Because not everyone has Bluesky, I’m going to recreate the content of a post there here.

In a quote post, Gillian Branstetter hits the nail right on the head. She quoted Phil Lewis, who posted a clip of JD Vance on CNN.

Phil wrote:

JD Vance attempts to justify spreading lies about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Branstetter posts an image in response, quoting Hannah Arendt on The Origins of Totalitarianism:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

This is the state of America. This is what the GOP has become. Just listen to so-called undecided voters. They express exasperation at their inability to sort out truth. They are convinced only that everything they are told is a lie. The media lies and politicians lie. And you see them immediately allow in the most sensationalist ideas as plausible as a result. Because everyone is lying all the time, only the craziest lies might be true because who could come up with that stuff? And when they are shown that the mass pedophile ring of the Democratic Party isn’t true, they move on to Haitians eating pets, and then move on to voter fraud and election stealing, and then move on to Central American insane asylum releasing patients in the US, and then move on to American cities being overrun by violent Black people, and then move on and move on and move on.

When we compare the GOP to Nazis, when we call them fascists, it’s not simply due to their beliefs, as horrific as many of those are. We make this comparison because they are adopting the means and methods of totalitarian and fascist regimes.

When it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…