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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 2, 2026 at 12:06 am
In 1938, using threats of overwhelming force, Adolf Hitler successfully annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Since resuming the Presidency on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump has moved aggressively against Canada, Mexico and Greenland.
Greenland is strategically significant to the United States. It sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.
Trump declared that the United States must own and control Greenland “for purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World.” He has not ruled out a military takeover of the island.
Greenland
This even though the Kingdom of Denmark—a member of NATO and an American ally—holds control of the semiautonomous island.
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched his powerful Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union.
Less than two years earlier, on August 23, 1939, he had signed a “non-aggression” pact with his longtime arch-enemy, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union.
Since then, his army had conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece and Yugoslavia. Hitler believed it would conquer Russia in about six weeks.
Adolf Hitler
Four years later, Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany lay in ruins.
Similarly, on February 28, 2026, Donald Trump conspired with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Israel’s mortal enemy and America’s longtime antagonist: Iran.
Trump predicted that the war would be over in four to six weeks—the same timetable Adolf Hitler gave for the completion of his victory over the Soviet Union in 1941.
And just as “Operation Barbarossa” proved a fatal mistake for Hitler, so Trump’s latest stab at playing Generalissimo has proven a total disaster. Seven months into his war, he still has no plan for winning it or withdrawing from it without losing face.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 million barrels of oil used to pass each day. That flow has been reduced to between two million and six million barrels each day.
Strait of Hormuz
This has created a worldwide spiral in oil prices—and fueled inflation in the United States and other nations. But as prices for housing, energy and food soar in the United States, Trump claims that “affordability” is a “Democratic hoax.”
Like Adolf Hitler contemplating architectural models while Nazi Germany neared destruction, Trump focuses on vanity projects like a 90,000 square foot White House ballroom and a towering “Victory Arch” literally overshadowing Arlington Cemetery.
In Nazi Germany, freedom of the press was non-existent.
- Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels forbade editors to publish any content that insulted the Third Reich.
- The regime closed down anti-Nazi newspapers and used the SA and SS to storm offices and destroy printing presses.
- Journalists who resisted were arrested, sent to concentration camps, or forced out of the profession, particularly if they were Jewish.
- Opposition and multi-party newspapers were banned, and their printing equipment and plants were confiscated by the Nazi Party.
Joseph Goebbels
During his second administration, Donald Trump has waged an even more relentless war on the free press than during his first one. This has included:
- Routinely denouncing critical journalists and mainstream outlets as “fake news,” “enemies of the American people” and national security threats.
- Revoking press credentials and barring reporters from outlets like CNN, Politico and MS NOW from entering the White House.
- Banning Associated Press reporters for refusing to use the term “Gulf of America” instead of “Gulf of Mexico.”
- Filing multi-billion dollar defamation lawsuits against major news organizations such as CBS and the Wall Street Journal.
Donald Trump
* * * * * * * * * *
Those who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 knew:
- He was a man driven by greed, racism, egotism and hatred.
- He was a 34-times convicted felon for falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn “star” before the 2016 Presidential election.
- His lies about the dangers of COVID had killed at least 400,000 Americans.
- He had incited a treasonous attack on Congress to illegally remain in office as President.
None of this mattered to those who voted for him.
In “Death’s Head Revisited,” a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” Rod Serling offered a haunting story of otherworldly revenge:
A former SS captain visits the ruins of the Dachau concentration camp to relive his past sadistic pleasures—and is put on trial by the ghosts of the inmates he tortured.
As usual, Serling, as narrator, gets the final word:
“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them.
“They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard.
“Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience.
“And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
In 2016, 2020 and 2024, millions of Americans—fueled by greed, ignorance and/or hatred—cast aside Rod Serling’s timeless warning.
And voted for a man who intended to turn the Earth into a graveyard.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 30, 2026 at 12:05 am
During the 2016, 2020 and 2024 Presidential elections, white supremacists comprised the overwhelming majority of the audiences at Donald Trump’s rallies.
Many of them sported signs that read: “MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.”
They knew that demographics were steadily working against them. Birthrates among nonwhites were rising. By 2045, whites would make up less than 50% of the American population.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first black President, had shocked Fascistic whites. His 2012 re-election had deprived them of the hope that 2008 had been an accident.
Then came 2016—and the possibility that a black President might be followed by a woman: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And the idea of a woman dictating to men was strictly too much for them to bear.
So, on November 8, 2016, Donald Trump—lacking any government experience and best known as the host of a reality TV show—was elected President of the United States.
Eight years later, in 2024, President Joseph Biden turned 80—six years younger than German President Paul von Hindenburg when he died—and was capable of dying literally any day.
His Vice President, Kamala Harris—a black woman—was widely perceived as unprepared for the Presidency.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump—defeated in 2020—was, like Adolf Hitler, waging an all-out campaign to make himself dictator.
Hitler had a list of priorities—such as exterminating the Jews and conquering France, England and the Soviet Union—that he intended to carry out.
Similarly, Trump had his own list of priorities. Most of these had been supplied by the Right-wing Heritage Foundation under the title “Project 2025,” or “The Presidential Transition Project.”
Established in 2022, the project aims to recruit tens of thousands of radical Right-wingers to the District of Columbia to replace existing federal civil servants.
The Heritage Foundation
ajay_suresh, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Their goal: To fundamentally reshape the U.S. federal government toward a Fascistic agenda.
