The ‘60s TV sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes,” which airs weeknights on MeTV, is, oddly, helping me figure out what we need to do to resist Trump/Musk.
An aside here at the outset: MeTV has been my nightly go-to since the election, after the wife and I started boycotting the corporate cable news.
CNN keeps trotting out that Scott Jennings braying jackass guy in prime time, the suits apparently thinking people, before they go to bed, want to get enraged at a guy who thinks his churlish efforts at gaslighting aren’t patently obvious.
MSNBC, for its part, is too Vichy for me; the talking heads there told us for weeks leading into the election that Trump was the next Hitler, but after he won, the “Morning Joe” people decided to go to Mar-a-Lago to try to make amends, and all the night-time people seem to do is whine fecklessly about whatever it is that Trump/Musk posted a few minutes ago on Truth Social or Twitter.
Which gets me back to: “Hogan’s Heroes,” and the lessons to be gleaned from a sitcom set in a German POW camp during World War II, with more “Heil Hitler”-ing than you’ll see at a monthly meeting of your local Republican committee.
Col. Robert Hogan is the head of the Allied POWs in Stalag 13, and the point man for The Underground, which uses the POWs in the stalag to run operations aimed at undermining the Nazi war effort.
They do so by playing a run of psyop games with the commandant, Col. Wilhelm Klink, who they lead to believe is the efficient manager of a camp with no successful escapes, though in reality it’s his ineptitude that allows them to play a key role leading the resistance to the Nazis from behind enemy lines.
There are so many parallels to our current situation in Trump/Musk America in 2025 that it isn’t even funny – the first being, the comedic level of undue arrogance on the part of both Wilhelm and his cronies and our contemporary Nazis, who are just as focused on literally getting rid of the penny, renaming the Gulf of Mexico and taking control of the scheduling at the Kennedy Center as they are doing actually dangerous things like hacking the U.S. Treasury and starting an untold number of disastrous trade wars.
ICYMI
- Democratic AGs win injunction blocking Trump/Musk raid of federal Treasury
- Funding freeze forcing Virginia health centers to close doors, cancel appointments
- Warner, Kaine tear apart Trump’s ‘wacky,’ ‘demented’ plan to seize Gaza
- Trump signs executive order banning trans athletes from high school, college sports
- Trump pledges to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education; He doesn’t say why
- Mark Warner on FBI purge: ‘This blatant abuse of power is making us all less safe’
I think we’re giving them too much credit for opening so many fronts in the war they’ve started with the left, center-left and center-right – which our thinkers are lamenting because it feels like our side is reduced to playing Whack-a-Mole just trying to keep up.
The flip side of that: it’s giving them more hills to have to defend, most of them inconsequential in the grand scheme, but if you’re paying attention, they’re expending energy and resources defending them – for instance, getting Google to spend its own political capital to acquiesce in the Gulf of Mexico renaming thing, and eliminating a list of holidays deemed to be too “woke” from its Google Calendar.
Google is now catching collateral damage, as is Elon Musk’s Tesla, sales of which are tanking dramatically in the backlash to the role he has taken on as the tip of the Project 2025 spear.
Google will be OK in the interim, but Musk, whose paper wealth is highly leveraged on his shares in Tesla, which earned him a mocking “no thank you” from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday in response to Musk’s “offer” to buy OpenAI for $97.5 billion, may be in more trouble here than you think.
Altman openly taunted the alleged world’s richest man, countering his offer for OpenAI with a pennies-on-the-dollar offer for Twitter.
“no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” Altman posted on Musk’s Twitter, which you may remember the neo-Nazi South African purchased (with, of course, borrowed money) in 2022 for $44 billion.
Twitter’s value has dropped precipitously under his ownership, largely because he isn’t the genius his paper wealth would seem to make him out to be.
ICYMI
- Ben Cline is ‘fed up’ with people complaining about Elon Musk: You know what to do
- Elon Musk fanboy Ben Cline goes to bat for neo-Nazi billionaire buddy
More evidence of Musk’s stunning lack of genius: he literally changed his Twitter profile overnight to “Harry Bolz,” with the tagline “Circumcisions at a 50% discount,” reminding the world that he’s a male twat who thinks we don’t know what we know about him: that he’s highly leveraged, on the verge of losing his paper billions, and is lashing out against the world, because that’s all he knows to do.
Which puts Musk in the company of the likes of his hero, Adolf Hitler, and his most recent enabler, Donald Trump, two other failsons who blundered their way into power by giving voice to legions of White racists, and taking advantage of millions more who acquiesced with their obvious nonsense because they assumed rules written on parchments would keep them in check.
The way Col. Hogan and his Heroes turned the tables in the ‘60s sitcom was by turning the officiousness of the Germans against them – first and foremost, playing the puffery of Klink’s “no successful escapes” to justify to his superiors that he be kept in charge at Stalag 13, so that the POWs could continue their clandestine operations under his inept watch.
The POWs also used what we know from the study of guerilla warfare is the advantage of being light and nimble in a battle with an overwhelming force.
That lesson for us from the TV show, from what we can learn from guerilla warfare, from the results of our own American Revolution 250 years ago, should be something we take to heart and follow as we gird up for the fight with Trump/Musk today.
We don’t need to win every battle, or even necessarily any battle; all we need to do is frustrate the overwhelming force, make them use their time, money and mental energy to defend territory that they assume is already safe.
And then, keep in mind, we have the advantage of being able to pick and choose our spots, and thus what they need to try to defend.
To name a few: a federal district court judge that can issue an injunction, to gum up the works; flooding congressional offices with millions of phone calls and emails; gathering outside the U.S. Capitol, outside congressional office buildings, outside their DC apartments, outside the homes and offices of Supreme Court justices and MAGA Republican state attorneys general, to make their work and home lives uncomfortable; a single Senate Democrat can bring business on the floor of the Senate to a standstill by using the Senate’s arcane rules against the majority.
The other side assumes that we’re going to play by their rules, which they’re not even playing by.
They used this to catch us by surprise; now it’s our turn.
ICYMI
The irony to Col. Klink’s “no successful escapes” humble-brag was, none of “Hogan’s Heroes” wanted to escape; they chose to remain in a prison camp behind enemy lines because it gave them the ability to fight the war from inside the enemy’s lair, and they had come to the realization that they were better equipped to be a part of a winning war effort as POWs than they were as traditional fighting soldiers.
I get it, that most of us feel like prisoners right now in this Trump/Musk America, and it’s natural to want to escape, either literally – the idea of moving to a Blue state is enticing – or figuratively, by just checking out.
You don’t feel like you can do anything to change what we’re all facing now.
Channel your inner Col. Robert Hogan, is my advice, and await the next instructions from The Underground.
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Chris Graham
