“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes … Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone … Everyone is scared.” – Anne Frank, The Diary of A Young Girl, 1947
You don’t have to be a Nazi to behave like one.
It has become increasingly disappointing to witness the casual cruelty of my fellow Americans, and particularly my fellow Alabamians over the last few months, if not years, as we have been submerged in the fear, loathing, self-righteousness, greed and ego of maga. For most of my life, I wondered often how it could be that thousands of people in Germany, in full view of millions of people, could so thoroughly dehumanize, mistreat and kill so many without the millions taking a stand against it.
I get it now.
It was the fear. It was the misinformation. It was the greed. It was justifying it through religion. It was convincing people that the law was on their side.
The millions not only stood aside, some of them helped.
A lot of good Americans flew across an ocean to put a stop to it. To quite literally save the world from it. Americans from all walks of life. All races. All ethnicities. All sexual orientations.
They charged off of boats into relentless gunfire. They went blindly into jungles on Pacific islands we can barely pronounce.
They did it to stop the spread of facsism. To stop the mistreatment and killing of innocents. To stop families from being ripped apart. To stop illegal detainments and shipping people off to faraway prisons to be tortured and killed.
We called them The Greatest Generation for what they did.
And now, less than a hundred years later, we’ve got people running around this country with swastikas and spouting the same rhetoric. The current president said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. That rhetoric came directly from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which he wrote that great cultures faltered because the “originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Donald Trump’s top advisor on immigration issues and the man responsible for his “zero tolerance” policy, Stephen Miller, was caught in leaked emails just a few years ago sharing white supremacist books and other materials and quoting Nazi rhetoric.
These dudes are in the White House.
Your great-grandpas would slap you.
We’ve already been through all of this. The Nazi stuff. The racism stuff. The white supremacy stuff. I thought we had come to the conclusion that it was all wrong, astoundingly stupid and not the way we wanted to live?
But here y’all are, once again, turning the people who own that Mexican restaurant you visit three times a week into super-villains who you’re willing to argue should be dumped into mega prisons and disappeared off to random countries. No matter their history. No matter their work in your community. No matter how good and decent they might be.
In some cases, no matter if they’re actually a U.S. citizen.
There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of U.S. citizens sitting in prison because those ICE agents you’re standing with didn’t give a damn about laws and due process and the Constitution. Because the people they were hellbent on detaining “looked foreign.”
An immigration attorney I spoke with last week has 11 clients right now who were scooped up without a warrant and without cause and are still sitting in prison, somewhere, awaiting something that resembles due process to start. All of them are U.S. citizens.
You don’t even need a story from an attorney though. Go to any social media platform and search for ICE arrests. You’ll find more videos than you can watch of ICE agents routinely, and without a care in the world, violating the Constitution repeatedly. Entering homes without warrants or probable cause. Pulling over vehicles without proper cause. Entering schools. Entering churches. Charging people with BS crimes because they’re angry.
In many, many cases, the people arrested wrongly sit in prison for weeks. They lose their jobs. They lose their homes. They lose their dignity.
And a fair number of Alabamians (although I refuse to believe it’s a majority) are applauding it all.
What are we doing?
Why did y’all buy all of those “Don’t Tread On Me” license plates and guns if you were just going to cheer on the treading government? What did you think the treading was going to look like? Did you think the treading was just going to be making comfortable white people slightly less comfortable?
It’s always the poor. It’s always the minorities. It’s always the at-risk folks. It’s always those who are being vilified. It’s always those who don’t have the power to take a stand individually.
That’s who you’re supposed to be standing up for. That’s who gets treaded on.
Because these sorts of things tend to snowball. The Nazis didn’t start with the gassing and mass murder. They started with simple vilification, slowly moving the masses to look the other way, to make excuses for the increasing cruelty and dehumanization. Step by step until there was no atrocity that would shock the conscience, nothing that would lead the masses to take a stand.
That’s not America in 2026. That much is certainly true. The atrocities here cannot be seriously compared to those we often hear of in Nazi Germany.
Yet.