Among these proposals:
- An all-out assault on immigration–both legal and illegal;
- Attacking America’s long-term allies, such as Canada and England;
- Catering to America’s longtime enemies, such as Russia and China;
- Waging an all-out war on the press;
- Replacing tenured civil servants with thousands of political hacks who owe their loyalty to Trump;
- Making the director of the FBI personally accountable to the President—just as the head of the KGB is personally accountable to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin;
- Stripping the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to protect the air, soil and water;
- Favoring fossil fuels—the leading cause of global warming—and abolishing regulations to combat climate change;
- Placing traditionally independent federal agencies such as the Department of Justice, Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission under Presidential control;
- Providing massive tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% at the expense of the poor and middle class;
- Designating contraception as the point where life begins;
- Outlawing abortion;
- Sharply restricting—if not banning—access to birth control;
- Designating Christianity as the official religion of the United States;
- Reviving and expanding the use of capital punishment, while sharply restricting the right of appeals.
Once Trump assumed the Presidency again on January 20, 2025, he began to vigorously implement as many of these goals as time and circumstances allowed.
Reading Katja Hoyer’s 2026 book Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, the parallels between Hitler’s Third Reich and Trump’s second term become frighteningly clear.
For the administration of Adolf Hitler, the Number One enemy was the Jews.
And so, on September 15, 1935, the Reich pushed the “Nuremberg Laws” through its rubber-stamp parliament. These stripped Jews of their citizenship and laid the legal foundation for their systematic persecution.
“The Reich Citizenship Law” restricted citizenship solely to people of “German or related blood.” It reduced German Jews to second-class subjects. And it defined who was Jewish by having three or four Jewish grandparents, rather than religious practice or belief.
“The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour” banned marriages and sexual relations between Jews and German citizens (“race defilement”). It also forbade Jewish households from employing German female domestic workers under the age of 45.
Enforcement of these laws was entrusted to the local police and Hitler’s paramilitary police forces, the S.A. (“Brownshirts”) and SS (“Schutzstaffel”).
For the administration of Donald Trump, the Number One enemy is Hispanics. Trump made attacking illegal immigration the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
At the 2024 Republican convention, which nominated him, delegates cheered and waved “Mass Deportation Now” signs, excited at the thought of seeing tens of thousands of brown-skinned men, women and children being forced to leave the country.
And since taking office, Trump has turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into his private army. Its size and budget dwarf those of every other federal law enforcement agency.
ICE employs more than 22,000 agents. Its annual budget usually stood at about $10 billion. But Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 2025, provided it with $75 billion in extra funding.
By July 21, 2026, according to ABC News, “The total number of deportations so far this fiscal year is 356,389, according to the numbers posted by ICE. ICE currently has 65,765 individuals in detention facilities, 60% of whom have a criminal record, according to the agency.”
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 29, 2026 at 12:13 am
If Nuremberg-style justice comes to the United States, those citizens who have lustily supported Donald Trump’s legacy of hatred, tyranny and corruption will be forced to answer for the horrors their support enabled Trump to commit.
Among these:
- Issuing executive orders revoking the security clearance of Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs’ “crime”: Preventing lies spread by Russians—and Americans—on social media platforms from swaying the 2020 Presidential election to Trump.
- Flooding the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Chicago with federalized National Guard troops against state governors’ wishes during immigration crackdowns and civil unrest.
- Flooding Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, with 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who terrorized (and in two cases murdered) both American citizens and illegal aliens.
- Threatening Harvard University with the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding, claiming that 2023 student protests about Gaza violated the civil rights of Jewish students.
- Threatening Greenland—an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark—with invasion unless it agreed to acquisition by the United States. Since Denmark is a member of NATO, such an invasion would pit the United States against its own alliance.
Donald Trump
- Launching an unprovoked attack on Iran on February 28, believing that in six weeks he can force its Islamic rulers to abandon their plans to develop nuclear weapons.
- Iran immediately closes the Strait of Hormuz—through which about 20 million barrels of oil used to pass each day. That flow has been reduced to between two million and six million barrels each day.
- This has created a worldwide spiral in oil prices—and fueled inflation in the United States and other nations. But as prices for housing, energy and food soar in the United States, Trump claims that “affordability” is a “Democratic hoax.”
- Like Adolf Hitler contemplating architectural models while Nazi Germany neared destruction, Trump focuses on vanity projects like a 90,000 square foot White House ballroom and a towering “Victory Arch” overlooking Arlington Cemetery.
- Seven months later—by September—the war continues and Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s on-again, off-again bombing campaign has dangerously strained and depleted American military stockpiles.
Reading Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, by Katja Hoyer, catapults the reader into the doomed Weimar Republic, which lasted from November 9, 1919, to March 23,1933.
Its parallels—whether intentional or unintentional, between that era and the one the United States is now living through—are uncanny and frightening.
During its 14-year existence, the Republic granted Germans rights they had never enjoyed—and which would be ruthlessly suppressed during the 12-year Third Reich that replaced it.
Among those rights:
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of assembly
- Privacy of mail, telegraph, and telephone
- Free and secret elections
- All citizens were eligible for public office
But the Republic had dangerous enemies—Communists on the Left, and Nazis on the Right. And it was plagued by charges of illegitimacy and even treason—for its members’ having signed the Treaty of Versailles ending World War 1.
