friendly fascism” masked in an appeal to return to “traditional values.”
