RE: Slow Cooking a toad - How Authoritarianism creeps in

I'm with you, man. I thought it couldn't happen in the US. Not because of exceptionalism, not because the founding fathers crafted some thing that was impervious to corruption. But because I thought we had learned from history. I thought while nationalism and authoritarianism had existed well before WW2, that event really shows us all how bad it can be and we all learned to never allow it again.

Well... Trump proves that it can indeed happen again, that people don't learn, that the lower classes today are just as easily bamboozled by a demagogue as they have always been and given into the hatred of nationalism.

On one hand, I remain hopefully as I see signs of resistance. On the other hand, it's very depressing and sobering to see how easily he is doing all this and how the entire GOP and most of the Democrats are enabling him.

That said, as I told @steevc on Mastodon, I am scared to bring my wife into the US right now. She has a green card, but ICE shows they don't care about that. I have been very critical of Trump online and I haven't previously made any attempt to hide my real name. My wife uses my last name. Am I being too cautious? Maybe, but this shit is scary.

I would really encourage you to listen to this podcast with Sam Harris and Jonah Goldberg about how bad it's getting. Keep in mind Goldberg is a huge conservative and used to be on Fox News, but he is very anti-Trump. As he says in the podcast "You can call them [MAGAs] right-wing, but they aren't conservative". Harris hides the full podcasts behind a paywall, but I think I can share the full episode. Here: https://samharris.org/episode/SE3C5F6992F