Another motivating factor: Right-wing antisemitism, shared by millions of Germans. The fact that the Republic held many Jews within its topmost ranks only increased the hatred aimed at it.
Germans refused to admit they had lost World War 1 on the battlefield. They demanded scapegoats—Jews, Communists, traitors—who had “stabbed us in the back.”
Adolf Hitler joined the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party in 1919—the year after World War 1 ended.
Adolf Hitler
In 1923, he staged a coup attempt in Bavaria—which was quickly and brutally put down by police. He was arrested and sentenced to less than a year in prison.
After that, Hitler decided that winning power through violence was no longer an option. He must win it through election—or appointment.
He repeatedly ran for the highest office in Germany—President—but never got a clear majority in a free election.
When the 1929 Depression struck Germany, the fortunes of Hitler’s Nazi party rose as the life savings of ordinary Germans fell. Streets echoed with bloody clashes between members of Hitler’s Nazi Stormtroopers and those of the German Communist Party.
Germany seemed on the verge of collapsing.
Germans desperately looked for a leader—a Fuhrer—who could somehow deliver them from the threat of financial ruin and Communist takeover.
In early 1933, members of his own cabinet persuaded aging German president, Paul von Hindenburg, that only Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor could do this.
Paul von Hindenburg
Hindenburg considered Hitler a dangerous radical. But he allowed himself to be convinced that, by putting Hitler in the Cabinet, he could be “boxed in” and thus controlled.
So, on January 30, 1933, he reluctantly appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor—the equivalent of Attorney General.
On August 2, 1934, Hindenburg died, and Hitler immediately assumed the titles—and duties—of the offices of Chancellor and President.
His rise to total power was now complete.
Eighty-four years after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Donald Trump became President of the United States.
The parallels between these two administrations have since become alarmingly clear.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 28, 2026 at 12:18 am
“For it is the doom of men that they forget.”
—Merlin, “Excalibur”
It’s April 16, 1945, and more than 1,000 residents of the town of Weimar, Germany, are being forced to view horrors they have never before seen and perhaps never imagined could exist.
Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Third Reich since 1933, won’t commit suicide until April 30, but Germany’s fate is already sealed. The war it had so arrogantly started is ending in humiliating defeat for its “master race.”
American army units have been appalled at what they found in Buchenwald concentration camp, which lies only about four miles northwest of Weimar. They are determined to make Weimar’s citizens see, up-close, the true legacy of the Hitler regime.
Among the nightmarish scenes the citizens view:
- Corpses piled on carts.
- Recently dug up mass graves, revealing countless bodies.
- Crematorium ovens filled with human bones and ashes of prisoners who had been murdered.
- An all-pervading stench of death, stemming from the tens of thousands of men and women who had been murdered there.
- A gallows where inmates had been executed.
- A wooden block over which they had been bent to be flogged.
- A table displaying samples of human skin that had been collected by the former camp commandant and his wife.
Corpses found in Buchenwald after its liberation
The United States Army films the Weimar residents as they are confronted with the horrors of Buchenwald. Out of this comes a documentary: “Death Mills,” which puts the blame for Nazi atrocities on the shoulders of ordinary Germans.
“These Germans, the ones who said they didn’t know,” intones a narrator, “were responsible, too. They had put themselves gladly into the hands of criminals and lunatics.
“They tell you now they meant no evil, that they knew nothing of what was going on or could do nothing even if they knew….
“Today, these Germans who cheered the destruction of humanity in their own land, who cheered the attack on helpless neighbors, who cheered the enslavement of Europe, plead for your sympathy.”
If similar justice comes to the United States, those citizens who have lustily supported Donald Trump’s crimes at all levels will be forced to answer for the atrocities their support made possible.
Among these:
- Pardoning about 1,500 of his followers who violently tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election in the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress. More than 250 of those pardoned had been convicted of assaulting police.
- Banning CNN, Politico and MS NOW correspondents from the White House because he didn’t like their “unfair” reporting about him.
- Signing 26 executive orders reversing climate change initiatives, eliminating DEI programs, and initiating a federal hiring freeze.
- Firing the inspectors general—who are charged with protecting the government from waste and corruption—from more than a dozen federal agencies.
- Firing Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices.
- Withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO).
- Withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
- Firing the non-partisan board members at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His toadies illegally renamed it the Trump-Kennedy Center and appointed him as its chairman—just as Joseph Stalin made himself arbiter of what was permissible for artists in the Soviet Union.
Donald Trump
- When artists and audiences—outraged by the takeover—boycott the Center, an embarrassed Trump orders its closure, claiming a two-year repair renovation is necessary
- Purging about a half-dozen executive assistant directors at the FBI. These were some of the bureau’s top managers overseeing criminal, national security and cyber investigations. Their “crime”: Investigating Trump’s inciting the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and illegally holding highly sensitive national security documents after leaving office.
- Ordering the Justice Department to indict his critics such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.
- Declaring “a national emergency” targeting migrants—legal and illegal.
- Trying to cancel birthright citizenship—enshrined within the United States Constitution—for U.S.-born children.
- Demanding a military parade for his 79th birthday, poorly disguised as a salute to the 250th anniversary of the United States Army.
- Pardoning favored political allies and loyalists. Among these: Seventy-seven people associated with the Trump fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, including Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and former chief of staff Mark Meadows.
