"The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other." Bertrand Russel
It’s a rough headline but sounds too familiar to the unthinkable. I get it: people are worried about the heavy hand of administrative silencing, censorship, and punitive actions against this community., so this diary won’t make it to the rec list. The proof of this fear is in two diaries at the top of the rec list on Annieli's punishment. It’s chilling, but that's what they want.
Let me know if people have a different interpretation of the video below of JD Vance speaking at the National Conservatism Conference. I will be happy to delete this story and change the headline if folks agree it should not see the light of day. But it sounds to me that history is repeating itself. We have a right to be scared; it is his words, not mine, and his party swarms with white nationalists. He should be questioned about what the hell he meant. He has never been vetted in a national election before. What else will come out?
We know Trump has plans to kick down the doors of 20 million of our friends and neighbors and drag them to Deportation Camps. He has a history of taking children from their mothers and fathers and losing them. He is a monster.
H/T to Lefty Coaster for the find. They posted it in a comment on yesterday's Project 2025 post on the National Weather Service, and NOAA proposed elimination by a future Republican president to implement.
In a chilling address to the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, JD Vance. MAGA hates intellectuals. There is no bigger cheerleader for Fascism than Donald Trump, JD Vance, and the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025. It sounds like a statement in support of a final solution to me.
2021
He smiled.
Kim Clarke is a writer known for her longform historical narratives. Her work has been featured in publications such as the Washington Post, the American Historical Association, the University of Michigan Press, Consequence, HerStry, and Flying Island literary journal. One notable piece by Clarke is “In the Face of Fascists,” where she explores the impact of Nazi ideology on universities during World War II. The Nazis systematically removed scholars who didn’t adhere to their “blood and race” teaching and research, significantly affecting institutions like the University of Heidelberg. If you’re interested in reading more of her work, you can find it on her website.
From the University of Michigan Heritage Foundation: In the Face of Fascists by Kim Clarke.
It was no secret what the Nazis were doing to the University of Heidelberg. Germany’s great university, declared The Jewish Exponent, had become “Hitlerized Heidelberg.”
Since 1933, Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party had emptied Germany’s universities of any scholar not committed to “blood and race” teaching and research advocating the superiority of the Aryan race. Hundreds of Jewish faculty and students were purged, followed by anyone with Communist or Socialist leanings. Nazis or Nazi sympathizers were elevated to leadership positions at universities across the country. Professors were beginning and ending lectures with “Heil Hitler.”
Nazi students led book burnings in several university towns, with bonfires consuming works deemed “un-German.” Fiction, poetry, political theory, art and “corrupting foreign influences” were torched.
“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path,” declared Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. “The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you.”
Have I lost my marbles? Am I reading too much into it?
Check that list above; not one word of it is surprising in today’s GOP. Check the speakers.