The Filmmaker Who Surfaced Horrifying Footage of the 1939 Madison Square Garden Nazi Rally says Trump is Not a Nazi, But..

He is a dangerous demagogue, says Oscar winner Marshall Curry after attending the Trump rally

Last night I posted a pop-up Sustain What conversation I had with the filmmaker Marshall Curry while he was inside Madison Square Garden amid 20,000 fans of Team Trump’s fear-mongering messaging. Curry in 2017 directed a chillilng film, “A Night at the Garden,” aobut a 1939 Nazi rally in that hall, and lots of Trump foes have been endlessly trying to draw comparisons.

With the dangers of overstatement in mind, I thought it worth zooming in this morning on a key point Curry made in our chat:

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.

Hear him here:

This morning, Curry posted some fresh reflections on Medium on the rally in 1939, which featured Fritz Kuhn, the self-styled “American Fuehrer.” Here’s an excerpt and link:

Trump says that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and it takes effort not to hear a resemblance between Trump’s call for a “total and complete ban” on Muslims entering the US and Kuhn’s call for an end to the “dumping” of (mostly Jewish) political refugees in 1939.

Trump and his campaign are stirring up religious conflict online as well. Numerous outlets reported last week that The Future Coalition PAC, funded by Elon Musk, is targeting Jewish voters with online ads that accuse Kamala Harris of being in the pocket of Palestine. And at the same time, they are targeting Muslim voters in Michigan with ads about Harris’ Jewish husband, accusing her of being in the pocket of Israel.

To be sure, there are antisemites infecting both the left and the right these days. But there’s one big difference: the antisemites on the left hate Kamala Harris and the Democratic party. The antisemites on the right, in contrast, love Donald Trump. They believe he speaks for them, and they’re emboldened when he refuses to condemn the Proud Boys or dines at Mar-a-Lago with Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and Kanye West (“I’m going death con 3 on Jewish People”).

In the 1930s, there were many seemingly-normal New Yorkers who got swept up in Fritz Kuhn’s cult of victimhood and rage. And there were many enablers in mainstream politics and business who turned a blind eye to Kuhn’s transgressions because they saw potential benefit for themselves. But there were others who refused to go along.

In the middle of Kuhn’s speech at Madison Square Garden, a Jewish plumber’s assistant named Isadore Greenbaum ran out on stage to protest. A mob of brown-shirted storm troopers swarmed him, punching and kicking him, even ripping off his pants. In the footage, you can see the terror in Greenbaum’s face as he is beaten.

But years later, a reporter asked him why he did what he did. His answer was simple and direct — and a challenge worth asking ourselves today. He said, “Gee, what would you have done if you were in my place…?”

Here’s yesterday’s pop-up Sustain What show:

Program note

And don’t forget to join me today at 1 p.m. US Eastern time for a discussion of Twitter’s X devolution and the prospect of Bluesky or something else someday supplanting the platform Trump has so tainted.

With X a Disaster in Disasters, Can Bluesky (or anything else) Fill the Gap?

You can watch and share on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and, yes, X/Twitter at @revkin (no streaming link there until showtime).

My guests are Jim Moffitt, a former Twitter engineer who successfully worked for years to boost the platform’s value in disaster warning and response, and Emily Liu, who is helping build Bluesky’s utility as an open social network.

For now, Bluesky is far too miniscule and inadequately resourced, to my eye, to come close to X’s power to connect in realtime. But the platform is growing rapidly, so it’s worth looking at how it might best be built to avoid the awful outcomes Twitter suffered in the transition to X under Elon Musk.

Bluesky is also becoming very popular with scientists and I recommend this living Google Doc: BlueSky for Scientists (although it’s quite dated):

As advance reading, you might click back to my 2022 post warning about what was coming: “Why a Twitter Implosion Could be a Disaster in Disasters.”