- Demanding that the media refer to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” and banning the Associated Press from the White House for refusing to do so.
Gulf of Mexico
- Demanding that Canada become the 51st state and aggressively raising tariffs on Canadian goods.
- Shutting down the Federal Government on October 1, 2025, when Democrats refuse to agree to his gutting Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), causing 10-15 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage.
- Among those not getting paid: Air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Owing to many controllers’ refusing to work, the FAA reduces air traffic by 10% at many airports.
- Shutting off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for the poor to pressure Democrats to support his gutting of healthcare programs.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 24, 2026 at 12:10 am
Fox News has spent two years peddling “The Big Lie”—that President Donald J. Trump was cheated of electoral victory in 2020.
But now the truth is coming to light.
On the March 3 edition of The PBS Newshour, political commentators David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart explored the explosive revelations emerging from a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.
Host Amna Nawaz opened:
And, at CPAC today, [Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for President Trump] went after Fox, saying they’re not pro-Trump enough.
But, just this week, we did see a huge admission in that—the latest filings and the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, that admission from Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch. He conceded under oath Fox hosts lied about the 2020 election, and he chose not to stop them. What are the implications of that?
David Brooks
New York Times Columnist David Brooks: Rupert Murdoch started a paper called The Australian a long time ago. He was a journalist, an actual journalist. And now he’s gotten to the point where you can lie on camera if—as long as your ratings are OK.
Those people who lied didn’t lie over little things. They lied about the election results of a presidential election, kind of a major deal. And we now know—as we all suspected—they all knew what was happening.
And Murdoch is sitting there atop this organization sort of blithely pretending it’s not really his problem. And so he can say it, and he has power over the corporation today. He owns it. He could fire Tucker [Carlson]. He could fire all the people—all the people who were in on this and whose journalistic integrity has been exposed as zero.
And yet he’s still trying to blithely rise above it. And so it’s amazing that we have a major news organization that is inaccurate about a presidential election.
Jonathan Capehart
Washington Post Associated Editor Jonathan Capehart: Oh, it’s huge. And it was confirmation of something that folks on the left and just folks paying attention kind of suspected: That Fox News, the “news” is in quotes, that they’re out there blatantly telling lies.
But then to see in black and white as part of this case that not only…they would say lies on television, but then, behind the scenes, they knew the truth.
And what that says to me is, Rupert Murdoch and his anchors, those people who are peddling in lies, they are insulated from the effect of the lies that they tell. When you see someone saying, “Oh, our ratings are going down, and that’s going to affect the stock price.” So there’s no concern….
Rupert Murdoch
Hudson Institute, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
So that means you’re more concerned about your bottom line than the corrosive impact on our democracy and political discourse in this country. That, to me, was what’s really disturbing.
And what’s even more disturbing is that Fox News isn’t even really covering this lawsuit, which means that their audience, who should know about what’s being said about them and about the programming for them, they will never—they might not ever know….that what they’re being told is just a big bunch of lies.
Amna Nawaz: I go back to the impact again, though, because their audience, which is in the millions, right……if you’re a loyal Fox watcher prone to distrust any other information source anyway, does any of this make an impact?
Jonathan Capehart: Well, that’s the point I was trying to make. We don’t even know if they will even know about this case, as a result. And even if they do find out, either they might not trust it, or maybe they just don’t care. I don’t know.
David Brooks: Well, they’re losing some viewers to the further right, the Bannons of the world. So they are — they are definitely losing viewers.
But my colleague David French made the core point about Fox. If you’re in red America or in rural America, Fox is not just a news organization. It’s your community center. It’s an organization that—that news organization that pays intense attention, that lots of good news stories about cops and soldiers.
A lot of things that happen in red America that don’t get much coverage in the coastal media get a lot of attention in Fox. And so the loyalty there is not only about politics, and it’s not only about news coverage. It’s just about where people see themselves reflected.
* * * * *
A Twitter user recently asked: “Are critical thinkers being vastly outnumbered in the USA because secondary education is just so damn expensive? It’s no wonder Republican states are among the most poorly educated.”
The answer is: No.
You don’t have to accept propaganda.
You can question the official version of any story.
You can seek out multiple sources.
You don’t have to seek out only those sources that confirm your long-held prejudices.
And you don’t need a college education to do so.
If Right-wingers—who make up the audience for Fox News—are ignorant, it’s because they want to be ignorant.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 23, 2026 at 12:13 am
Reputable news organizations believe they’re hurt when a reporter gets his facts wrong—or, worse, invents a story for sensationalistic attention.
For Fox News Network, getting hurt means that some of its own reporters have told the truth. And, as a result, many of its viewers are turning to other Right-wing propaganda outlets.
In a series of email exchanges, Fox Network executives revealed they were not simply loyal to President Donald Trump but mortally afraid of him.
Star Host Tucker Carlson said that Trump was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
Nor was Carlson the only one. The fear started at the very top—with Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch: “Nobody wants Trump as an enemy. We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.”
Up to January 26, 2021, Murdoch allowed Fox advertiser Mike “My Pillow” Lindell to appear on the Tucker Carlson Tonight Show to lie that Trump had been cheated of victory by massive voter fraud.
Questioned as to why he allowed it, Murdoch agreed with the statement, “It is not red or blue, it is green.”
Rupert Murdoch
In short: Lust for money, not ideology, motivated Fox’s slant on politics.
