There is a thin line between life and death
My friends, today is a momentous day in history.
Eighty years ago this morning in the early hours, Soviet Red Army scouts pierced the first sub-camp at Auschwitz.
By 3:00 pm, dumbfounded Soviet soldiers were in Auschwitz.
Evil was revealed 80 years ago this morning. The answer of what modern and civilized human beings can do to others was fully revealed.
Let us understand something plainly.
Who handcuffed the human beings sent on military aircraft without food or water back to Brazil?
Who stripped human beings of basic dignity and their humanity in an exercise of debauched cruelty, aimed at titillating a political mob risen to power on a wave of grievances and resentments that have licensed this despicable abuse in the name of the people of the United States of America?
I dissent.
Let us understand that these actions were made lawful by the vote of 49.9 percent of us, and now we must bear the consequences and moral responsibility. The country acts in the name of no party, but rather in the name of We The People.
The American Armed Forces are being stripped of its honor as we speak, while being ordered to be the most expensive taxi service and budget airline in world history.
It will get worse.
The silence of Chuck Schumer and his colleagues verifies that impotence is a plague, a disease and a modern curse that has found its home in the Do-Nothing Democratic US Senate of 2025.
The Do-Nothing Caucus of Trump’s politburo may be the most rotten part of the entire corrupted institution, and the one that most offends the American spirit.
The founders predicted the rise of demagogues, but not the capitulations of so many weak-kneed cowards who lack moral stamina, grit and the integrity of convictions and the toughness to stand behind them.
Chuck Schumer and the Do-Nothing Democrats aren’t just hollow men and women, but supine ones.
With few exceptions, the US Constitution is to be defended by fools and knaves in an hour of growing danger and menace.
Avner Less was a German Jew.
His family was murdered in the extermination camps.
His destiny required his survival. He became a policeman, and rose through the ranks.
He was an Israeli police captain in 1962.
Ricardo Klement was the alias of SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, who was living in hiding in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Eichmann was the organizer of the Wansee Conference, chaired by Reinhardt Heydrich in January 1942. It was the meeting during which the industrial scale murder of Europe’s Jews was planned. They spoke in euphemisms. They talked about shipments “east.” They talked about “special treatment.” They talked about settling the Jewish question, and called it the “final solution.”
The meeting was filled with lawyers.
The Holocaust was the work of lawyers.
Everything was legal.
The Nazis were obsessed with legality.
Everything was buttoned up, especially the meticulous record keeping.
The surviving set of minutes is the record of the greatest crime in the history of humanity – planned in a leafy Berlin suburb over a sumptuous lunch in just 90 minutes. That is all the time it took.
Less was the only man who spoke to Eichmann.
The Israeli chief inspector and the SS criminal talked face to face for 275 hours.
The interrogation is a masterpiece. Studying it could be the work of a lifetime.
Less talked about the interrogations 20 years later when he was asked a question about them.
He was asked if the experience had changed his perspective about anything.
It is an interesting question to ask the man who sat across the table from the principal organizer of the Holocaust for the equivalent of 11.5 days.
He did not answer the question by talking about revenge, or the satisfaction of seeing the Nazi criminal swinging from the end of an Israeli rope.
In fact, he didn’t attend the event. He talked about democracy instead.
Less observed that there are Adolf Eichmann’s everywhere. They are all around us, he said. He said they are “latent in a democracy,” but that in a “dictatorship of the left or right, they become deadly in an instant.”
It is an astonishing statement.
Democracy.
It is democracy that is the protection against mass murder and the depravity of the most savage animal on the planet: the human being.
Democracies, in all of their forms, are the only system of government and societal organization that places the dignity of the human being above the jackboot of the state.
American democracy remains a fragile experiment that has entered a period of contestation, which followed the greatest triumph of the American civil rights movement and the election of a two-term black president of the United States. It is important to remember that the American flag when thinking about America’s progress towards being a full democracy in which all people are equal under the law.
It wasn’t until there were 50 stars on the flag that Jim Crow was ended. The last two stars were added in 1959 – really not that long ago. John Lewis belongs to the ages now, and has taken his place with the other founders of the American Republic. Then, he was just a gutsy young man who had not yet taken the first unarmed step towards state violence and hatred.
