Journalism Professor Angie Chuang; University of Colorado-Boulder
OPINION
When President Donald Trump generates news stories, he is acting just like Adolf Hitler, according to a University of Colorado Boulder journalism professor.
Professor Angie Chuang said Trump’s “shifting policy positions” along with his “racially inflammatory statements and threats” create numerous news headlines, which are part of a darker, devious strategy according to the scholar. (Though if Chuang is writing a story herself about Trump, that presumably makes her complicit in Trump’s plan).
Chuang (pictured) recently shared her thoughts in The Conversation, a purportedly academic news website that leans heavily against Trump, and receives millions in dues from private and public universities, including CU-Boulder. She has previously called Trump a “racist.”
Chuang knocks Trump for initially saying he would send troops into San Francisco to quell crime and then reversing course after pushback from the city and “tech moguls.” Each new development creates a new story, which Chuang said is part of Trump’s Hitler-like plan to overload people with information.
She writes:
I am a longtime journalist and now scholar of journalism and race, trained to see the methods and aims behind political leaders’ press operations. And as I show in my forthcoming book, the Trump administration’s rhetorical strategies echo the playbooks of authoritarian and white supremacist organizations such as the Third Reich and some factions of the modern alt-right movement. They are intended to narrow the scope of who belongs as an American.
In her Conversation essay, Chuang spreads disinformation, repeating the debunked claim that in 2017 Trump said there “fine people” on “both sides” of a violent riot in Charlottesville, Va. As extensively documented, he was referring to protesters who wanted a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee taken down and those who wanted it to stay. Even left-wing Snopes confirmed this.
Chuang continued on to make frequent references to Trump being just like Hitler, writing:
A recent scholarly analysis of Trump’s leadership concludes that the second-term president is overwhelming the public into “organized despair” by pitting races against each other while targeting minority groups as scapegoats, a tactic that hearkens back to 1930s Germany.
Researchers of Nazi propaganda identified key tactics in the German press such as name-calling and lumping together groups seen as opposition – communists, liberals and Jews – until public understanding of those groups blur into phrases like “enemies of Germany.” The messaging was constant and immersive, carried in local and national newspapers, radio, film and posters.
“I believe that the endgame for this strategy is authoritarian power that greatly narrows the scope of who truly belongs and has rights in this country as an American,” Chuang concluded.
BUZZ