And, as with all Fox News commentary, truth played no role in the decision to air it.
With unapologetic hypocrisy, Fox stars Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked the lies being peddled by Trump—and their own network.
In a text to Ingraham, Carlson said that Sidney Powell, an attorney who was representing the Trump campaign, was “lying” and that he had “caught her” doing so.
Ingraham: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”
Hannity said Giuliani was “acting like an insane person” and Ingraham described him as “an idiot.”
And Hannity said: “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
Sean Hannity
How do we know all this? Certainly not because some outraged Fox whistleblower made these exchanges public.
It’s because Fox’s chief victim, Dominion Voting Systems, decided to strike back.
The Denver-based company produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States.
Dominion, claimed Fox, had criminally enabled Democrats to steal the election for Joe Biden by programming its machines to throw out votes meant for Trump.
Its reputation unfairly tarnished, its employees threatened with violence by Trump’s Fascistic supporters, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News in March, 2021.
Dominion charged Fox News with pushing false conspiracy theories about the company to win back dissatisfied viewers upset with its coverage of Trump’s defeat.
Libel lawsuits are typically centered around one falsehood. But Dominion cites a lengthy list of Fox hosts making false claims even though they were known to be untrue.
According to an almost 200–page document Dominion filed in the lawsuit:
“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the Dominion stuff’ was ‘total BS.’ Yet despite knowing the truth—or at minimum, recklessly disregarding that truth—Fox spread and endorsed these ‘outlandish voter fraud claims’ about Dominion even as it internally recognized the lies as ‘crazy,’ ‘absurd,’ and ‘shockingly reckless.’
“As a result of the false accusations broadcast by Fox into millions of American homes, Dominion has suffered unprecedented harm and its employees’ lives have been put in danger,” Dominion’s attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.
Backing up its assertions: A treasury of emails, texts, testimony, and other private communications from Fox News personnel contradicting the network’s claims that Dominion’s voting machines had rigged the presidential election in Joe Biden’s favor.
These had all been obtained through the discovery process.
While Fox was echoing Trump’s claims of “massive voter fraud,” its executives and commentators knew that he—and they themselves—were lying.
In mid-November 2020, Carlson texted one of his producers that “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election.
Later, Carlson said that Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s attorneys and a prominent accuser of election fraud, “is lying.”
Dana Perino, an anchor, called allegations of voter fraud against Dominion “total bs,” “insane,” and “nonsense.”
Murdoch told an executive on November 6, 2020 that “if Trump becomes a sore loser we should watch Sean [Hannity] especially and others don’t sound the same.”
And on January 5, 2021, Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott:
“It’s been suggested our prime time three [Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham] should independently or together say something like, ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won.’ It would “go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election [was] stolen.”
But Fox never aired such a statement.
Fox has repeatedly tried to get the case dismissed, but Superior Court Judge Eric Davis has refused to do so. A trial is slated to begin on April 17.
There is a difference between journalism and Fascistic propaganda. And Fox News Network routinely provides examples of the latter.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on September 22, 2026 at 12:49 am
For the administration of Adolf Hitler, the Number One enemy was the Jews. Enforcement of antisemitic laws was entrusted to the local police and Hitler’s paramilitary police forces, the S.A. (“Brownshirts”) and SS (“Schutzstaffel”).
To facilitate this all-out war on Jewry, the Reich operated 23 main concentration camps with over 1,000 satellite camps, along with a massive network of at least 44,000 total sites, including forced-labor camps, transit camps, ghettos, and extermination camps.
The result: An estimated slaughter of six million Jews, mostly throughout Eastern Europe and Russia.
For the administration of Donald Trump, the Number One enemy is Hispanics. Trump made attacking illegal immigration the centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
And since taking office a second time, Trump has turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into his private army. Its size and budget dwarf those of every other federal law enforcement agency.
By July 21, 2026, according to ICE:
- The total number of deportations this fiscal year is 356,389.
- ICE currently holds 65,765 people in detention facilities.
- By June, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had arrested just over 43,000 people.
- That amounts to 1,438 arrests per day in June.
ICE operates roughly 212 to 225 active primary detention centers in the United States. Immigrants’ rights groups estimate a network of over 270 to 400 total facilities.
The United States has deported more than 25,000 people under secretive agreements with 35 countries to take migrants whose nation of origin refuse to take them.
In Nazi Germany, joking about Hitler or other high-ranking Nazis could result in arrest and imprisonment.
A merchant named Erich Kaiser found himself in “protective custody” for telling a joke: “Back in the day we used to have a Kaiser sent from heaven above. Today we have some arsehole from Berchtesgaden [Hitler’s mountain retreat].”
In Trump’s America, comedians who displease the President find themselves viciously attacked, even fired.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), pressured ABC to fire late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel. This followed on-air comments Kimmel had made after the September 10, 2025 shooting of Right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk.
Carr accused Kimmel of speaking disparagingly about Kirk. In fact, Kimmel had criticized Trump for showing more concern about building a White House ballroom than the loss of his alleged friend, Kirk.
Jimmy Kimmel
Kimmel’s show was briefly suspended, but a mass protest by viewers led the network to quickly reinstate him.
After Kirk’s death, Trump and his Republican allies threatened retribution (“consequences”) for people who spoke unflatteringly about him.
