Donald Trump is not Hitler. But the media is doing Hitler’s work.

Do not forget that our media is the Fourth Estate of Government

Consider this thought experiment. You’re on a blind date or you’re meeting a group of new people for the first time. If your intention is to avoid any awkward silence, what is the one topic of conversation you can be certain would incite a heated discussion? Why, the topic of President Trump of course.

Since his inauguration in 2016, nary a single soul has had the privilege of escaping the topic of his presidency. Everywhere you turn, in all the news you read, you can be certain his name and face will be plastered all over your consciousness. Gone are the days when the name Trump merely invoked the image of excessive glitz and getting fired. Today, the mention of Trump will generate in our minds either the image of a monster devil, or the image of a hero savior, depending on where you stand on the political spectrum.

To put it simply, the topic of Donald Trump is today a polarizing force between all of society. Needless to say, our familiarity and understanding of the pre-political Trump and post politics Trump is dependent on the information provided to us from our media. Leaving aside our political bias coloring the division of our own opinion on Trump, the question begs to be asked: is our media setting the stage towards a pre-Nazi brown shirt vs. red shirt Germany through their exacerbation of our societal divide?

With the passage of time, the intensely partisan rhetoric encourages our polarization by pressuring us into taking sides; you’re either in the Trump Hate Club or you’re in the Trump Fan Club. The danger of our single-minded obsession with Trump, driven primarily by excessive media coverage, is making us blind to other aspect of our governance. It’s worth noting that this state of affairs is delightful for the people in power, because the consequences of the public’s obsessive fixation on Trump is the lack of public scrutiny towards the powerholders’ bureaucratic dealings.

Just as it is the same with our presses and media, arguably Hitler didn’t pursue his agenda with conscious malice. Hitler, like the media, assumed he held the moral high ground. And as Hitler sincerely believed he was placed on earth to implement his semi divine vision of the Third Reich, the media today believes it is their self-anointed duty to direct the masses into falling in line with their ideologies. Gone are the days of objective reporting. Most of journalism today focuses on opinion bending.

And similar to Hitler, the outcome from the media’s agenda is just the same. Polarization and dehumanization. As Hitler orchestrated men against one another, our media today divides and inflames. According to the Nazis, the Jews were monsters for destroying Germany. According to the media, Ivanka is a monster for throwing images of her happy family in the face of immigrants whose families are separated by authorities. Or, Illegal immigrants are monsters for throwing their children into the arms of coyotes trafficking human cattle across the border.

We in the free society are reliant upon our free press to deliver the news and information necessary to keep us informed. We should however, be reliant on our own judgement to understand how to analyze the messages and narratives we receive from them. Just as Hitler’s delusional rally for his blessed Third Reich should have been ignored, the media’s sanctimonious delusion of moral righteousness should be irrelevant to us.

Most of us believe we are immune to the media’s manipulation of our emotions, but where guilt is effectively employed, our logical impartiality begins to vanish, and fear rushes in to take its place. No one understands the power of fear against our psyches better than media professionals, which explains why fear-tactics are so frequently deployed to inflame our basest emotions.

This is especially so in today’s cut-throat media climate where the ruthless grab for eyeballs, viewership and readerships is at its fiercest. Add to that the diminishing margin of profitability in the dying business of traditional media, their desperation to cling onto any form of public relevance incentivize their battle to the bottom. Fear is thus an effective tool the media uses to command our attention and to sway our opinion into executing their agenda.

In Asa Baber’s 1987 essay ‘Hitler’s Dream,’ he chronicled his own travels throughout Germany during the decade after World War 2. He noted a curious commonality amongst the German people whereby no one could explain how they’ve allowed a phenomenon like Hitler to come into power. He found in one former SS officer, a conversation which could explain the tragedy. “Hitler divided us and then offered to save us” he said. “That’s how fascism works.”

And that is how our media works.

Observe the media’s tendency to manufacture massive public outrage. Watch as the media deploy their hyper-emotionalist scare tactics to generate anxiety for attention. Moral indignation, demonization, anger and aggression, rage and fury, animosity and hatred. All of which leads to the dehumanization of the other side. Observe their tendency of pitting men against men, us against them. The rhetoric of partisan politics are undeniably poisonous, malevolent and blind. As the saying goes in the industry “if it bleeds, it leads.”

But do not place the fault on the media solely. It is after all our own responsibility to understand the intentions of the media, for it is up to us the public to keep the fourth estate of our government in check. All we have to do is be vigilant not to buy into the constant pressure of the press goading us into losing our objectivity. As true as every nation gets the government it deserves, we get the presses we deserve.

Back to the blind date or first-time group meetup thought experiment pictured in the beginning of this article. Even if the subject of Trump would be an easy topic to bring up in order combat any awkward silence, it is probably better judgement to steer clear of that topic because it simply makes no sense to antagonize others before you understand who they are as a person.

Reasonable people who are rational in their social conduct do not intentionally antagonize another person out of irrational malice. Nothing good nor benevolent can arise from any emotionally driven, hate-based dehumanization because the endgame from mass polarization will be a nightmarish primitivism of tribe against tribe. And may I suggest that as members of civil society, we had better be alert to when the media itself is guilty of it.

Saul Alinsky, the master manipulator of public discontent writes “that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene.” After all, in the words of the post WW2 German public trying to make sense of why they committed the evil they did, “We don’t know how it happened, we weren’t prepared for Hitler, he surprised us”.