I’ve been thinking that for some time, and what happened in Minneapolis today (1/7/26) has pretty much convinced me. Can anyone counter that, and offer some hope?
The hope is that it’s not remotely over yet, and plenty of people are fighting. Everyone filming these assholes, rightly calling them out as Nazis, etc, is fighting the good fight. Even if lawmakers aren’t doing nearly enough.
It’s not remotely over. These assholes are going to go down. It may just take a little while.
It is like they are following the Third Reich playbook. I’m not sure they have read all the way to the end, though.
We’re not a successor state to the Holy Roman Empire, for one.
Trump issued a statement basically making the driver an insurgent and the agent a hero. It’s the kind of thing I used to read about in dystopian-future-cyberpunk books. But this is the dystopian now.
We don’t speak German.
You’re assuming there are only 2 options, either a free and functioning democracy, or nazi germany.
There is a huge spectrum of governments running from totalitarian to extremely free and democratic.
The US is a flawed democracy right now. We have less freedom than most of europe, but we still have more freedom than a lot of democracies in south America.
Its not a clean black/white division.
For example, Freedom house rates the US 84/100 on its democracy and freedom index. Finland by comparison is 100/100. Canada is 97/100. The cutoff for the transition from a ‘free’ country to a ‘partly free’ country in Freedom house is about 70/100.
FWIW, the US used to score about 94/100 in 2009. Then the GOP won congress in 2010, and the racist backlash against Obama started, then Trump, and now we’re at 84/100.
V-Dem gives the US a 0.61 on ‘egalitarian democracy index’ and gives Norway a 0.83.
If you look at the democratic backsliding in the US, we’ve basically gone back to where we were in the 1970s. We still have far more democracy and freedom now than we did in 1900. Not saying that’s a good thing, just saying there is a huge amount further we have to decline to truly be totalitarian state.
That would be nice, but who is going to bring them down? The democrats are spineless pussies. Even if they win they won’t use the power of government to do anything meaningful. The judicial system is terrified to hold Trump or his cronies accountable (look at what happened to Trump with all his felonies).
These criminals will just live out their lives and nothing will happen. What about all the crimes committed in the first Trump admin, nothing was done when Democrats controlled the white house and congress under Biden.
And Trump doesn’t have a Hitler mustache, right?
Let us take yesterdays tragic incident. It appears ICE surrounded her car, and she tried to drive away. Doubtless some ICE agent got his toes run over or was hit at very very low speeds and has a nasty painful bruise- whereupon he panicked and over reacted and shot her. Horrible, but likely not a crime on his part. In any normal police force, he’d have his badge taken away, but not convicted. Noems fantasy about the car being "weaponized’ is ridiculous of course. We still dont know all the facts, however.
Now compare this to Kristallnacht, where something like 100 Jews were out and out murdered, and some estimates of the death toll are higher.
We are getting a mite hysterical here, this is nothing at all like the start of the 3rd Reich.
Correct.
The Dems arent anything like that, but they are totally powerless now. wait until the elections later on this year, the Dems might control at least the House.
So, you did not see the video where none of that happened.
It was more “ICE decided to murder a woman and denied her medical care as she died”.
Tell that to people who have been murdered or imprisoned or deported. How “free” are the dead?
Doubtless?
I saw the video and I doubt very much any of that came close to happening. Why are you throwing ICE bones they most assuredly do not deserve?
Okay, it’s not Kristallnacht. But it’s still dangerous, because AFAIK and I’d love to be wrong, there’s little if any training required to be an ICE agent. So we have these goons who don’t know how to use minimum force, and they’ve got a lot of guns and not much impulse control. And when we also have a President and his crew who tie themselves in knots justifying this incident, I can see things getting increasingly more deadly.
On the bright side, at least it’s not (yet) a crime to not have the TV on and be utterly silent when Trump is giving a speech.
(And then there’s my neighbor, who until very recently was all in favor of ICE nonsense, because “They’re only arresting criminals! Honest, hard-working people have nothing to worry about.” Then he found out that two of his employees are at risk of deportation, and that is a scandal and an outrage. Okay…)
Hope, we still have, albeit in limited quantities. IF Democrats can regain control in 2026 of the House, and IF they’re willing to stand strong in the face of inevitable presidential abuse of power, then we have a chance to claw back from the edge.
If we manage free and fair elections leading up to 2028, same.
But…
I don’t see a chance of even odds on the first, and the second is even more of a longshot IMHO. And even given all of the above, it seems that the Republican lesson from the last 12 years means that Power alone, not the law, is the purpose of government, and it’ll be decades before that’ll likely change.
So, yeah, at best I’d hoped for a Warm but not Hot Civil War, and exhausted capitulation to Republican aggression as the far more likely result.
And that means, much like the Third Reich, a lot of people who just want to live their lives being destroyed along with their country because the risks of rebellion seem/are too high.
None of this is accurate or has any relationship to objective reality. I look forward to your retraction and apology.
“You mean, I get a gun?”
“Sure do, kid.”
“When do I get to use it?”
“Whenever you want.”
If that’s not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.
The mayor of Minneapolis got on TV and told ICE to “get the fuck out of our city”. If this were the “fourth reich”, he’d already be imprisoned and possibly dead.
Bystanders filmed and disseminated footage of the incident. They were out there yelling “fuck ICE” yesterday, and they’ll be doing the same tomorrow. In a “fourth reich” those people would’ve been shot on the spot, or dragged out of their beds to be put in front of a wall at sunrise.
That’s not to play word games or minimize what’s going on. But what we’ve got right now is a democratically elected government with previously existing institutions that are being governed in a tyrannical fashion. We still have a Constitution and these tyrants are losing case after case, causing them to withdraw or modify their behaviors.
Again, what’s happening is bad, and occasionally judges and courts are being disregarded (I have to acknowledge it before some clever person swoops in with the thought-terminated cliche “the Constitution is not self-executing”. But if we were in a fourth reich, every judge ruling against Trump would already be dead/imprisoned and replaced. Numbered reichs simply don’t have an adversarial justice system. It’s not part of the thing.
That being said, things could get worse, and this next election will tell us a lot. All of this needs to stop, or we’re fucked. But there was no coup. We had an election, the country chose to gave power to assholes, and now we’re seeing the expected results. That’s different from being in a totalitarian country.
The road to Reichdom is a winding continuum.
I am not sure where we are on the road but we have passed a ton of mile markers and red flags along the way.
Another parallel to Nazi Germany.
Maybe that’s why trump gave money to Argentina. Reserving a room, as it were.
That’s why it’s up to us to elect fighters in the Democratic primaries for the mid-term elections. That’s the emphasis of Indivisible, a non-violent, progressive organization with independent chapters in every state. We need more Democrats like Mamdani, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, etc., to push out Schumer and Jeffries and confront Trump head on.
We also need to ensure that the mid-term elections are free and fair.