As the nation descends further into madness and authoritarianism (where “they’re eating the dogs” meets “they’re ignoring the courts” — it has been educational how sanity and democracy collapse together), one observes with increasing concern 1) how the perpetrators refer to themselves and 2) how they refer to their enemies. As with recent works, some quite lengthy (America Is Simply Too Absurd for Democracy to Survive), this writer intends to be a witness to such things, for as long as waning strength allows. After all we’ve seen over the past decade it is quite difficult to be shocked anymore, but we cannot allow the most troubling developments to be lost and forgotten in the numbing ocean of stupidity and horrors.
“The GOP has a Nazi problem,” Laura Loomer, rightwing activist, admitted in the fall of 2025. “And the more we pretend like we don’t, the worse it’s going to get.” A stunning admission. It was prompted by the Young Republicans, many not so young, getting caught praising Hitler, cursing Jews, and speaking of gas chambers for opponents. At least fellow Trump ally Loomer regarded Nazis as a bad thing. This of course was after the Nazi salutes given by Musk and Bannon at public speeches, which garnered no consequences, coming and going like the wind. Paul Ingrassia privately said he had a “Nazi streak” — and now serves as acting general counsel of Trump’s General Services Administration. An aide to a Republican lawmaker displayed an American flag with a swastika on it in his cubicle. Republican Nazis run for office in Missouri, North Carolina, Illinois, and elsewhere. The GOP even has a self-described “black Nazi.” These are chilling developments. While plenty of decent conservatives and Republicans have condemned these events (anti-nazis no doubt still in the majority), and even doled out punishments, it is impossible to deny that a Nazi cancer exists in the party, and that in the Trump era the kind of indecency that would have been political suicide fifteen or twenty years ago has become business as usual. The most blatant of evils has spread from the darkest corners of the rightwing masses and has reached the top. No, it is not wholly new — American Nazis infected Republican politics long before they celebrated the election of Trump as a new dawn for their movement — but it is more open and powerful now. Quite understandable, given Trump’s public embrace of white supremacist ideas and figures, his post-and-delete use of Nazi imagery, and his reported private admiration of Hitler.
What Republicans call others can of course be closely related to what they call themselves. Trump labeling leftists “vermin” and declaring undocumented immigrants to be “poisoning the blood of our country” obviously echoes Hitler and other monsters. But there is a more frightening word increasingly thrown about (also utilized by the Third Reich against communist enemies), one more familiar: terrorist. Anyone who has lived in the post-9/11 epoch understands the power of this word: labeling someone as such justifies doing whatever you please to them, such as torture or indefinite detention without trial. At the very least, the epithet serves to generate fear and hatred, to say of someone, no matter how innocent, “This is the most despicable kind of human being” (Zohran Mamdani was, naturally, called a terrorist by bigots just for running for mayor of New York). Trump and his allies are continuing this American tradition, broadening its scope to increasingly frame opponents as despicable and dangerous, as “the enemy from within,” as Trump also called leftists.
In September 2025, the Trump administration declared Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” and then released the notorious NSPM-7 memorandum that laid out the beliefs of Antifa terrorists: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” While Joint Terrorism Task Forces and federal agencies were directed to investigate and prosecute violence (alongside some troubling language about going after “radicalization” efforts, i.e. free speech), the danger was obvious. Antifa is at most a bunch of small groups of socialists, anarchists, and communists; it isn’t one organization, and might be more accurately viewed as an ideology or movement. Thus, the administration has framed individuals who think a certain way (an anti-fascist way, pretty necessary these days), or belong to the wrong local group, as terrorists, even if they have never hurt a fly (this is not to say some haven’t). Just as horrifying, there is real fear that by using such a vague, barely-existing “organization” as its terrorist boogeyman, an authoritarian might crush nonviolent dissent: any leftist, liberal, or even conservative critic of the administration could be said to be spewing “anti-Americanism,” “extremism,” or “hostility” (equally vague terms), and thus be associated with Antifa, and thus be a domestic terrorist worthy of arrest. We are not yet living in such a nightmare, but the language of terrorism has been deployed. Activist Renee Good, though disobedient, was probably not attempting to hit ICE agents with her car in Minneapolis earlier this month, unless completely suicidal. Trump’s homeland security secretary labeled her a “domestic terrorist” immediately, pre-investigation. The vice president did something similar. Meanwhile, in Texas, Trump’s Department of Justice appears to be prosecuting standard protesters alongside violent offenders who shot cops — they happened to be at the same protest, but they are all condemned and charged together as “Antifa” “terrorists.” For Trump, rioters in Portland were terrorists. During the national “No Kings” rallies, Republicans slandered the peaceful protesters as terrorists and Antifa. A world where such slander of critics is followed by incarceration grows slowly easier to imagine, especially as the slanderers embrace the Nazi mark.
My writings often have more of a thesis. But sometimes it is enough to simply witness, to help ensure events of this age are never forgotten. To say these things happened. And that I was appalled.
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