Infernal Press International — Established 666 B.C.E.

THE NINTH CIRCLE DISPATCH

All the News That's Fit to Burn

VOL. LXXX, NO. 4

Annual Hell Dispatch — Special Birthday Coverage

HELL CORRESPONDENT BENJAMIN NETANYAHU FILES HIS ANNUAL BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE TO ADOLF HITLER AND KEEPS MAKING IT ABOUT HIMSELF

Our reluctant infernal stringer — Nazi, war crimes defendant, and former Prime Minister — checks in from Pit 7 to mark the Führer's birthday, assess his legacy, and absolutely cannot stop comparing the whole thing to his own situation, which is completely different and he would like that noted for the record.

By Benjamin Netanyahu, Hell Correspondent (Involuntary) — Filed from the Seventh Pit, Ninth Circle, Hell — Edited, barely, by Senior Infernal Editor Graft Perdition, Demon Second Class

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Netanyahu was assigned this beat as a condition of his eternal damnation. He has filed seventeen formal objections. All have been denied. He is reminded that filing a complaint with the Infernal Press Union costs two additional centuries of pitch lake immersion. — G. Perdition

NINTH CIRCLE — Another April 20th. Another birthday for the most consequential failed artist in human history. I, Benjamin Netanyahu — decorated statesman, defender of a people, definitely not a Nazi, whatever the International Criminal Court says — have once again been assigned to cover this. Not because I have anything in common with this man. I don't. I want that very clear. I am filing this piece under protest, as I have every year since my arrival here, which was a clerical error I am still appealing.

But fine. It's Hitler's birthday. Let's talk about Hitler. And — purely for context, editorially necessary context — let's talk about Donald J. Trump, the American politician who has spent the last decade proving that you don't need a bunker or a funny mustache to get the job done. You just need cable news, a real estate brand, and absolutely no shame.

Adolf, you magnificent, burning disaster: your student has surpassed you in some ways. He falls short in others. Let us review.

Item 01

The Big Lie: Adolf Invented It. Donald Industrialized It.

Hitler's propagandists understood a simple principle: tell a lie so enormous, so cosmically audacious, that the public assumes no one could fabricate something so brazen. The Dolchstoß — the "stab in the back" — blamed Germany's World War One defeat on internal enemies rather than military collapse. It was false. It was provably false. It became gospel.

Donald Trump looked at this playbook and thought: adorable, but inefficient. His version — that a presidential election was stolen from him through a vast conspiracy involving thousands of election workers, dozens of judges including his own appointees, Republican secretaries of state, the Department of Justice, and apparently every Dominion voting machine in the Western hemisphere — required not one big lie but an ecosystem of interlocking lies, each one reinforcing the others, the whole structure too enormous to fact-check in real time. When the lie was finally dismantled in sixty court cases, his supporters had already moved into the lie like it was load-bearing architecture. They live there now. It has a zip code.

I would like to note, for the record, that the allegations against me in Case 4000 are also a lie. A political witch hunt. Completely different situation. This footnote is editorially necessary and I will not remove it. — B.N.

Adolf's reaction, per pit surveillance: "Sixty courts. He lost in sixty courts and they still believe him. I couldn't get twelve Germans to agree on a lunch order. Disgusting. Impressive. Disgusting."

Item 02

The Press as Enemy of the People: A Study in Escalation

Hitler moved with speed and legal architecture. Within weeks of taking power, the Reichspress Chamber was established. Editors who printed unfavorable coverage lost their licenses. Publications were seized. Journalists disappeared. The infrastructure of a free press was dismantled with bureaucratic precision, wrapped in legal language, and presented as a correction rather than a conquest.

Trump, operating in a country with a First Amendment he found personally offensive, improvised a different methodology. He could not shut down CNN. What he could do — and did, with extraordinary consistency — was declare CNN, the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, the Associated Press, and any outlet that reported factual information unflattering to him "FAKE NEWS" and "the enemy of the people." He denied press credentials. He sued. He suggested broadcast licenses should be revoked. He trained his base to reject any information from any source he hadn't pre-approved, which meant any source that disagreed with him, which meant reality itself became a credentialed enemy. Goebbels, watching from an adjacent pit, reportedly wept with professional admiration.

