What Mark Pocan Said About Steven Miller Was Appropriate (Opinion)

This feels like the perfect thing to write as I prepare to take off for the weekend.

You know, I’m old enough to remember when the Republican party was trying to convince me that an obvious Nazi salute was, in fact, not an obvious Nazi salute.

Now, the Wisconsin media is being called on by the Republican Party to condemn Mark Pocan’s recent comments surrounding Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff, Steven Miller. For the purposes of this story, I also need to point out that Steven Miller is a Jewish American.

In an exchange on June 25th, Steven Miller took to Twitter to make his thoughts known about the Mayoral Primary in New York, stating “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.”

Now, before we go any further, allow me to show you EXAXTLY how racist that statement is.

Let’s look at immigration rates in New York by decade, shall we:

Incorrect use of the word literally not withstanding, the immigration rate has always been between 30-40%.

Miller’s claim here is not only factually inaccurate, but seems to be exclusively based on the color of the skin of the immigrants in New York today.

Enter Wisconsin House of Representatives member Mark Pocan. He responded to Miller’s comments by saying “Racist f*ck. Go back to 1930’s Germany.” For the record, the original post was not censored.

Now, from my perspective, the right has forfeited their right to clutch pearls over language from elected officials right around the time we learned where the current President likes to grab women, but politics and hypocrisy go hand in hand. That’s not what this is about.

The Republican right is telling Wisconsin media they need to speak up about this statement, specifically highlighting that it is anti-Semitic to tell a Jewish person to go to 1930’s Germany.

As a member of the media, I think it’s my duty to speak out on this matter, at the request of the GOP.

Mark Pocan was 100% correct in making this statement. Let’s break down why that is.

In 1930’s Germany, the Nazi Party had been growing in size, gaining momentum, and engaging in one of the worst acts perpetuated in human history. The way they were able to gain support for these actions was by scapegoating another population, in this instance, Jewish people, and telling the citizens of Germany that all of their problems stemmed from that population.

Not only that, but the tax rate on the highest earners in the country was 20%. Tax revenues collected were used for austerity politics and defense spending.

Well now, why does this sound so familiar?

A government hell bent on slashing social programs, increasing defense spending, and blaming the scary “other” because they look and talk different than the majority of us.

I know I’ve seen this political agenda somewhere else before… You know what? This mirrors the Republican platform. Isn’t that something?

I feel like this doesn’t get discussed enough. Do you know why the United States didn’t trend towards fascism? It doesn’t have to do with religious values or morals- it was FDR style politics.

Every country that embraced social spending, embraced Democracy. Every country that embraced defense spending and xenophobia, embraced Fascism.

This part of the article isn’t opinion by the way, this is a verifiable fact.

So to bring this conversation full circle, when Mark Pocan tells Steven Miller– the Chief of Staff of a President with an agenda of fear of immigrants, increasing defense spending by 150 billion dollars, kicking millions of people off Medicare, and decreasing taxes on billionaires– to go back to 1930’s Germany, that is not a statement of hatred.

IT’S A STATEMENT OF FACT.

And if the pearl-clutchers in the GOP struggle with basic facts, I’d be happy to find them a safe space, if that’s what they’re looking for

To hear more of my thoughts on this, click the player at the top of the article.

[britannica.com] [news.berkely.edu] [Businessinsider.com] [Spreaker: Outside The Box]