Everyone’s worried about Donald Trump. As they should be. They should also worry about his friends across the aisle. Division of Labor Monday, which saw Trump reveal his plan to stop all Muslims from coming into the United States, also announced this convergence between right and left. Newt Gingrich: Nine percent of Pakistanis agree with ISIS, according to one poll. That’s a huge number. We need to put all the burden of proof on people coming from those countries to show that they are not a danger to us. Michael Tomasky: It [Obama’s statement] says to Muslim Americans that the rights you have as Americans have to be earned, fought for. And you know, that’s OK…But I do know that if other Americans had some […]

Fascists often soften their call for national purification and the deportation of alien elements with invocations of family values. In 1942, as the Vichy regime began handing over the foreign-born Jews of France to the Nazis, it made the decision to deport their children (about six thousand) with them. In order to fulfill the Nazis’ quota—but also, Vichy proclaimed, to keep the families together. At the time, Robert Brasillach wrote, “We must separate from the Jews en bloc and not keep any little ones.” Defending his position after the liberation of France, he explained: “I even wrote that women must not be separated from children and that we must arrive at a human solution to the problem.” A month later, he doubled-down on the notion that family values might somehow soften his fascism: I […]