I’m going fishing this week – metaphorically, anyway – because I need a break. Let’s meet up here again after Labor Day.
But before I go, permit me to quote myself.
On the eve of the ’16 election, I urgently warned (for what it was worth, which was nothing) that voters should reject the demagogue “who builds a wall between truth and disinformation, who role-models the Russian despot, who attacks the legitimacy of our entire election process,” and who, if elected, would “transform our fragile democracy into an authoritarian thugocracy, swathing his despotism in red, white, and blue.”
Um. Hello?
But for anyone still clueless about our slide toward what former CIA officer Evan McMullin calls “proto-fascism,” perhaps a passage from William Shirer’s classic history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, will prove enlightening. Shirer, an American journalist, reported from Germany during the ’30s:
“Often in a German home or officer or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the papers. Sometimes (I) was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions (I) was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts had become what (their leaders), with their cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.”
If only Shirer could see us now.
He also wrote: “The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it.”
When I return Sept. 8, the seismic referendum on America’s imperiled democracy will be only 56 days away. See you then.