I’ve noticed that sometimes things that appear unthinkable are actually predictable, even inevitable. Things you happily assumed were true, like lifelong membership in a beloved community, turn out to be illusions, once you see the alluring thing curdle and crumble exactly the same way over and over. Only in hindsight, once the damage becomes undeniable, can you see how destructive the unquestionable thing you thought was perfect actually was. The unthinkable is revealed to have been clearly preordained.
If you are in a cult, membership in good standing is the only consideration for those who revere the leader. The leader can rape members, it is God’s will, and besides, the rape victims are fucking liars. The leader can lie in the face of overwhelming evidence, he lies for a greater truth and it’s also a lie that he lied, vicious, traitorous liars said that about the always truthful leader. The leader can kill his cult members, if they are true believers they willingly pawn their lives for their leader’s divine vision. Such is the power of true belief in a worldview.
The Nazis recruited masses from those neglected Germans who had never had any political voice in German political life (Germany had only recently become a democracy). The Nazi movement made these invisible Germans feel like virile, crucial, indispensable players in world history. If they joined the party and sucked up to their leaders without question they could be promoted to unimaginable heights. An insignificant, uncharismatic, unqualified, not born wealthy or politically connected person who had no hope of ever having any power (think Stephen Miller, Jeffrey Clark, Mike Johnson, JD Vance, Gym Jordan, Kashyap Patel) could become the highly respected, rightfully feared, Nazi in charge of sending millions to their deaths. Talk about a rush for someone whose highest goal in life is a feeling of superiority and power over others.
Then you have the born millionaires whose inherited wealth soon reaches the billions — the list is long: Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Steve Mnuchin, Elon Musk (trillionaire), James Fucking Dolan (NY Knicks owner) … you get the idea. They grow up believing they are geniuses, since they had the wisdom to choose wealthy fathers they never alienated by opposing. Since they consider themselves infallible visionary geniuses in all areas (and not psychopathic hoarders of obscene, never sufficient wealth at everyone else’s expense) they believe they have the absolute right to control others. Their will is unchallengeable law in the businesses they control.
A brilliant motion picture spectacle was made about the power of a great individual’s will (though the hero of the story was born lower middle class) Triumph of the Will. The impressively choreographed pageant of German discipline, mass conformity, and ecstasy, at Mr. Hitler’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, flashed gorgeously across screens all over Germany. Wide eyes gleamed with the reflected light of the glittering, stirring spectacle as it magically bounced off those movie screens. All you need, boys and girls, is a convincing, lushly presented, relentlessly one-sided story to sell your worldview to masses of people (no matter how objectively incoherent or mad your story is) — if you have the money and influence to make sure millions watch it. The most necessary talent for a dictator is an instinct for public relations, and the very best advertising people to make the most powerful ads in support of that instinct.
I’ve been regularly exercising my First Amendment right to express my opinions on this blahg read by very few people (I’m not on any other “social media”). Lately bots seem to have been checking in to monitor these obscure posts, which are harshly critical of both the Nazis of old and their American counterparts in our own day. Some days I suddenly have hundreds of visitors. I’m sure I’m on one of Palantir’s lists of people to be rounded up and given special treatment (sonderbehandlung), if the blessed day arrives for these natural aristocrats to decide who is worthy of living and who must be eliminated (Lebensunwertes Leben [1]). They are lunging headlong toward that glorious day, exactly like the Nazis did — by brute force, fueled by the power of hatred, and an intense 24/7 propaganda blitzkreig. Heather today gave a nice snapshot of the Nazi theory of power in a democracy:
Much of [Nazi political theorist Carl] Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that in a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law, power belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who himself almost certainly has not read Schmitt—asserted this view in August of last year when he said: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”
Alex Kaplan of Media Matters notes that since Trump took office in 2025, his loyalists have urged him simply to declare a national emergency in order to justify dictating new voting and election rules to the states.
The U.S. Constitution gives to the states the authority to conduct elections, but the Trump administration wants state voter lists, at least in part so it can run them through a tool designed to find noncitizens who might have applied for benefits for which they’re ineligible. That system, known as Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements and, confusingly, also abbreviated as SAVE, is not designed for voter rolls, and as Liz Dye explained today in Public Notice, it explicitly did not cover U.S. citizens.
But, Dye explains, between last April and last August, employees of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Department of Homeland Security, and the Social Security Administration linked the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements to the master file from Social Security, called NUMIDENT. Then they reprogrammed SAVE to upload voter rolls for mass citizenship screening. source
The truth, reflected in the extremist Heritage Foundation’s own voter fraud database, is that the fraud rate in US elections is miniscule, in the single digits across millions of votes. The Heritage Foundation’s database shows a total of hundreds of cases of fraud, going back decades, covering years of elections where over a billion votes were cast. The incidence of fraud is something like 0.0001%. Bill Barr himself said under oath that he told Trump his claims of massive voter fraud changing the election outcome in 2020 were “bullshit.” The Heritage Foundation‘s own Hans von Spakovsky speaks for all these voter fraud Nazi motherfuckers. “Illegal aliens” and other non-citizens are not voting. They are not trying to vote. Create a fake emergency and then take bold steps to fix it.
Hitler’s party never found it necessary to change a word of the democratic Weimar Republic’s constitution. They merely invoked Emergency Powers after rushing through an Enabling Act immediately after their parliament building was burned down. The rest, as they say, is history.
All I can say at the moment is “fuck these Nazi putos”. They are marching behind a deranged and demented figurehead of extremely limited ability, reckless, incapable of strategic thinking or compromise while projecting overweening confidence, who has repeatedly, continuously lied to and already alienated masses of his own followers. Those true believers in the MAGA cult will follow him to hell. Nobody else is going down there with him.
[1] from Wikipedia: The phrase “life unworthy of life” (German: Lebensunwertes Leben) was a Nazi designation for the segments of the populace which, according to the Nazi regime, had no right to live. Those individuals were targeted to be murdered by the state via involuntary euthanasia, usually through the compulsion or deception of their caretakers. The term included people with disabilities and later those considered grossly inferior according to the racial policy of Nazi Germany. This concept formed an important component of the ideology of Nazism and eventually helped lead to the Holocaust.[1] It is similar to but more restrictive than the concept of Untermensch, subhumans, as not all “subhumans” were considered unworthy of life (Slavs, for instance, were deemed useful for slave labor).
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