If you’ve been on YouTube, there are these fascinating videos of city life in Berlin, Germany, in the 1930s. What’s so remarkable about them is their ordinariness. Well-dressed Berliners dine in outdoor cafes, smiling. People stroll down the street without a care in the world. Street vendors sell pretzels. A Cadillac dealership is open for business in a Bauhaus-style showroom in an upscale part of the city.
It’s 1938.
At the same time, people are quietly being apprehended and sent away. Professors are fired. The press is systematically stifled. The Times of London classifieds are filled with ads from Jewish professionals begging for jobs as live-in help just for room and board. The complacency of the smiling people on those summer Saturdays in Berlin is something to behold.
Recently, the following has happened in your country:
On a radio show, Carl Paladino, who ran for Congress in New York, said that Merrick Garland should “probably be executed.”
Video has surfaced of Florida sheriffs training Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked Capitol police.
Six states have chosen election officials who claim the 2020 election was stolen, which should predict the outcome in the next one, no matter what the actual vote.
A Texas school district has ordered “The Diary of Anne Frank” removed.
Former Trump White House aide Garret Ziegler complained about the “anti-white” Jan. 6 Commission. Later, he posted the personal information of FBI agents who carried out the Mar-a-Lago warrant on social media. Along with their children’s.
Nineteen out of 35 GOP Senate candidates don’t acknowledge the results of the 2020 election.
Joe Kent, a GOP congressional candidate in Washington, has said that “Hitler was a complicated historical figure” who “many people don’t understand.”
In Indiana, an amendment was introduced to eliminate rape and incest exceptions in their anti-abortion bill. The GOP candidate for governor of Michigan supports the same policy.
The Republican nominee for Maryland attorney general hosted a 9/11 conspiracy radio show. He expressed the idea there were demolition charges installed in most buildings in New York City.
In Georgia, Herschel Walker is running for Senate. He’s put a gun to his wife’s head. Twice.
West Virginia Republicans are pushing to end child support, reasoning this will reduce the number of abortions.
A Louisiana woman who was carrying a skull-less fetus that would die within a short time from birth traveled to New York to terminate her pregnancy after her local hospital denied her an abortion.
A consultant to GOP Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, said “my policy is not to conduct interviews with reporters who aren’t Christian,” and Jews and non-Christians are not part of the conservative movement.
I could fill the entirety of this newspaper front to back with stories like these. They emanate from one Party, and one Party only.
It’s summertime in New York in 2022. People are out, dining outdoors, riding bicycles, day tripping to the beaches. Business is good. All is well.
Or is it?
It’s bad enough the New York Republican Party has such monstrous people like Elise Stefanik, who is so repugnant, it is impossible to even process the holding of public office by someone this despicable. Then there is Mr. Paladino. We have admitted pro-seditionist, Steve Bannon acolyte and Proud Boy partner Lee Zeldin running. It seems he’s committed voter fraud even before his primary ended.
Locally, George Santos is running for the 3rd CD, a cartoonishly inept, crude, and ignorant troll whose entire campaign is based, not on policy matters, but stoking resentment. His social media timeline is followed and endorsed by conspiracy theorists, White nationalists and militia members.
At this point in their Party’s history, pulling a lever for any GOP candidate is a recipe for the undoing of this country’s social compact and way of life. That includes Jack Martins, who is a serious man by any definition, but his total silence while all this is going on makes him 100% complicit.
Remember how Marc Rubio, Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham all fell in line after Trump won? That’s how things work in politics. Elect ONE of them, and you’ve pulled the trigger on our Democracy.
What’s it going to take? Haven’t you seen enough?
The ordinary volk in those 1938 videos had no idea that in just one year, their world would be obliterated. You wish you could tell them. But I doubt they would listen.
Are YOU listening?
Donald Davret
Roslyn
