William Lindsey Oct 22, 2024

"January 30th 1933 dawned cold and clear in Berlin as Adolph Hitler took his oath of office and promised Germans he would uphold the constitution. It would ultimately take him less than 30 days to dismantle it. ...

All you need to end a democracy is a leader willing to suspend or end the Constitution and a supporting cast large enough to allow him to do it.

Republicans have both."

~ Rachel Bitecofer

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/1

https://thecycle.substack.com/p/what-really-happens-if-trump-wins

What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?

Like Hitler, Trump Has Made Clear His Plan is Dictatorship, Not Democracy

The Cycle- On Substack
Show threadWilliam Lindsey Oct 22, 2024

"In an echo of [Sinclair] Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, [Dorothy Thompson] wrote in a 1937 column: 'No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model.'"

~ Heather Cox Richardson

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/2

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-21-2024

October 21, 2024

On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials.

Letters from an American
Show threadKim ScheinbergOct 22, 2024

@wdlindsy
I've reread 'Who Goes Nazi' every year for the last decade. It says something (not flattering) about me that I knew nothing about the context in which it was written. (I'd also watched Casablanca a dozen times before noticing it was made in 1942. It's a very different film knowing it was written before anyone knew how the war would end.)

Thanks for sharing this. It's probably a good time to revisit my two lists:

1. Who will hide me in an attic
2. Who will gleefully turn me in

Show threadWilliam Lindsey Oct 22, 2024
@kims It's heinous that we have to ask those questions, isn't it? That we have to live in fear that our own neighbors or family members might turn us in? And have to wonder who will shelter us? I go through these questions, too, as an openly gay man who has tried to make his voice heard against political and religious oppression, who knows full well from what was done to the Jewish people in the Nazi period that things can turn on a dime.
Show threadKim ScheinbergOct 22, 2024

@wdlindsy
I don't keep that list out of fear. I keep it as a means of updating my address book. It has cost me more than a few friends of many years, and brought me closer to those I once thought of as acquaintances

The fear that keeps me awake at night isn't about wondering who will hide me in an attic. It's the worry that my attic is too small for all the people — friends and strangers alike — that I am prepared to hide

With apologies to Spielberg, "We're gonna need a bigger attic..."

Show threadWilliam Lindsey 
@kims I understand. Same for me. It's more a matter of asking, "Which of my neighbors may turn out to be very different from the person I think he/she is, in either a shocking or a consoling sense?" It's a matter of remembering that people can turn out to be not at all who we imagine them to be. I think this has been a central feature of the Trump era for many us, the unmasking of people (as they unmask themselves), and the recognition that many people we thought we knew are now alien to us.
Oct 22, 2024 at 2:27pmWeb