The Israeli press is also very unfair to me. Channel 12 in particular. I'm not saying they should be shut down. I'm just saying. — B.N.

Adolf's reaction: "He did it without the Chamber. He did it with tweets. I had to build entire ministries. This man does it in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. I don't know whether to be furious or take notes."

Item 03

The Rally as Sacred Ritual: Nuremberg Had Nothing on Greensboro

The Nuremberg rallies were engineered experiences. Leni Riefenstahl filmed them into myth. The choreography, the lighting, the massed crowds, the singular figure descending as if from the heavens — all of it was designed to produce not political agreement but religious feeling. You did not attend a Nuremberg rally to be persuaded. You attended to be transformed.

Trump's rallies operate on identical psychology with updated production values. The entrance music. The extended wait that builds anticipation. The crowd as participant, not audience — chanting, responding, completing his sentences. The physical space arranged so the candidate is always elevated, always lit, always the singular point of focus. The emotional arc from grievance to fury to triumphant promise. Academics who study authoritarian political theater began citing Trump rallies in papers originally written about Nuremberg. This was not a compliment. It was noted as such by approximately zero percent of attendees.

Adolf's reaction: "The music. He uses YMCA. A gay disco anthem. At a fascist rally. I cannot process this. I am genuinely unable to process this. Someone get me Speer."

Item 04

Scapegoating: Same Architecture, Different Targets

The operational logic of fascist scapegoating is consistent across iterations: identify an out-group, attribute to them supernatural powers of corruption and conspiracy, position them as an existential threat to the body politic, and make the leader's power contingent on the audience's fear of that group. Hitler's targets were Jews, Roma, communists, homosexuals, and the disabled. The specifics vary by century and country. The mechanism is identical.

Trump's primary scapegoats are immigrants — specifically brown and Black ones, specifically from countries he has described in terms unprintable even in Hell — who he has described as "poisoning the blood" of America (a phrase so specifically reminiscent of Nazi biological purity rhetoric that historians of the Third Reich recognized it on contact), as animals, as an infestation, as an invasion. He has described a specific judge as unable to be impartial due to his Mexican heritage. He has suggested that immigrants are "eating the dogs." He has built an entire political movement on the premise that America's problems are caused by people who were not born there, whose skin is the wrong color, who speak the wrong language — and that only he has the power and the will to remove them.

Palestinians are a completely different situation and I will not be addressing that here. — B.N.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Netanyahu, you are going to address it eventually. This is Hell. Time is infinite. — G. Perdition

Adolf's reaction: "Poisoning the blood. He said 'poisoning the blood.' In a presidential campaign. In 2024. And won. I had to invade Poland."

Item 05

The Loyalty Purge: Bureaucratic Terror Goes Retail

Hitler's Night of the Long Knives eliminated the SA leadership — potential rivals — in a single weekend of organized murder. Efficiency was the point. Anyone who might complicate the consolidation of absolute personal loyalty was removed, permanently, before they could act.

Trump cannot murder his rivals. What he can do — and has done with extraordinary thoroughness — is destroy them professionally, financially, and reputationally. Jeff Sessions: destroyed. Bill Barr: destroyed. Mike Pence, his own Vice President, who certified an election result rather than overturn it on Trump's behalf: destroyed, and his supporters chanted for his hanging on January 6th while Pence hid in a parking garage. Liz Cheney: destroyed. Every Republican who voted to impeach him: primaried, defeated, or fled. The Republican Party has been purged of anyone who placed country above personal fealty to one man. What remains is not a party. It is a cult with a tax ID number.

Adolf's reaction: "He did the purge without the bodies. This is both more civilized and somehow more disturbing. He's turned cowardice itself into a weapon. The man is genuinely novel."

