Thread by @dcpetterson

As a youngish teenager, living through the Nixon years, waiting to get drafted to die in the meatgrinder that was Vietnam, watching the struggles of my black and brown brothers and sisters and the fight for women's rights, I contemplated a fascist Amerika.

1/14

As the decades passed, I saw Republican presidents--Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr, Bush Jr and Trump--all of them, every one, obtained their office through cheating and usually making deals with America's enemies.

Look it up:

1) Nixon made a deal with Vietnam (during the war!)

2/14

2) Reagan made a deal with Iran
3) Bush Sr rode on Reagan's treasonous coattails
4) Bush Jr needed Sr's SCOTUS picks, his brother counting Florida's votes, and was reelected by lying about 9/11
5) Trump -- Russia. Need I say more?

3/14

Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, all went in and out of style, but never went away. The KKK, neo-Nazis, right-wing mass murderers, and the WACO / David Koresh cultists peeked at us from under their rocks, just out of sight. Well, not always out of sight.

4/14

Remember the Blues Brothers? One of the best comedies ever. The villains were Illinois Nazis. In 1980. I lived near Chicago in 1980. I knew some Illinois Nazis. They were real. They were not jokes. They've always been there.

5/14

imdb.com/title/tt008045…

Nixon was a criminal, wanting power above anything else. That's the root of fascist autocracy.

Reagan was senile, but the men around him were outright fascists. Bush Sr was a former head of the CIA. Bush Jr was (and is) an idiot, and everyone around hm were Reagan's men.

6/14

Trump was, and is, the culmination. He is all the evil of every Fascist Republican president since the 1960s, but without the edges sanded off to make him acceptable. He has, for decades, been a bagman for the Russian mob. He is not a fascist leader. He's a moron flunkie.

7/14

Trump is too stupid to hide his evil, but the groundwork laid over the last fifty years means he has given permission for all the worms and lice, Lyme disease-carrying ticks and plague fleas to come out of hiding and infest our culture with their scum.

8/14

COVID is an apt analogy, a symptom of the fascist disease that the Republican Party has become. Either it is no coincidence, or the gods have a very dark sense of humor, for this once-in-a-century plague to have hit the world during the Trump Reich.

9/14

COVID is a metaphor for the spread of world fascism, made possible by the weakness of American leadership, which, in turn, happened due to the infestation of Nixon, Reagan, the Bushi, and Trumpism.

This is now our world. We are in crisis.

10/14

The Republican Party is owned by Russian fascists. It is run by America's enemies.

It is up to us to save the planet.

Democrats know the stakes. Yes, they are, each and all, still imperfect humans. They are, each and every one, a mix of the sacred and the profane.

11/14

There will be scandals engulfing each and every one of the Democratic heroes and thought-shapers.

Fuck the scandals. Ignore them. I don't care how serious any scandal is, be it sexual, economic or political.

Example: So Joe Manchin is an asshat. I don't give a fuck.

12/14

We will all live, or we will all die. We don't get to choose our allies any more. We can worry about purity after we've lived through the war.

We need to find a sense of priority. Or America will die.

13/14

"We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately."

-- Benjamin Franklin

14/14

PS. I obviously didn't die in Vietnam. The draft ended two years before I was eligible. I met a girl a year later whose highschool sweetheart died in Vietnam with his discharge papers in his pocket. She and I were married three years after that.

I don't want our grandchildren to grow up in a fascist totalitarian dictatorship.

These are the most important days you will ever see. The world is in your hands. Be a goddam hero.

PPS. The Blues Brothers movie was released in 1980, 35 years after the end of WW2.

It has now been 41 years since the release of the Blues Brothers.

Nazis were still a threat in 1980. They've grown stronger since.

PPPS. The Etruscans had a measure of time called the saeculum. This is the period from when an important event happens, until the last person who was alive at that time has died.

Another way to put it is, a saeculum is the measure of living memory.

Fascism can fully threaten the world only when the last person who remembers its horror has died.

It is no coincidence that Trump rose to power at this moment in time. We are nearing the end of the saeculum marking the rise of Hitler.