I’ve been saying this since last year to my family members on the other side of the political spectrum (some MAGA, some moderate), and I feel like I’ve been saying it til I get blue in the face, but it definitely feels like the MAGA wing of the Republican Party wants to go back to this era of German history ASAP.

It should be pointed out that had the Holocaust and WWII not happened, Nazi Germany was still an unmitigated nightmare that no one but the Nazis themselves were enjoying very much. There were and are plenty of authoritarian and fascist states where genocides don't happen, but which are nevertheless hell on earth for everyone who's not a functionary of the state.

So even if you think it's hyperbole to worry about extermination camps in the US, there's absolutely nothing hyperbolic about a dystopian state coming into existence in which dissent and difference are crimes. Donald Trump and his band of dead-eyed sadists like Stephen Miller will do whatever they can in a second Trump term to bring such a state to you.

Nazi comparisons are completely justified.

“It happened, therefore it can happen again.” – Primo Levi

Saw this written on a plaque at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and it really gave me pause, reflecting on what is happening all around the world right now.

This is not what America is.

Is it though? After all the Nazis were inspired by the US.

True. The Nazi concentration camps were not constructed for Jews, but political dissidents. They were created to detain people that did not succumb to gleichschaltung, coordination or alignment with the Nazi agenda.

and less than a week away from a 4th reich if all the tightass tankies vote 3rd parties

I grew up with the whole JW things crammed down my throat before I, as a teenager, finally snapped at my abusive, alcoholic mother and told her off. My dad backed me up fortunately. I hate that cult. But I cannot condone even sending my worst enemies to a fucking concentration camp.

They should, however, be investigated and arrested on a traditional, case-by-case basis. Most of those people are just idiots who really reject modern reality because real life is hard. The point is though, you can't just paint a whole group as evil and round them up. It's important to find the ones actually doing bad things and run their lives in particular.

Insightful interview https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-trumps-rhetoric-compares-to-historic-fascist-language

"I think Trump has been conditioning Americans since 2015 to see violence as something justified in certain cases and even patriotic.

He's been conditioning them to see other Americans as enemies, as diseased, as dirty. And what we have to remember is that authoritarians might initially target one group, and he's been talking mostly about immigrants. But he's also calling the enemy within the political opposition.

[...]

And this is part of an authoritarian projection mechanism. I call it the upside-down world of authoritarianism, where, ever since Mussolini, he was the first to call democrats the real tyrants and fascism was going to be freedom. Fascism was going to make Italy great again. That was a slogan, as was drain the swamp. Trump took that from Mussolini as well."

I mean yeah.

The very first killed were the disabled. And not in prisons but instead in an improvised shed in the asylum they were in.

But the Sentiment is right.

This is exactly what America is and always has been.

That's too much, even for Jehovah's witnesses. JW's deserve their freedom just as anyone else. But I should add, there should be a law that allows one to legally hose them down with cold garden water if they come to your house to bother you. If they come and you like it, all good. But if they come and I specifically tell them never to bother me again, they better write that somewhere cuz next time they get a legal watering. It would make a lot of people get a renewed sense of home ownership lol. But I mean, the JW's could just stop pestering people.