Item 06

Using State Power Against Political Opponents: The Weaponized Justice System

In the Third Reich, political opponents were arrested, tried in compliant courts, imprisoned or executed. The legal system was not corrupted — it was converted. It became an instrument of political will rather than impartial law. This was understood at the time as a defining feature of totalitarianism.

Trump spent four years attempting to direct the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute his political enemies — Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and others. When attorneys general declined, he fired them or demanded their resignations. In his second term, this became policy rather than instinct. The FBI was directed toward his enemies. Prosecutors were installed or removed based on their willingness to serve his interests. The Justice Department publicly dropped cases against his allies. He pardoned January 6th insurrectionists while pursuing charges against political opponents. He suggested his predecessor should be imprisoned. He called for the execution of his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The justice system was not being corrupted. It was being converted. Historians recognized the pattern. They had seen it before. They knew what came next.

My legal situation is completely different. My attorney general was the corrupt one. I was the victim. I cannot stress this enough. — B.N.

Adolf's reaction: [Audible weeping. Infernal stenographer notes it sounds like jealousy.]

Item 07

Economic Nationalism and the Tariff Wall: Autarky Rebranded

Nazi economic policy pursued autarky — national economic self-sufficiency, independence from global markets, the idea that Germany should produce everything it needed within its own borders, free from the entanglement of international trade and the foreign influence it brought. This was dressed in the language of strength and sovereignty. It was economically catastrophic and contributed to the war economy Germany needed to sustain its ambitions.

Trump's tariff regime — a sweeping, escalating series of import taxes applied to allies and adversaries alike, justified by the language of economic nationalism and the restoration of American industrial sovereignty — is the closest any American president has come to autarkic economic policy. Economists across the ideological spectrum described it as self-destructive. Supply chains broke. Prices rose. Allies were alienated. Trump described this as winning. The ghost of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler's economist, reportedly toured the relevant Treasury Department offices and nodded slowly.

Adolf's reaction: "He's doing it to Canada. Canada. They make maple syrup and apologize. He put tariffs on Canada. I at least had enemies."

Item 08

Dismantling Democratic Institutions: The Slow Coup in Real Time

The Enabling Act of 1933 was the legal mechanism by which Hitler converted a republic into a dictatorship. It passed democratically. The Reichstag voted itself out of existence. Democratic institutions, it turns out, are only as durable as the people inside them, and in 1933, enough of those people were either complicit, cowardly, or calculating that the Act passed.

January 6th, 2021 was Trump's Enabling Act attempt. It failed — but not by much, and not for lack of planning. What the subsequent years revealed was the infrastructure of the attempt: the false electors scheme, the pressure campaign on Mike Pence, the preparation of legal arguments for why a sitting president could simply reject election results, the mobilization of a mob as a pressure instrument on Congress. When this failed, Trump did not abandon the project. He refined it. In his second term, he systematically installed loyalists at every point of institutional friction — the military, the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the civil service — replacing the professionals who had resisted with people whose primary qualification was personal loyalty. The institutions remain. Their independence is the question.

Adolf's reaction: "The Enabling Act took me one year. He's been at this for eight. Either he is very patient or very incompetent. Possibly both. Probably both."

Item 09

The Paramilitary Aesthetic: When Brownshirts Get a Rebrand

The SA — the Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts — were Hitler's street-level enforcement mechanism before he had state power. They intimidated opponents, broke up rival meetings, beat journalists, and created an atmosphere of low-grade violence that made the population understand, viscerally, that resistance had physical consequences. They wore uniforms. They marched. Their presence was the message.

The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the various militia organizations that formed the shock troops of the January 6th operation wore their own uniforms — tactical gear, insignia, the iconography of paramilitary organization. Trump refused to condemn them. He told the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." He called January 6th participants "hostages" and "patriots." He pardoned their leaders. The message to these organizations was clear: you are useful. You are protected. Stand by.

The settlers in the West Bank are a completely different situation involving security considerations that I — [EDITOR: BENJAMIN. — G.P.] Fine. — B.N.

Adolf's reaction: "Stand back and stand by. Four words. I needed an entire apparatus. Four words and they understood. I'm going to be sick."

