Pikes might like this..from the UK Guardian..

The lawyer Mike Godwin famously came up with the “law” that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one (or 100%).

Robert P Jones thought long and hard about whether to go there in his latest book. But the more he studied US demographic numbers, considered the rise of Christian nationalism and heard Donald Trump use the language of racial purity, he found the conclusion inescapable. “This is our 1933,” he writes. So it is that Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy begins with the rise of the Nazi party and the complicity of the German people, including German Christians and churches.

Jones cites Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler, remembered for the poem First They Came. But for the first four years of Hitler’s reign, he notes, Niemöller did not fully oppose the Nazis. He later regretted that he and the Protestant German church did not speak out sooner.

Backslide returns to the analogy in its epilogue. He writes: “Just as God asked Niemoller where he was between 1933 and 1937, God will ask us where we were between 2025 and 2028. Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing.”

Sitting in his downtown Washington office, the president and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) contends that US democracy is experiencing a severe “backslide” that is directly aided and abetted by an “apostate” white Christianity, including Trump’s language on the campaign trail.

“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly used the concept of genetic inheritance. In 2020, addressing a mostly white crowd in Minnesota, he declared: “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

Normalisation is a perennial danger.

“If don’t want to live in a place where we have a thuggish police force that’s kidnapping people off the street in masks and killing US citizens in the streets, now’s the time to speak up,” Jones said.

Backslide cites historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s 1950 The Aftermath of Nazi Rule report for Commentary magazine based on interviews with postwar Berliners: “A great number of Germans, especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to.”

Dreadful. One can only hope we come to our senses this fall.