“This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year there will not be a Jew left in Germany.” — Hitler, 1939

“We will root out the Communists, Marxists … and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within … our country.” — Trump, today

@tristansnell Not all fascists have to be compared to Nazis. The Nazis were fascists, for sure -- but fascism is bad enough on its own.

Kids aren't learning just how fucking evil the actual Nazis were. They aren't learning about actual fucking traincar loads of people, with 13 million of them shipped to camps where they were systematically incinerated or shot to fall into mass graves they had dug themselves at gunpoint.

Let's save the Nazi comparisons for actual fucking nazis.

@FirefighterGeek @tristansnell The thing is, though, that the Nazis didn't start with train cars full of people. They started with smaller measures.

I visited the Holocaust Museum in DC a few decades ago. (Highly recommend it, but it's emotionally shattering. Don't plan anything else that night!) There was a "kid's exhibit" called Daniel's Story. You enter a room in the life of a Jewish kid named Daniel just as Hitler is rising to power. Everything seems normal.

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@FirefighterGeek @tristansnell As you move from room to room, time moves forward. There are changes, but they are small and are easily dismissed as "not so bad" once you've accepted everything that comes before.

Then you enter the last room which is the gates to a concentration camp. Suddenly, you realize that each of those "not bad" steps led you to this point and how bad they really were.

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@FirefighterGeek @tristansnell So when Trump uses language that echos early Nazi rhetoric, it's totally fair to call him a Nazi even if he's not saying - yet - that we need to build death camps to kill all the Jews.

If we get to the point where Trump is in charge and is going full Nazi Final Solution, then it's too late. We need to point out the Nazi parallels early and avoid them.

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@TechyDad @tristansnell are you suggesting trump has anything like that planned?

@FirefighterGeek @TechyDad @tristansnell Did Hitler have it planned from the beginning? It doesn't actually matter. Without enough like-minded followers his initial plans would have been irrelevant. This is why he put out feelers at every stage to learn what he could get away with.

Likewise what Trump currently has planned is irrelevant. The relevant questions are what would he do if he could get away with it and where are his feelers leading. The answers are anything and genocide. The argument you're trying to make is astonishingly ahistorical.