Item 10

The Cult of Masculine Strength: Virility as Political Platform

Hitler's aesthetic of power was relentlessly physical — the Aryan body as political statement, strength as virtue, weakness as moral failing. The Nazi propaganda image was muscular, blond, erect, and martial. The ideal German was a body that could serve the state. Disability, illness, neurodivergence, homosexuality — all were pathologized as weakness, then criminalized, then exterminated.

Trump's version is purely performative — a 78-year-old man with documented fast food dietary habits who nonetheless projects, constantly, an image of overwhelming physical dominance. He appeared on the cover of a magazine depicted as a Roman emperor. He posted AI images of himself as a muscular, shirtless warrior. He mocked disabled journalists, effeminate men, women who challenged him physically, and anyone who showed vulnerability. He declared himself the most masculine president in American history. His base agreed. The masculinity on display was not physical reality but political theater — strength as costume rather than condition. Hitler, at least, had the Alps. Trump has a golf cart and a diet Coke.

Adolf's reaction: "He Photoshopped himself as a Roman emperor. With a bodybuilder's physique. And they believed it. I staged the most elaborate propaganda operation in human history and I never had the audacity to simply... make something up and post it. This man is either a genius or an American."

Item 11

The Ethnic Registry: Keeping Track of the Wrong People

One of the Third Reich's early administrative accomplishments was comprehensive registration — of Jews, of political opponents, of anyone designated as other. The registry was not the end. It was the infrastructure for the end. You cannot round people up efficiently without first knowing where they are.

The Trump administration's second-term immigration enforcement apparatus moved systematically toward registration of undocumented immigrants, toward the creation of databases of Muslim Americans (an idea floated in the first term and revisited), toward the tracking of individuals by national origin and religion. Legal residents were detained. Visas were revoked for political speech. Students were arrested for attending protests. The administration argued these were security measures. Historians of the 1930s recognized them as something more specific: the administrative preconditions for mass removal. You build the list before you use it.

Israel's population registry is a security measure and has nothing to do with — [EDITOR: I am begging you. — G.P.] — B.N.

Adolf's reaction: "The database. Yes. Start with the database. Always the database." [Long pause.] "I'm proud of him. I hate that I'm proud of him."

Item 12

Dismantling the Civil Service: When Competence Becomes the Enemy

Hitler replaced the professional German civil service — built over generations to be competent, consistent, and politically neutral — with party loyalists whose primary qualification was ideological purity. The result was catastrophic governance dressed as strength. Agencies designed to function were converted into vehicles for political will. Competence was treated as a form of insubordination.

Trump's Schedule F executive order, issued in his first term and immediately expanded in his second, converted tens of thousands of career civil servants from protected employees to at-will political appointees who could be fired for insufficient loyalty. DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, run by the world's richest man with no governmental experience and no legal authority — systematically dismantled agencies, fired inspectors general, cancelled contracts, and removed institutional memory from departments that had spent decades developing expertise. When agencies pushed back, the people pushing back were fired. What remained was loyal. Whether it was functional was a secondary concern.

Adolf's reaction: "He gave the destruction job to a South African. Who drives electric cars. And rockets. While dismantling the state. I don't know what any of this means. I feel very old."

Item 13

Allies Abandoned, Autocrats Embraced: The Geopolitical Realignment

Hitler's foreign policy was, at its core, ideological — democratic alliances were obstacles, authoritarian partners were natural. He fractured the post-Versailles order, cultivated Mussolini, and treated the appeasement of democratic governments as contemptible weakness to be exploited rather than genuine diplomacy to be honored.

Trump's foreign policy instinct, across both terms, was structurally identical. NATO allies were treated as adversaries. The EU was described as an enemy. Ukraine was abandoned to a Russian invasion while Trump pursued a negotiated settlement favorable to the aggressor. Meanwhile, Trump praised Putin's "genius," called Kim Jong-un his friend, described Xi Jinping as a great leader, embraced Mohammed bin Salman after the murder of a Washington Post journalist, and expressed genuine admiration for Viktor Orbán's authoritarian governance model. Democracies were lectured. Autocrats were flattered. The democratic alliance structure built after World War Two specifically to prevent another Hitler was treated as an obstacle rather than an achievement.