He would be beaten and bludgeoned by people who stood for the proposition that he was “less than.” He was below the people who were attacking unarmed people because of the color of his skin.
This is the meaning of the Confederate flag. It is a symbol of subjugation and oppression, a marker of racial primacy. It is the literal battle flag of a slave autocracy that waged war against the United States and killed hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Today, it replaces the banned swastika as an able substitute for Nazi marches and extremist parades. It is no accident that the flag has found a home around Donald Trump and his cause. It is no accident that 158 years after General Grant accepted the unconditional surrender of the cruel slave master and traitor Robert E. Lee that the first breaching of the US Capitol by the Confederate flag was made by a Trump foot soldier in the “red hat” brigade of pissed off Americans who want power and think violence is acceptable.
Today, those criminals are pardoned thugs who make up the spine of Trump’s
Army of Menace.
It is a growing army and a violent one.
This gathering above took place at the Washington Monument, where we honor the memory of the man who created the nation with acts of profound humility and wisdom.
The Nazis have come to hijack the meaning of George Washington. They can’t have him.
George Washington was first.
He was the first American president.
He was “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”
He was a man of indomitable strength and character.
What is it that we are all witnessing in this extreme and radical moment?
It seems important to occasionally step back from the swirl of vituperation and “breaking news” chyrons to assess what is really happening.
What is the fight over? Who believes what exactly?
Exhaustion seems to be the emotional and psychological disposition of the broken Democratic Party, plus no small measure of ineptitude and corruption mixed in with a spirit of surrender and appeasement on issues, big and small.
We have crossed the rubicon and entered an undiscovered country.
The American far right has come to power. They are careening their way to its full use in the early days of an arrogant new regime that is wrecking institutions, and consolidating power through the appointment of the unfit and disordered to positions of life and death responsibility in a fallen world.
Together, we are drifting towards an abyss.
We have passed through the still waters of farce and the light boil of silly to the menace of the present. We are headed towards a catastrophic fall.
Between 2015 and today, Donald Trump has become the singular leader of an autocratic movement that is the greatest threat to the endurance of the American Republic since secession and the Confederacy.
During this time, Donald Trump was twice narrowly elected president of the United States with a plurality vote, and was twice impeached.
He incited and led an insurrection.
He was restored to political power in an election that he won legitimately.
He pardoned his mob.
Trump’s overt embrace of revenge as a political philosophy saw the wholesale capitulation of every principle, position and value by the political party that embraced him.
The Republican Party, founded in 1854 to stand against the evils of human slavery, succumbed to a Queens hustler running on a platform of narcissism, malice and animus. It has been reduced to an organized conspiracy for the purposes of advancing the self-interests of its donors to maintain the power of the politicians who stand for nothing but themselves. None of them saw Trump coming, but he saw every last one of them from miles and miles away.
There is physics involved around shrinking political parties, which the Republican Party is.
First, it is important to recognize that a shrinking party can still win, and under the rules of the American system, hold power consistently.
Second, a shrinking political party becomes more extreme. It works precisely like the collapse of a star. As it gets smaller, it gets denser and hotter. That is the environment in which Trump will govern.
Why can’t anyone in American politics defend the glory of American democracy?
How is it possible that Democrats lost a House and Senate majority to an autocratic cause that supports an agenda that is shocking in its extremism?
Punishment is the organizing principle around MAGA.
Trump is America’s disordered and elderly mob boss.
His cabinet is a crew of scumbags resplendent in their unfitness and incompetence, bound together by their shared lack of qualifications and basic decency for any position of trust.
They are a political gang that is assertive, aggressive and hellbent on abusing power for the purposes of fighting and destroying, not building a more just society.
Each of these people would have been a perfect fit for the once common descriptor “little Eichmann.”
It referred less to hatred than the infinite capacity for humanity to fall towards what Hannah Arendt so perfectly described as the “banality of evil.”
There are two political parties that have endured as central pillars of the world’s oldest Republic.
