trump announces his bid for reelection!

[Rev. Rye]

are intentionally being obstinate or do you not know there is a major divide between communism and socialism? Ask stallin and hitler if they are compatible.. if so why did million fight eacth other to install their own personal ism in each others home land?

And here's what I have to say about the whole "Hitler was a socialist" meme:





And as someone who's currently between volumes in his re-reading of Ian Kershaw's mammoth biography of Hitler, I can say this is more or less accurate.

An actual quote from an early speech from Hitler:

Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of the nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem, “Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land — that man is a Socialist.

A few years later, he said this when asked about Socialism: "Socialism! What does socialism really mean? If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism."

In the pre-1933 days, there was a sizable contingent of the National Socialist Worker's Party called the Strasserites that actually took the "Socialist" part of their name seriously. Around 1930, he started to purge them from the party. When he came to power, especially on the Night of the Long Knives, he purged them from life.

And here's what Richard J. Evans, one of the top historians of the era has to say about it:

Perhaps to emphasize this anti-capitalist focus, and to align itself with similar groups in Austria and Czechoslovakia, the party changed its name in February 1920 to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party…. Despite the change of name, however, it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth from, socialism. True, as some have pointed out, its rhetoric was frequently egalitarian, it stressed the need to put common needs above the needs of the individual, and it often declared itself opposed to big business and international finance capital. Famously, too, anti-Semitism was once declared to be “the socialism of fools.” But from the very beginning, Hitler declared himself implacably opposed to Social Democracy and, initially to a much smaller extent, Communism: after all, the “November traitors” who had signed the Armistice and later the Treaty of Versailles were not Communists at all, but the Social Democrats. (Page 172-3 of my edition of The Coming of the Third Reich.)

TL;DR: Unless your definition of "socialism" is "Anything Trump or Mitch McConnell doesn't like," Hitler was not a socialist. And I honestly wouldn't put it past Trump to even fail that definition.

And while we're on Democratic candidates and the crowds their rallies draw... well, here's a recent photo of a Bernie rally in Brooklyn a few months ago:


Huge crowds came out to see Bernie Sanders, and this was around the time of a major winter storm in New York. Still think Trump's far more popular than any Democratic candidate (and, bear in mind, as of my lunchtime, there were 22 others, which might also explain the poor showing at the Biden debate)?