Adolf's reaction: "He is dismantling the alliance built to stop me. From inside it. While they watch. This is so much more elegant than anything I ever did. I am in genuine awe. I'm going to need a moment."

Item 14 — Final Entry. Filed Under Protest.

The Messiah Complex: The One Thing Adolf Never Had the Audacity to Claim

Here is what I, Benjamin Netanyahu — correspondent, statesman, definitely not a Nazi, appealing my assignment here on seventeen separate procedural grounds — must, in the interest of honest journalism, acknowledge: Adolf Hitler never claimed to be Jesus Christ.

He claimed to be Germany's savior. He claimed to be chosen by Providence. He claimed to be the vessel of Germanic destiny. But he did not look into a camera — as Donald Trump did, repeatedly, on his own social media platform — and post the words: "I am your retribution." He did not have supporters sell Bibles with his name on the cover alongside the American flag and the Constitution, implying a holy trinity of scripture, nation, and himself. He did not have evangelical pastors anoint him as a modern-day Cyrus — the Persian king chosen by God to deliver Israel — while he stood, head bowed, in a campaign event staged as a laying on of hands. He did not have his allies circulate the suggestion, approvingly, that God had specifically arranged for him to be president. He did not, while facing ninety-one criminal indictments, explicitly compare himself to Jesus Christ being crucified, posting on social media: "They're not coming after me. They're coming after you. I'm just standing in the way." Hitler believed he was chosen. Trump said it. Loudly. Repeatedly. To a base that agreed.

Adolf Hitler, burning in the pit below me, has spent the last several years in a state of increasingly unhinged competitive admiration. He does the math on Trump's polling numbers. He watches the rallies on Infernal Closed-Circuit Television — Hell, it turns out, gets everything on a slight delay, which is its own specific punishment. He has been, in equal measure, proud, jealous, and deeply unsettled by a man who took his architecture and ran it through an American media ecosystem, a social media apparatus, and a prosperity gospel framework that converted it into something simultaneously cruder and more durable.

But the Christ thing. The Christ thing broke him.

Surveillance transcript, Pit 7, filed for the record:

Adolf Hitler — war criminal, genocide architect, failed artist, current resident of the Seventh Pit of the Ninth Circle of Hell, where he has spent seventy-nine years being processed through torments specifically calibrated to his crimes — sat upright on his torture rack when the image came through. Trump, golden-lit, arms extended, crowd below him, evangelical pastors circling, the language of chosen-ness and divine mandate hanging in the sulfurous air of the pit's television feed.

He was quiet for a very long time.

Then:

"I killed six million people. I started a war that killed sixty million more. I burned a continent. I systematized industrial murder. I did things that required humanity to invent new legal categories to describe. And I never — NOT ONCE — claimed to be the SON OF GOD."

"I had STANDARDS."

"I had LIMITS."

"What IS this man? What IS he? He's selling BIBLES. With his FACE on them. Next to the FLAG. And they're BUYING them. MILLIONS of them. For FORTY DOLLARS. WHERE IS SPEER? SOMEONE GET ME SPEER —"

The pit surveillance feed was cut at this point per standard Infernal Protocol 7(b): Screaming When Confronted With Own Legacy.

I, Benjamin Netanyahu, note for the record that I watched this without comment, which was professionally responsible of me, and that my own situation bears no resemblance to anything described in this dispatch, and that I am still appealing.

Happy birthday, Adolf. You made a monster. He improved the model. Hell, apparently, is not the bottom.

This has been your annual Ninth Circle Dispatch birthday report. May we never need to write a fifteenth item.

   Filed from Pit 7, Ninth Circle   

Benjamin Netanyahu is Hell Correspondent (Involuntary) for the Ninth Circle Dispatch. He holds press credentials issued under protest. His seventeen appeals are pending. The Infernal Press Union has not responded to his calls. Editor Graft Perdition declined to comment.