Each of them has played a vital role in the advancement of human dignity and freedom. One of them has abandoned democracy and liberty. One of them has turned against free elections. One of them has turned against equality for all people under the law. One of them has declared a right to rule over the majority. One of them has embraced violence. One of them has embraced thuggery. One of them has made Donald Trump their leader. One of them has become a threat to the Constitution and the endurance of the American experiment.
The Republican Party is controlled by thousands, not millions.
Those thousands have succumbed to the temptations of power in a way that no previous collection of American political activists ever has.
Their partisanship gave way to a fervor that, combined with algorithms, Fox News and demagogues galore, gave birth to a toxic cloud of animus that has led to their making war on the country that gave them a birth right of freedom.
They are committed to rewriting the definition of freedom to make it narrower and smaller again. They have put America on a collision course for disaster and political violence.
Control and subjugation are the meaning of policies that demand pregnant 10-year-olds carry their child rapist’s baby to term, while male politicians decide what birth control women can have.
They intend to use technology to track, monitor and control women. Many of them are prepared to accept the use of violence to achieve political aims, and believe in the establishment of a national morality written by fanatics and charlatans like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. They want to build a thieving theocracy that is beyond the control of the people. The people in this dystopian philosophy are simply pawns of the state.
When democracy collapses, violence follows because people kill other people for political power.
It took thousands of years for humanity to evolve to a point where the rule of law took the place of state savagery. The American experiment is one of the most noble undertakings in all of human history. It stands at the edge of an abyss because of Donald Trump, his family and a couple of thousand opportunistic cowards.
There is nothing that is carved in stone ahead – for good or bad. The American people will have a decision to make.
Reconciliation and renewal seem a better path than tyranny and violence.
Before he died, Avner Less reconciled himself to his place of birth.
He reconciled with the German people, and became one of them again. When he died, Avner Less held two passports.
He was a German-Israeli Jew, who interrogated Adolf Eichmann face-to-face for 275 hours.
The lesson that he learned from the experience is one the American people have no right to forget.
Our children deserve to live in an America that is freer and more prosperous than what came before.
They deserve that — no matter how despicable and cowardly the couple of thousand people are who have an iron grip on the Republican Party.
Now, they purport to hold an iron grip on the country.
“F*@k them” might not be the most eloquent “cri de guerre,” but is appropriate.
They must be defeated.
They may label themselves as members of a great institution that once stood for democracy, but that is long gone.
Avner Less would know exactly what he was looking at.
When he turned around and faced the leaders of the party that lost to MAGA, he would know exactly what he was looking at too.
Let us not pretend that Donald Trump has taken power because he is strong or his movement powerful, worthy or virtuous.
It is rotten, scurrilous and a danger to world peace.
Each day will bring this point into starker and clearer relief.
What elected Donald Trump was a weakness of resolve and spirit wrought by selfishness and decay.
I disdain and oppose this weakness.
I hope you will demand in the days ahead a rising strength and honesty from the leaders who stand up and say, “Follow me.”
The false prophets in our midst have led us into a terrible quagmire, but then again, we are Americans and not lemmings.
We are the masters of our fate, and the author of that of our children.
Have we broken the faith?
My view is not yet, but we are well on our way.
Let us turn around soon, and very soon.
To Steve’s first question, about who were the people who handcuffed these humans… I had the same sort of thoughts in Trump 1.0. Who were the people who snatched little children from their parents, listening to what must have been screams of terror and reaching for their moms and dads? I wondered what they told their spouses when they got home? Did the screams haunt their dreams? How did they face their own kids? And yet before they did those deeds, we would have considered them friends, neighbors, ordinary people. Afterwards, they were monsters who walked among us.
We have to focus on what we can control. Much of what is occurring now is beyond our control to stop or pause. For anyone, such as myself, who has MAGA Senators and a MAGA Rep, it has been deaf ears from them. We’re seeing what was promised.
In 2026, Senator Tillis, if he chooses to run, is up for re-election for Senator in North Carolina. If things go badly, and it seems like it will, then his seat can be won. We will work toward that end. One step at a time because the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.