Rachel Maddow Friday night had an Edward R. Murrow moment.
We have seen this at the fringe of what is barely called politics. When I was a kid growing up in northern California in the 1980's, you used to see this kind of thing at skinhead events, right? But this is now mainstream frontrunner Republican national politics. And tonight in Chicago it really turned into playing with fire. But if you want to know where it came from, and you want me to prove to you that it was deliberate what happened tonight in Chicago, well here's where it came from. Watch. This is chronological.
You can watch the rest here, and particularly what Trump said in St. Louis. Someone sent me via Twitter a link to the Afterschool Special "The Wave," in which a teacher invents a fascist movement in his classroom only to watch it take over the school, at which time he reveals the students' "national leader" as Adolph Hitler. I doubt such an awakening is happening among hard core Trump supporters, but there certainly is a hangover at RNC headquarters this morning.
In the meantime, no one in the mainstream media covering Republican politics can be allowed to push a "nobody saw this coming" excuse. Trump has promoted the brownshirt mentality in his own ranks, and everyone now knows it.
