ABSTRACT
The ideological and narrative connection to President Trump in this story is the idea widespread in the Republican Right that socialism is part of a vast conspiracy that threatens the very survival of the “West.” While many Americans are aware of some of the genocidal activities of Hitler’s Nazi Germany, less known is the number of European countries where Nazi collaborators murdered Jews. Charges of Republican Party official cooperation with antisemites and former Nazi collaborators first started circulating in serious research in the 1960s. In 1993 the Anti-Defamation League became ensnared in a national scandal when news broke that the organization was involved in illicitly sharing spy files on Left-wing activists with a secret network of police and Right-wing groups. Television was the new media platform in the early 1960s when an egomaniacal and histrionic Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was broadcast on the new media called television.
