A revelation meant to embarrass President Donald Trump by revealing an alleged soft side for arguably his most popular political enemy has prompted a beloved leftist to favorably quoted a Nazi sympathizer, without caveat, in public.
Yet another installment in the lucrative world of White House gossip books – American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War by Tim Alberta – claims that the president “became enamored” and “starstruck” by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a far-left rookie lawmaker that has accused Trump of running “concentration camps” on U.S. soil.
Trump liked her charisma so much, Alberta wrote, that he compared her to Eva Perón, the wife of an Argentine strongman best known for flooding his country with a migrant wave of unrepentant Nazis, implicating his nation in one of history’s worst crimes against humanity and forever altering Argentina’s demographics.
If true – and, with all books of this genre, this is a big “if” – the commentary would be tremendously embarrassing for Trump. He would have been caught praising one of his most charismatic critics, albeit an agent of chaos just as likely to damage the Democrats with a radical crusade on any given day than attack the opposing side. A man who Hollywood, mainstream American media, and an organized campaign of leftist extremists routinely label a “Nazi” would have been caught on record praising a woman who, evidence indicates, hoarded Nazi treasure.
Ocasio-Cortez could not let the left score a clean hit without impunity, however, and decided to one-up Trump’s alleged remarks. She went on Twitter Sunday night and favorably quoted Perón, using a remark she clearly felt could also apply to her.
And just like that, the news cycle morphed from “why does the president think being compared to a Nazi sympathizer is a compliment?” to “why does this socialist lawmaker identify with a Nazi sympathizer?”
As public schools in the United States woefully lack in-depth studies of the history of the Americas, the hemisphere Americans inhabit, the image of Eva Perón in the American psyche is one most often associated with the lamentable musical Evita. Most try to picture Perón and think of Madonna. In Evita, Eva Perón is a beloved, populist First Lady who organizes charity concerts and rises from rural town maiden to famous actress and, ultimately, First Lady. The moral conscience of the play is Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a communist mass murderer who advocated for the “elimination” of LGBT people and openly hated black people (in the play, he chastizes Evita for the policies of husband Juan Perón).
Evita, which is questionable enough, writing in a 2004 book: “My favorite Broadway show is Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber, starring Patti LuPone. I saw it six times, mostly with [ex-wife] Ivana.” Ocasio-Cortez, however, is an on-the-record fan of the real Evita Perón, the one with the kind of anti-semitic baggage that the American left has struggled to toss aside all year.
Juan Perón was indispensable to an untold number of Nazi officers. Saving Nazis from international law was so important to him that he created a national “commission” to process fugitive Nazis. As a 1997 Chicago Tribune article explained,
Peron’s top officials, Argentine documents show, hired Horst Fuldner, an Argentine-born captain of Adolf Hitler’s feared SS, to coordinate the entry of at least dozens of Nazi war criminals to Argentina after World War II and help bring in some of the 40,000 other Germans who entered Argentina from 1945 to 1955. Most of the Germans have never been investigated for Nazi ties.
[…]
The feared Dr. Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, who sent millions of Jews to concentration camps, were caught in Argentina, along with other top Nazi criminals. How many other elderly Nazis may still be sipping coffee in Buenos Aires’ elegant European-style cafes no one knows.
Few currently believe that Perón himself was a Nazi. Rather, he had a lot to lose from standing on the side of justice – according to Argentine newspaper La Nación, he freed as many as 35 captured Nazis in Argentina “out of fear that their testimony could compromise the 1943-46 military regime he was a part of” – and a lot to gain. The Nazis regularly brought to Argentina European loot to demonstrate their value. Evita Perón, evidence later indicated, directly benefitted from the treasure that the Nazis brought with them, much of it believed to be stolen from Europeans Jews slaughtered in concentration camps.
“It is still suspected that among her [Eva Peron’s] possessions, there were pieces of Nazi treasure, that came from rich Jewish families killed in concentration camps,” The Politically Incorrect Guide to Latin America, a book by Brazilian journalists Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira, revealed. “Peron himself even spoke of goods of ‘German and Japanese origin’ that the Argentine government had appropriated.”
Ocasio-Cortez – ally of anti-semitic Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), darling of anti-semitic newspaper the New York Times – now owns the anti-semitic legacy of Evita Perón. No one asked her for her opinion of Perón, savior of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and S.S. leader Adolf Eichmann, but she chose to favorably compare herself to his wife.