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Dean Obeidallah's avatar

With today's GOP we are all getting a sense of what it was like to be living in early 1930's Germany as fascism took hold.

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Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH's avatar

I have been meditating on why our society is not nurturing and has no empathy and collective culture is flying apart. We need to understand, not just the burgeoning deviant political philosophies, but why they are becoming more actively hateful and vicious which as you discuss is actually endorsed by main stream Republican politicians. I watched DJT start with othering Obama by challenging his birth certificate, then othering Muslims and Mexicans as a political strategy, then accepting othering Jews ("will not replace us"), then a vast public movement of science and vaccine denial during COVID, which was not just without empathy, but othered the high risk elderly, essential minorities, the poor and urban elites (as expendable nuisances) in promoting their own libertarian, individualistic freedom, finally culminating in othering pregnant moms to protect the potential life of a fetus above all values even at the price of allowing expectant mothers having a miscarriage to suffer and making the ethical practice of medical caring illegal and finally othering children by passing laws re-permitting child labor.

So what does this mean? From a historical perspective this is all very serious because I am aware that wars always start by othering the enemy (see WWII Japanese internment camps, Muslims in the Iraq war among others) and that Hitler started his extermination project by othering handicapped, mentally retarded and mentally ill Germans and killing 200,000 of them. This is a deep seated pathology. Few people, especially in the media, see how all these events are tied together and are at the core of the Trumpian/Republican urge to fascism.

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