I'm not a swastika-poster. I hate your Uncle Adolf almost as much as FDR's "Uncle Joe" (may you burn in Hell, Frankie). But tribalism is very interesting, and very real, and in that sense, I feel it necessary to point to some recent posts:

Glenn Reynolds posted a link to an Algemeiner post defending Bari Weiss and said,

Remember: If you interpret “woke” as a synonym for “crazy and stupid” — or, increasingly, “crazy, stupid, and vicious” — you’ll seldom go far wrong.

So far, so good. And Kerstein offers a mildly stiff defense of Western civilization. But that post also made an odd point:

Cancel culture is necessary in order to prevent the spread of racist, violent, and insurrectionary incitement.

He even links to another article he wrote, "We Need Cancel Culture to Fight Hate and Antisemitism, but Must Limit Its Abuse," saying, "Trump deserved to be canceled for his incitement..."

... Really? Because this is a lie and deeply unAmerican.

Remember, HUAC did not pursue Communists. It pursued people who had joined the CPUSA, which was infamously under the control of Comrade Stalin. In other words, they did not investigate belief, they investigated membership in a foreign-controlled political party.

Remember when Gina Carano posted "the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?" Someone noted the Auschwitz Museum posted almost exactly the same thought.

That is correct.

Everyone has political beliefs, even if they can't articulate them. To persecute someone for what they believe is as anti-human as any anti-Semitism, because you're persecuting them for what they are, not what they do.

The old Protestants of the Reformation called this, "freedom of conscience," and this idea was and is anti-thought crime. (Yes, Cromwell and others banned the public practice of the Catholic mass, but the Pope was an enemy of the Anglican Church for a long, long time.)

Not all Jews believe this. A. J. Kaufman, discussing black-on-Asian violence in ‘Whitewashing’ troubling attacks on Asian Americans, said, "Matters aren’t helped when disingenuous outlets like CNN often avoid identifying the ethnicity of the recent assailants... No group has a monopoly on hatred or racism."

Of course, a lot of Jews see Nazis everywhere. Even Dennis Prager fails to fully recognize this failure in "I Now Better Understand the 'Good German'":

Of course, I still judge Germans who helped the Nazis and Germans who in any way hurt Jews. But the Germans who did nothing? Not so fast.

What has changed my thinking has been watching what is happening in America (and Canada and Australia and elsewhere, for that matter).

It's a good article, but Prager elides a very important point: by the time Weimar hit, the two major parties were the Catholic Zentrum (soft socialist) and the SPD, hemi-demi-semi-maybe-democratic Socialist party.

The Communists, under the KPD, were out to destabilize Weimar and destroy the Zentrum/SPD duopoly, and they co-operated with the Nazis and other radicals to do it... until 1932, when the Nazis were about to seize power, and all of the sudden the Red Shirts became "Antifaschistische Aktion," a monumentally bald-face lie, er, "re-branding" of the people who had made the Germans desperate enough to vote 40% for the Nazis.

We are in the same situation now.

Cancel culture is one step up from early-'90s P.C., closer to the Red Guards and CCP's Social Credit. Some people think we should stay away from CC. "It makes us as bad as them."

No, it doesn't. What did Saul Alinsky say? "Make them live up to their own rules."

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

— H. L. Mencken

Good and hard. Until they stop. Until they apologize to the people they tried to destroy.