On September 15—five days after Kirk’s death—Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast: “So, when you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out and, hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed to use law enforcement to target Americans who mocked Kirk’s death, calling that domestic terrorism:
“We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law to take away your freedom.”
Stephen Colbert had hosted CBS’ The Late Show With Stephen Colbert since 2015. Since then, he had humorously mocked Trump’s outlandish and often illegal behavior.
On July 14, 2025, he made this joke:
“While I was on vacation, my parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe.”
Stephen Colbert
Meanwhile, Paramount, the owner of CBS, was in the midst of an $8 billion sale to the Hollywood studio Skydance Media. For this, it needed the regulatory permission of the FCC of the Trump administration.
Trump had long made clear his desire to see Colbert removed from the airways. After CBS cancelled The Late Show, the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media was quickly approved by the FCC.
In 1938, using threats of overwhelming force, Adolf Hitler successfully annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Similarly, Donald Trump began making threats against Canada, Mexico and Greenland even before his second inauguration.
He threatened to impose a 25% tax on all products entering the United States from Canada and Mexico unless they stopped the flow of drugs (which Americans crave) and illegal aliens (which employers crave).
And he continued to assault Canada with a seemingly endless series of tariffs. To which Canadians retaliated with counter-tariffs of 15% to 50% on $27.6 billion worth of U.S. goods.
Flag of Canada
Worse, he began insulting Canada’s leaders and making threats of using military force to make Canada—a staunch American ally for over 200 years—America’s “51st state.”
Next, he targeted Greenland—which is strategically significant to the United States for two reasons:
- It’s home to America’s Pituffik Space Base. This “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to the base’s website; and
- It sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Politics, Social commentary on September 22, 2026 at 12:05 am
In the beginning was the audience. And the audience was filled with Fascistic hate and prejudice, and sought always to have its beliefs confirmed.
And then came Fox News Network, which sought to capture that audience—and, with it, huge ratings and profits.
At the center of both Fox and its audience stood Donald Trump—first as a Presidential candidate, then as President.
In him, Right-wingers found their ideal representative: He promised to destroy all those groups they hated.
Among these: Blacks, Asians, “uppity” women, Muslims, liberals, Hispanics, Democrats.
Donald Trump
So when Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election—by 81,284,666 votes for former Vice President Joe Biden versus 74,224,319 for Trump-–the Right was devastated. And furious.
Unlike its defeats in past Presidential elections, this time the Right refused to accept the will of the electorate.
Trump had often “joked” about how wonderful it would be for the United States to have a “President-for-Life”—as was the case in China.
This time the Right intended to make that a reality.
Central to making that happen was the Fox News Network.
In 2022, for its seventh consecutive year, Fox News stood as the top-rated cable news network in the United States. Fox averaged 1.4 million total day viewers.
By contrast, 733,000 watched MSNBC and 568,000 watched CNN.
In prime time, Fox came in first with an average of 2.3 million viewers in 2022.
MSNBC came in second with 1.2 million and CNN ranked third with an average of 730,000.
As for profits: Fox’s net income for the twelve months ending December 31, 2022 was $1.507B, a 4.94% increase year-over-year.
In 2015, Trump launched his campaign for President. His chances for success seemed impossible at the time—even to many mainstream Republicans.
But as he won victory after victory in Republican primaries, Fox News stuck with him. And stayed with him through the four years of his Presidency.
Fox was Trump’s favorite network. It gave him unstinting praise and sought to put a favorable spin on everything he did. As a result, Trump rarely gave interviews to CBS, NBC or ABC News.
In turn, Fox profited hugely as its audience—and advertisers—eagerly tuned in.
So when Trump lost the 2020 Presidential election, he and Fox decided they must get him back into the Oval Office.
Trump did his best—or worst—by filing about 60 lawsuits to overturn the results of the election. But none of his attorneys could prove their claims that widespread fraud had robbed him of victory. The suits were dismissed by judges or withdrawn by Trump’s own attorneys.
Fox News couldn’t file fraudulent cases on Trump’s behalf. But it could poison the public mind by claiming—endlessly and falsely—that Trump had been cheated by massive voter fraud.
Fox didn’t even wait for the final results of the 2020 election to be called before it intervened on the side of what would soon be dubbed “The Big Lie.”
On Election Night, Chris Stirewalt, the political editor of Fox News Channel. was the first to project Biden’s victory in Arizona. This turned out to be right—and brought a furious attack upon Stirewalt.
Tucker Carlson
“We worked really hard to build what we have,” Fox host Tucker Carlson texted his producer, Alex Pfeiffer. “Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
For Carlson, credibility didn’t mean ensuring integrity in news reporting. It meant telling Fox’s Right-wing audience what it wanted to hear—whether the “news” was true or not.
Carlson added that he had spoken with fellow primetime commentators Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity minutes earlier and that they were “highly upset.”
In a January 26 Op-Ed for the Los Angeles Times, Stirewalt wrote: “Having been cosseted by self-validating coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are in error or that their side has been defeated as an attack on them personally.
“The lie that Trump won the 2020 election wasn’t nearly as much aimed at the opposing party as it was at the news outlets that stated the obvious, incontrovertible fact.”
Stirewalt was fired from Fox News in January, 2021.
Trump was furious about the Arizona call. After the election, he attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax.
Which many of them did, costing Fox a big chunk of its audience.
