There are a few things that traditional media outlets harp on when it comes to various Democratic candidates, and it very infrequently has anything to do with their policies. Chuck Todd, a hack from way back, was hosting some roundtable punditry on MSNBC on Monday, when he decided that the best way to criticize Sen. Bernie Sanders was to bring up the online support Sanders’ campaign has had over the past few years, and its aggressive nature. In order to do this, Todd quoted from an article by right wing writer, and executive editor at The Bulwark Jonathan Last, who analogized Donald Trump’s following to Sanders’, writing “No other candidate has anything like this sort of digital brownshirt brigade. I mean, except for Donald Trump.”
Todd went on to finish Last’s thought that maybe, just maybe, there needs to be an “online mob” for a candidate to be viable in today’s world. Todd threw the question to the group, none of whom batted as eye at the strange analogy to the Nazi’s infamous paramilitary. Besides being a silly-billy thing to say, not unlike blaming school shootings on same sex marriage, it’s a wildly anti-Semitic analogy to strike, especially when the candidate you are talking about is both Jewish and has family who were murdered, with the support of actual brownshirt forces in Nazi Germany.
The Sturmabteilung were the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, used to police the party’s activities in the 1920s and 1930s, and played a big part in intimidating and enacting violence on Jewish businesses. They were called “brownshirts” because they wore brown uniforms. They were some of the first modern domestic terrorists.
Is Chuck Todd intentionally being anti-Semitic by reading this conservative view of the world as a legitimate talking point? Probably not. I doubt Todd even considered how shitty a thing it was to say. But it shows how, and what, traditional “liberal media” outlets consider a-political rhetoric. This analogy isn’t supposed to be incendiary in the least, which is why Todd used it. Unfortunately, it is, and people like Todd should know better.*
Sanders’ senior adviser David Sirota and his campaign’s national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray went online to slam Todd and the media’s characterization of the Senator from Vermont’s supporters.
*Frankly, they should know better than to read The Bulwark for their ideas on a Democratic primary in the first place.