The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 605
The Story of Therapy Dog Tails 605
Where Everyone Gets a Dose of Puppy Love
PRESENT DAY 83: Walking Among Nazis
A MAGA nut shot up a Democratic office in Tempe, Arizona a few days ago. He’s now under arrest. Another MAGA nut in Phoenix set fire to a mailbox hoping to destroy Democratic votes, illegal votes or both. This is both the Trump legacy and the fact of Trump life after years of hate mongering and inciting violence among fanatic followers and knowing that Trump doesn't care whose lives he ruins or sacrifices. Just ask Ashli Babbitt. Democratic vote or illegal vote there’s no difference in Trump’s fevered mind or in the fevered minds of his MAGA mongrels This was two days ago and so far the arsonist is insisting that he didn’t have a political agenda. He just wanted to get arrested. Got his wish - charged with terrorism among other things. This is akin to Trump’s recent logic about golf great Arnold Palme: great golfer means great man means big dick. This Trump logic was on full display at a recent rally where he went on at length about Palmer’s “manhood." The illogic all around us is bad enough. But it’s the violence that makes the Trump MAGA era truly disturbing. There has been plenty of illogic before but we’ve never had a fascist former president before stirring up hate and violence to go along with it as Trump does every day and has done veery day now for nine years. In short, we’ve never had a self declared Hitler lover running for the presidency before or the masses of Trump Youth (old and young) ready to give up their freedom and even their lives for him. (Of course, Trump isn't running to be president; he’s running to end the presidency.) The MAGA mongrels noted above gave up their freedom. So did the more than a thousand to date who stormed the Capitol at Trump’s command on January 6, 2021 to try to “stop the steal,” a steal that didn’t exist. The MAGA nut who attempted to murder Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, didn’t just give up his freedom. He proved ready to give up his life. Such a vicious attack on such a prominent, unarmed person often results in the cop death of the assailant. In fact, of course, that guy and many of those sacking the Capitol on J6 would have been shot dead had they not been white. A black Ashli Babbitt would have been just one of many. Now we have General John Kelly, Trump’s first chief of staff, revealing Trump’s admiration for Hitler. This is nothing new, of course. We’ve heard this before, just not from such a reliable source or at such a critical time with supposedly half the country still willing to vote for Trump. I don’t know how many actually will vote for Trump. Certainly he will get 40% of the vote. He may get 45% of the vote. I’m confident that it won’t be more than that and that Kamala Harris will win in what today amounts to a landslide - 52 or 53% of the vote nationally, enough for her to win the electoral college. I think that both she and Trump know this but neither will acknowledge it - Harris because she doesn't want to let up on the pressure to get out and vote, Trump because he can’t stand to be seen as a loser. But if 45% of the American population actually supports Trump, this means that 45% of the American population are Nazis themselves. As it must have been in 1930s Germany, many of them may not be admitting it to themselves, but it’s true nonetheless. We on the side of America have been reluctant to call them Nazis outright but it’s time now to jettison that sort of politeness or protocol or whatever it is that has kept us from calling Trump the liar that he is, the fascist that he is and the Nazi that he is. And if Trump is a Nazi, so is everyone who supports him whether they know it or not, whether they acknowledge it or not, whether the like it or not. That means that 45% of the American people are are Nazis. 45% of the American voting population are Nazis. 45% of the people on the street are Nazis. 45% of the people at the supermarket are Nazis. 45% of the parents at your school board meeting are Nazis. 45% of the people in your book club are Nazis - okay maybe not the reading public. Nazis don't read that much. But that means that every time one of the 55% of us who still believe in those old fashioned American values of equal justice and opportunity for all and who still believe in the U.S. Constitution walks out onto the street, we’re surrounded by people who don’t believe what we always thought they believed. We walk out among popes who would have no problem rounding us up and putting us in concentration camps because that is, after wall, what Trump has promised. It’s what Nazis do. Trump promises it openly for those he doesn’t like but that list, of course, includes everyone who votes against him. The only thing the vote means to Trump is as a means of identifying his enemies. Every time we walk among Americans on American streets, we are amongst people who