At the beginning of the Trump presidency, there were already plenty of people who were throwing around the word Nazi. After all, Trump campaigned on a platform of openly fascist ideas: A wall at the southern border, a ban on Muslims entering the country, and a brand of nationalism that appealed to both racists and evangelicals.

His delivery style wasn’t too far off the mark, either. A loudmouthed populist who could say all the trigger words for the rabid conservative base, his speeches were dark and foreboding.

But talking like a certain dictator and promising some of the same sort of governance doesn’t actually make you a Nazi. It definitely doesn’t compare to the kind of white nationalism that led to the Holocaust.

And then the Unite the Right rally happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. There was just enough Trumpism bubbling over into the population that a significant cross-section of them decided he would be the one who could bring about the circumstances they’ve been looking for, and they acted on it.

Liberal activist Heather Heyer lost her life at the hands of a crazed alt-right fascist wannabe who had come to celebrate the rise of authoritarian power in the United States. Flags with swastikas marched next to flags with the stars and bars, drawing an equals sign between traditional southern rebellion and what these people saw as a dictator they could rely on to implement their ethnocentric ideals.

As far back as I can remember, if Nazis with Nazi flags show up at your party and you don’t immediately ask them to leave — or do something even more drastic, as our grandfathers might have — you are by default hosting a Nazi party.

So when Trump declared that there were “very fine people on both sides,” the phrase was picked apart by news outlets and commentators and politicians on both sides for weeks. For me, the meaning was clear: If there was anyone on the Nazi-party-hosting side that Trump thought was a “fine person,” then he was a sympathizer at the very least.

Unfortunately, the rise of authoritarianism in America has only sped up since then. The fact that the media allowed Trump’s Charlottesville comments to come and go seemed to normalize them as simply a Trumpian thing to have said.

After that, speech after speech contained more and more radical rhetoric. He told police officers to use more and harsher force when throwing suspects into their cars. He exhorted his supporters to remove dissenters from his rallies at any cost, promising even to pay their legal bills. He constantly pointed at and dehumanized the media that was still allowing him to say these things without repercussions, and his followers threatened them and made jokes about nooses for journalists after Trump praised a Montana candidate who had assaulted a reporter.

Whenever a Trump supporter would publicly do something that resulted in destruction or vi0lence, Trump would immediately blame liberals and the media for inciting his adherents by ruining the American dream and promulgating “fake news.”

And now we’re here.

We seem to not even need Trump anymore.

We have members of Congress who openly try to carry weapons into their chamber. We have candidates running for office who promise more sieges of the kind we saw on January 6 at the Capitol. We now see from the right a constant barrage of the darkest, rawest, most savage lizard-brain tendencies that America has known since our forebears infected Natives with smallpox and cornered them into reservations the size of an apartment bathroom.

And we finally have a name for it. It is the fascism we were afraid to say.

Coming full circle back to Virginia, site of the first colony in America, site of the white supremacist tiki torches marching through Charlottesville, now we see the actual fruit of that poisoned tree. And it looks exactly like Nazi Germany, at least on the scale that began to pare down the will of anyone who might have resisted.

They’re burning books in Virginia.

Anyone who’s passed even the most beginner-level high school history course knows what happened in 1933 after Hitler began burning books. And if you’ve read this much of this article, you already know all the stories of parents outraged over Critical Race Theory being taught in their children’s schools. It’s not, in any school anywhere, but that hasn’t stopped the political right from convincing them that it is.

It should be taught, by the way. It is an examination of the roots of systemic oppression in America that must be absorbed to even understand in a way that we can do anything to change it.

Never mind that, though: Conservatives don’t want “explicit” scenes of beatings that slaves endured at the hands of cruel masters who may share their last names being carried in books in their children’s schools.

And it isn’t just race. They don’t want depictions of any non-traditional gender roles or s*xuality being read as acceptable, let alone celebrated, in their children’s schools.

From the link above, which leads to a story on the situation in Virginia:

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said. Meanwhile, Twigg said he wanted to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

This is no longer speculation. This is no longer just Donald Trump telling angry white males that football players shouldn’t be allowed to protest on a field.

This is the political right in America now, and they are burning books.

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