For Fox, this was the ultimate catastrophe. The company began cracking down on its employees who had dared tell the truth on Election Night.
One case involved White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich. Her sin was fact-checking a Trump tweet accusing Dominion Voting Systems of election fraud.
Heinrich wrote that top election officials had determined “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
“Please get her fired,” Star host Tucker Carlson texted his fellow told host Sean Hannity: “Seriously….what the fuck? I’m actually shocked….It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity replied that he had already spoken to Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive. The next morning, Heinrich’s tweet had been deleted.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on September 18, 2026 at 12:08 am
Republicans have long tried to prevent or eliminate programs that aid the poor and middle-class, including:
- Social Security (since it began in 1935)
- Medicare
- National health insurance
- Food stamps
- WIC (Women, Infants, Children).
So why are so many poor Americans now flocking to this party’s banner?
Two reasons: Racism and greed. There are historical parallels for both.
First, race:
In 1999, historian Victor Davis Hanson noted the huge gap in wealth between the aristocratic, slave-owning minority of the pre-Civil War South and the vast majority of poor white Southerners.
Victor Davis Hanson
“Before the war in the counties Sherman would later ruin, the top 10% of the landowners controlled 40% of the assessed wealth.”
In contrast, “more than half of those who were lucky enough to own any property at all still possessed less than 15% of the area’s valuation.”
So Hanson asked: “Why did the millions of poor whites of the Confederacy fight at all?”
He supplied the answer in his brilliant work on military history, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny.
One of those liberators was General William Tecumseh Sherman, who led 62,000 Union troops in a victorious “March to the Sea” through the Confederacy in 1864.
So why did so many poor Southern whites literally lay down their lives for the wealthy planter class, which despised them?
According to Hanson: “Behind the entire social fabric of the South lay slavery.
“If slavery eroded the economic position of the poor free citizens, if slavery encouraged a society of haves and have-nots…then it alone offered one promise to the free white man—poor, ignorant and dispirited—that he was at least not black and not a slave.”
And the planter class and its allies in government easily fobbed off their poor white countrymen with cheap flattery. Said Georgia Governor Joseph Brown:
“Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration, and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense his equal. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men.”
Arlington House and plantation, former home of Robert E. Lee
Similarly, poor whites now flock to the Republican Party—which holds them in equal contempt—in large part to protest the 2008 election of the first black President of the United States.
According to a Pew Research Center study released on July 22, 2011: “Notably, the GOP gains have occurred only among white voters; a 2-point Republican edge among whites in 2008 (46% to 44%) has widened to a 13-point lead today (52% to 39%).”
Since the 1960s, Republicans have pursued a campaign policy of “divide and rule”—divide the nation along racial lines and reap the benefits at election time.
- Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- Republicans opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
- Republicans, with Richard Nixon as their Presidential candidate in 1968 and 1972, pursued what they called a “Southern strategy”: Use “code language” to stoke fear and hatred of blacks among whites.
- Republicans have falsely identified welfare programs exclusively with non-whites. (Of the six million Americans receiving food stamps, about 42% are white, 32% are black, and 22% are Latino–with the growth fastest among whites during the recession.)
Thus, in voting Republican, many of these poor whites believe they are “striking a blow for the white race.”
And they can do so in a more socially acceptable way than joining a certified hate group such as the American Nazi Party or Ku Klux Klan.
Since 2015, openly racist groups such as the Klan and the American Nazi Party have flocked to the banner of Presidential candidate mogul Donald Trump. By enthusiastically courting their support, the real estate mogul has made it possible for Republican candidates to openly display their own racism.
Now greed:
In the hit play, 1776, on the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence, there is a telling exchange between John Dickinson and John Hancock. It comes during the song, “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men.”
Dickinson, the delegate from Pennsylvania, urges Hancock, president of the Second Continental Congress, “to join us in our minuet.”
By “us” he means his fellow conservatives who fear losing their property and exalted status by supporting American independence from Great Britain.
John Dickinson
Hancock declines, saying: “Fortunately, there are not enough men of property in America to dictate policy.”
To which Dickinson replies: “Perhaps not. But don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor. And that is why they will follow us.”
Today, poor whites generally identify with the CEOs of powerful corporations. They believe the Republican gospel that they can attain such wealth—if only the government will “get out of my way.”
They forget—or ignore–the truth that government, for all its imperfections, is sometimes all that stands between them and a wide range of predators.
In return, the CEOs despise them as the privileged have always despised their social and economic “inferiors.”
Unless the Democratic Party can find ways to directly address these bitter, Politically Incorrect truths, it will continue its decline into insignificance.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on September 17, 2026 at 12:10 am
On July 22, 2011, ABC News carried the following story:
The Pew Foundation, analyzing voter identification, found “the electorate’s partisan affiliations have shifted significantly” since Barack Obama won office in 2008.
The GOP had gained strength among white voters, most specifically “the young and poor.”
A seven-point Democratic advantage among whites under age 30 three years ago had turned into an 11-point GOP advantage. And a 15-point Democratic advantage among whites earning less than $30,000 annually had swung to a slim four-point Republican edge by 2011.
In addition:
- The GOP gains had occurred only among white voters.
- Republicans had made sizable gains among white voters since 2008. Fifty-two percent of white voters called themselves Republicans or leaned to the GOP, compared with 39% who affiliated with the Democratic Party or leaned Democratic.