reject everything America has always stood for and who are doing what they can to end democracy by using our democratic institutions to install someone for whom those very institutions are anathema. The Nazis around us want to install someone who would destroy the institutions we’ve spent 240 years refining so that they would work for everyone, so that they work for those who were once considered subhuman (AfricanAmericans and indigenous people), unimportant (legal immigrants) or who were simply considered inferior (women, the disabled, the outcast, the non-white, etc.). When we walk into the supermarket, we’re surrounded by Trump MAGA Nazis who either say nothing when election workers have their lives threatened by MAGA nuts or who actually encourage that sort of disruption of our American democratic processes. When we sit down at a restaurant, we’re served by people who support someone who flouts the law as most convicted criminals do. When we’re stopped by a traffic cop, it may well be that we’re being stopped by someone who thinks that a man convicted of rape is the right guy of the office of the presidency. When we step up to the counter at a store, we’re face to face with someone who thinks that Mike Pence betrayed America and Nancy Pelosi is a war criminal. We walk among Nazis, that is. We wonder how it is that such people, any people, can support the convicted felon and rapist. We wonder how they can support Trump when he’s making a treasonous phone call to our enemies and probably not informing his parole officer of such behavior. We wonder how anyone can go along with Trump’s undermining of U.S. national security and policy in the Middle East by doing secret Nazi “diplomacy" with his fellow Nazis, Putin and Netanyahu, in whose interest it is to get the Nazi Trump back into power in the most powerful country in the world, the country that before J6 was the envy of the world for our freedom and respect for the rights of all. Trump turned the U.S.A. into a third world country on Jan. 6 but that was just a small step toward where he wants to take us - to the sort of Christian nationalist country that would be on a par for its suppression of our rights as Israel or Saudi Arabia as well as to the sort of oligarch dominated plutocracy that Putin oversees in Russia today. These are Trump’s heroes and those are his goals. But it’s spooky for us 55% who still believe in the U.S. Constitution. It’s spooky to walk among people we once thought were entirely behind the American experience but who have now revealed themselves to be just the opposite. When we look a fellow American in the eye on the street now, there’s a question as to whether this person is with you as an American or involved in the Trump MAGA Nazi movement to destroy what America is. It’s impossible to trust the people you meet on the street. They may greet you in a friendly way as they always did but now we have to wonder. Do they actually consider us to be their enemy? Someone who simply believes in the ideas of justice and equality for all - do they now actually believe that such people are their enemy? Trump has told them that we are. Many have believed it. Many prefer to believe the demagogue rather than the ideal. Many prefer to believe what Trump says rather than what they see with the own eyes because what Trump is telling them is what they want and what Trump is telling them is that Nazi Germany was a better place to live than 21st century America. It’s shocking how many of those around us every day go along with that. And worst of all, the Trump Nazis are heavily armed. A corrupt Supreme Court and MAGA states have made sure of that. But this is the new America. The new alt Nazi America won't disappear once Kamala Harris gets 55% of the vote and beats Trump by 12 million nationally. She will do that. Hillary beat Trump by three million and that wasn't enough. Biden beat Trump by seven million and that was. Harris will beat Trump by twelve million because there are just too many honest Republicans and Independents now supporting Harris and Walz to believe otherwise no matter what this or that poll says. That will be enough to win the election but not enough to undo what Trump has done to us. The Trump MAGA Nazis won’t accept defeat, of course. They’re already saying it’s rigged. Trump has been saying that since the start in 2015 because he knew in his hear that he had no business in American politics. But even with Harris and Walz in the White House, these Trump MAGA Nazis will still be there on the street, eying you to see if you're one of them or not. Like all cults the Trump MAGA Nazis have their own language, their own signals, their own body language. They can pick each other out. We can’t. We aren’t part of any cult. We’re just Americans who believe in American ideals and once thought that all Americans believed in them. Trump ended that. Now there is nothing but suspicions. Everywhere there is suspicion. No election will end the suspicion.
