Watching Project Nazi: The Blueprints of Evil on AHC. The parallels

[doc03]

with Trump are chilling.

[onecaliberal]

1. I went to the holocaust museum in LA more than a year ago and left with the same thoughts.

So much more now. Truly frightening.

[doc03]

4. A couple years ago I would watch something like this and think this could never happen

in the USA. But you talk to these MAGA people they seem to be willing to believe anything that nut job tells them.
I saw one at the gym today, he always has Fox News on the TV. I saw him getting in his car in his rear window he had the MAGA hat, one that said Drain the Swamp, another said Lock Her Up and another Keep America Great and Trump 2020. In addition he had several Trump stickers on the back.

[onecaliberal]

6. These people are frightening, but they can't succeed unless we turn our heads.

[uponit7771]

2. K&R, I can imagine "shower rooms" on the border ... its the same mentality of cult that allowed

... people to justify killing humans on an industrial level.

[winstars]

3. Duhhhhhhh. From NY'ers, who have known this asshole for 40 years, GOOD MORNING!!!!

[abqtommy]

5. The parallels should come as no surprise

since Trump and Republicons ARE Nazis/Fascists. If it walks like a Nazi and talks like a Nazi then it's a Nazi!

[Trumpocalypse]

7. Unfair to compare Trump with Hitler

Hitler volunteered for the army.

[mnmoderatedem]

8. "making Germany great again" was mentioned several times

when describing rhetoric during Hitler's rise to power.

Couldn't help to notice.

[Hortensis]

10. Remembering Hitler didn't initially run as a monster but as Ronald Reagan.

Yes, a more aggressive, far more authoritarian Reagan promising to rescue a nation that was having great difficulties after WW1, but Hitler, like Reagan, initially campaigned on protecting traditional family values and religion, restoring economic wellbeing, and defending national security.

Reagan of course inherited superpower America's domestic prosperity and world leadership, which Trump's actually trying to destroy.

But the Germany Hitler took control of was truly broken, hurting, humiliated and lost and longed to return to the days of Germany's authoritarian "second reich," when it was a advanced, vigorous nation lead by an idealized Chancellor Bismark, the days when Germany lead the world in science. That longing was a retreat from a democracy they were nowhere near ready for to a prosperous authoritarianism, but understandable. It was the misty glories of the thousand-year reich established by Charlemagne over central Europe that fueled support for the dreadful, mad ambitions of a very, very bad leader.

Germans and Germany were in a very different place from us. We have our own national dynamics, including our very strongly entrenched representative democracy and individual rights Germany hadn't achieved, but the personality traits that cause some to respond to and obey the Hitlers and Trumps and others to emphatically reject are exactly the same.

[Hortensis]

9. The parallels of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism

in both nations are chilling. Trump's one man. Those who support him number in the tens of millions and have no idea that they have become a force capable of great evil. They really don't know it and certainly won't believe it. Some are on the left, and analysts report a surge of support for authoritarianism among young voters.

Someone who's studied authoritarian governments for 40 years had emphatically simple advice for lay people wondering if it could happen where they were: Watch out for mean people.

A lot of us have become mean.

Germany had its nicer half appalled by nazism, but many elections were stolen and laws broken increasingly blatantly, moving to using physical violence to intimidate and take. And then it was too late.