- Democrats had lost their edge among lower income white voters.
- In 2008, Democrats had a 15 point lead among white voters with family incomes less than $30,000. By 2011, Republicans had a four-point edge among this group.
- The GOP’s lead among middle income white voters had grown since 2008, and Republicans held a substantial advantage with higher income white voters.
- Republicans have made gains among whites with a high school education or less. The GOP’s advantage over Democrats had grown from one point in 2008 to 17 points in 2011 among less educated whites.
- Republicans had made smaller gains among whites voters who had college degrees.
What is fascinating about these findings is this: The Republicans have, since 1980, pursued a policy of gutting programs aimed at helping the poor—while repeatedly creating tax-breaks for the wealthiest 1% of the population.
For Republicans, the patron saint of this “love-the-rich-screw-the-poor” ideology remains Ronald Reagan–two-time governor of California and twice-elected President of the United States (1981-1989)
Ronald Reagan, who taught Americans to worship the wealthy
Among those charting Reagan’s legacy as President was former CBS Correspondent David Shoenbrum.
In his bestselling autobiography, America Inside Out: At Home and Abroad from Roosevelt to Reagan, he noted:
- On January 28, 1981, keeping a pledge to his financial backers in the oil industry, Reagan abolished Federal controls on the price of oil.
- Within a week, Exxon, Texaco and Shell raised gasoline prices and prices of home heating oil.
- Reagan saw it as his duty to put a floor under prices, not a ceiling above them.
- Reagan believed that when government helped business it wasn’t interfering. Loaning money to bail out a financially incompetent Chrysler was “supporting the free enterprise system.”
- But putting a high-profits tax on price-gouging corporations or filing anti-trust suits against them was “Communistic” and therefore intolerable.
- Tax-breaks for wealthy businesses meant helping America become stronger.
- But welfare for the poor or the victims of a predatory marketplace economy weakened America by sapping its morale.
“In short, welfare for the rich is good for America. But welfare for the poor is bad for America, even for the poor themselves, for it encourages them to be shiftless and lazy.
“Somehow, loans to the inefficient management of American corporations would not similarly encourage them in their inefficient methods,” wrote Shoenbrun.
Republicans have sought to dismantle Social Security ever since that program began in 1935. And Republicans have furiously opposed other programs aiding the poor and middle-class—such as Medicare, food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants, Children).
In short, this is not a political party with a history of rushing to the defense of those most in need.
So the question remains: Why are so many poor Americans flocking to its banner?
The answer lies in the history of the American South—and slavery.
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NAZI PAST IS AMERICA’S PRESENT: PART FIVE (END)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on October 2, 2026 at 12:06 amIn 1938, using threats of overwhelming force, Adolf Hitler successfully annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
Since resuming the Presidency on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump has moved aggressively against Canada, Mexico and Greenland.
Greenland is strategically significant to the United States. It sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York.
Trump declared that the United States must own and control Greenland “for purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World.” He has not ruled out a military takeover of the island.
Greenland
This even though the Kingdom of Denmark—a member of NATO and an American ally—holds control of the semiautonomous island.
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched his powerful Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union.
Less than two years earlier, on August 23, 1939, he had signed a “non-aggression” pact with his longtime arch-enemy, Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union.
Since then, his army had conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece and Yugoslavia. Hitler believed it would conquer Russia in about six weeks.
Adolf Hitler
Four years later, Hitler was dead and Nazi Germany lay in ruins.
Similarly, on February 28, 2026, Donald Trump conspired with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Israel’s mortal enemy and America’s longtime antagonist: Iran.
Trump predicted that the war would be over in four to six weeks—the same timetable Adolf Hitler gave for the completion of his victory over the Soviet Union in 1941.
And just as “Operation Barbarossa” proved a fatal mistake for Hitler, so Trump’s latest stab at playing Generalissimo has proven a total disaster. Seven months into his war, he still has no plan for winning it or withdrawing from it without losing face.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 million barrels of oil used to pass each day. That flow has been reduced to between two million and six million barrels each day.
Strait of Hormuz
This has created a worldwide spiral in oil prices—and fueled inflation in the United States and other nations. But as prices for housing, energy and food soar in the United States, Trump claims that “affordability” is a “Democratic hoax.”
Like Adolf Hitler contemplating architectural models while Nazi Germany neared destruction, Trump focuses on vanity projects like a 90,000 square foot White House ballroom and a towering “Victory Arch” literally overshadowing Arlington Cemetery.
In Nazi Germany, freedom of the press was non-existent.
Joseph Goebbels
During his second administration, Donald Trump has waged an even more relentless war on the free press than during his first one. This has included:
Donald Trump
* * * * * * * * * *
Those who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 knew:
None of this mattered to those who voted for him.
In “Death’s Head Revisited,” a 1961 episode of “The Twilight Zone,” Rod Serling offered a haunting story of otherworldly revenge:
A former SS captain visits the ruins of the Dachau concentration camp to relive his past sadistic pleasures—and is put on trial by the ghosts of the inmates he tortured.
As usual, Serling, as narrator, gets the final word:
“All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes; all of them.
“They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard.
“Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience.
“And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”
In 2016, 2020 and 2024, millions of Americans—fueled by greed, ignorance and/or hatred—cast aside Rod Serling’s timeless warning.
And voted for a man who intended to turn the Earth into a graveyard.
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