"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

"DONALD TRUMP IS RUNNING THE MOST openly fascist campaign ever undertaken by a major-party nominee for president of the United States.

That’s not hype; it’s a textbook application of the term. …

We like to think that fascism can’t happen in America. But it’s happening right now."

~ Will Saletan

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/3

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/lets-be-honest-trumps-running-as

“Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth — that evil is not one person but can be easily activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal."

~ Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (NY: Random House, 2020), p. 267

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/4

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653196/caste-by-isabel-wilkerson/

“Foreign visitors who concerned themselves with the plight of the Jews — and the majority did not — had to deal with an unanswerable question. How is it possible for these warm-hearted, genial people, noted for their work ethic and devotion to family values, to treat so many of their fellow Germans, with such contempt and cruelty?”

~ Julia Boyd, Travelers in the Third Reich, The Rise of Fascism (NY: Pegasus, 2018), p. 372

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/5

http://pegasusbooks.com/books/travelers-in-the-third-reich-9781681777825-hardcover

“People voted for Hitler as they voted for Putin and Trump, because they didn’t want to give up their own privileges. This isn’t a matter of ignorance. They understand exactly the price of enlightenment: that the equality of humankind means the equality of humankind, and not only after I’ve secured my own comfort."

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), p. 56, citing Bettina Stangneth

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/6

“What had come out on top in Germany might occur in darkest Russia or the Balkans, but surely not in their law-abiding country. What had happened? That was the question raised on all sides, but no one had an answer."

~ Joachim Fest, Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood, trans. Martin Chalmers (NY: Other Press, 2012), p. 100

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/7

“A nation, they said, that had produced Goethe, Schiller and Lessing, Bach, Mozart, and so many others, would simply be incapable of barbarism. Griping at the Jews, prejudice, there had always been that, they thought. But not violent persecution.”

~ Ibid., p. 181

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism
/8

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

~ Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Tolitarianism, p. 474

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #lies #disinformation
/9

“[Bettina Stangneth is] not convinced that Germans have faced the worst fact about the Nazi period: not the ignorant masses, but the educated elites were the driving forces behind the regime. ...

Ir wasn’t an unwashed, unlettered mob, but hundreds of well-off and well-read students, and their professors, who gleefully followed the Nazis’ first orders."

~ Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), pp. 55, 274

#Trump #fascism
/10

“Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space.”

~ Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (NY: Random House, 2018), p. 57

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #lies #disinformation
/11

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/586030/how-fascism-works-by-jason-stanley/

"The kind of government that a Trumpian sort of fascism would bring would not actually address any of the real problems in life. It would only generate the next round
of fake problems the next set of things you should be afraid of and then it will magically declare that those things have been resolved."

~ Timothy Snyder

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #lies #disinformation
/12

https://snyder.substack.com/p/fascism-on-television

"If you asked a hundred or a thousand young men what Trump wants to do that would benefit them, or how the country he wants to create would plausibly be better for them than the one they live in now, I suspect almost none of them would be able to come up with an answer."

~ Paul Waldman

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #lies #disinformation #gender #men #MaleVoters
/13

https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/trumps-empty-appeal-to-young-men

"If you’re one of those young men excited when he goes on your favorite podcast, so much so that you’re considering voting for the first time? I’ve got some bad news. You’re just another in a long line of marks who fell for Donald Trump’s scams."

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #lies #disinformation #gender #men #MaleVoters
/14

"'I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,' Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. 'People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.'”

~ Jeffrey Goldberg

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #military
/15

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327

"A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse."

#Trump #JDVance #Republicans #fascism #military
/16