PR blunders, also Nazis

It's been a week for bad PR moves, with Pepsi releasing it's incredibly poorly thought out protest themed ad, followed by United Airlines showing us all exactly what they think of their customers. But then we come to Sean Spicer.

I've not talked about Spicer much, before his selection as Press Secretary there really wasn't much to talk about, he's been in politics for a long time, spent a good while as communications director for the RNC, made a couple remarks that sounded almost sane in regards to The Toddlers' horrible statements during the campaign, and was then mysteriously selected as White House press secretary. A situation that came about by what I can only assume are shady dealings.

Since then he has been basically the perfect mouthpiece for the administration, combining arrogance, ignorance, and bigotry into one body, his press conferences are uniformly insane and lacking even the remotest connection to reality.

Yesterday he decided that not enough attention was being paid to the administration, what with all this hubbub over planes and shit, so he favorably compared Hitler to Assad because Hitler "did not use chemical weapons on his own people".

Now, even the American public school system covers the holocaust I think, just a little bit, and I suspect that most of us recall something about gas chambers during that period, so his statement is categorically false. To be fair, what I think he was trying to say is that even in WWII, no one used chemical weapons on the battlefield, but since he is apparently incapable of reading from a script, and also apparently more of a Nazi sympathizer than we assumed, it did not come out that way.

Why do I call him a Nazi sympathizer when he could just be stupid? Because I really don't think the language used was entirely unintentional. In his repeated attempts to clarify his statement, he said that Hitler never ordered the use of gas against "his own people", or  "innocent people". The implication being that the Jews were not true Germans, nor innocent. This could be argued to be a simple slip of the tongue, but I consider it a bit more insightful than that. Nazi supporters, when they aren't full on holocaust deniers, tend to justify those events by saying that the Jews and other killed deserved it somehow, that they weren't innocent, and were actively harmful to the nation. I don't fully understand their logic and am happy for that state of affairs to continue, but it does exist.

I think that if you believe something it does eventually come out, especially if you start to feel comfortable in a situation, like you are among friends. I think Spicer may have been flirting with Nazi ideology for a long while and now finds himself in an administration that, if it doesn't specifically share those views, is not hostile to them, and he is feeling like he can be more himself. Basically the same shit we are seeing across the country with the rise in hate crimes and stupid people saying stupid things to anyone who isn't a straight white Christian.

Is he a full on Nazi/Alt-Right or whatever? Perhaps, perhaps not, but he is immersed in an environment that more or less encourages that mindset, and when you get used to thinking in a certain way it becomes pretty hard to not speak like it too.

That is perhaps the most damaging aspect of this whole debacle of a presidency, that this language and behavior is normalized to the point that the press secretary has difficulty keeping it out of official statements. That, more than anything, encourages Nazi and white supremacist movements to come out of the shadows and act like they are the mainstream. And the thing is they could end up becoming that.