UPDATED 10/28 9 am - As I’ve written before, no real progress on the issues I explore here on Sustain What is possible without sustaining democracy and moving past racism and hate, so I had to cover tonight’s hate-filled Trump “rally.”
As Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden event was getting into gear on Sunday afternoon, I reached out to Marshall Curry, an Academy-Award winning film director.
I was hoping to interview him because in 2017 he made a stunning seven-minute documentary called “A Night at the Garden” built with rediscovered film footage of the February 1939 rally at the venue organized by the German American Bund, a pro-Hitler organization that was inflaming passions here in the years before the United States entered World War II.
It turned out Curry was in line outside the Garden amid thousands of MAGA-hatted Trump fans.
Curry was there shooting a documentary following the work of a major magazine that had two journalists in the hall (details can’t be released yet). Once he was in the building, in between hate-filled speeches from the podium, we were able to connect by phone. I’ve posted the conversation above and you can also watch and share it on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X/Twitter.
I got to know Curry starting in 2011, when I wrote for The New York Times about his “brutally neutral” film (my description) centered on the life of an Earth Liberation Front arsonist environmentalist and the federal prosecutor who pursued the group for years.
In our conversation Curry stresses that he doesn’t see Trump as a Nazi, but did find the level of vitriol in the hall deeply chilling - and at a level far beyond what he’s seen in even the most passionately anti-Trump Democrats.
As he expalined:
I still don’t think Trump is a Nazi but I do think he’s a demagogue and I do think he uses a lot of these same tactics demagogues have used for thousands of years – to kind of stir people up against each other and grab power in the process.
Please do listen and weigh in with your thoughts.
I watched the first hour or so of warmup acts and was appalled at several points, particularly by Rudolph W. Giuliani’s vile diatribe lumping all Palestinians - including the “good people” - in one unwelcome boat.
I hope that any voters in swing states whose prime concern is the future of Gaza and the Palestinian people drop any plans to skip voting for Kamala Harris.
In the meantime, Fox News had a very different impression of the “historic rally.”
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