Going along to get along is a powerful human survival instinct. But when it comes to fighting fascism, sometimes you have to take the uncomfortable step of being the first one to take the action or use the language that’s needed to make change. That's ultimately how change happens: someone does something different, and others follow.
In this week’s “Meeting the Moment,” Anat and I addressed two different topics where we've been hearing a lot of discomfort from folks along these lines. I also gave a forgotten-history lesson about what the Nuremberg trials should tell us about our current era.
Was it a good idea for Virginia voters to choose to redraw their maps?
To defend themselves (and all of us) from a fascist movement trying to seize an illegitimate House majority by doing the same thing? Of course it was a good idea! But Republicans would love you to think otherwise, judging by all the ads that misleadingly suggested Obama was against the redistricting measure.
Won't that just give MAGA an excuse to declare the midterm results illegitimate?
They don't need an excuse! We know they're going to try to do that, because that's what they always try to do when they lose. Emphasis on “try.” We can make sure they don't succeed by doing two things: preparing people to reject the BS we already know MAGA will pull, and win by so much that they can't even try to contest the results. (That's one lesson we should take from Hungary in 2026, as Kim Scheppele explained on Weekend Reading Live.)
Should we really say that Trump and ICE are holding people in “concentration camps”?
Yes — because it’s both true and strategic.
It’s true because that's what they are, as Andrea Pitzer explained in our recent conversation: a place where people are held without due process after being rounded up based solely on what they look like and where they come from.
It’s strategic because it signals that this is an extreme circumstance that demands an urgent response. Think of it this way: can you imagine a bunch of Texas moms deciding to caravan down to Dilley and protest because in America, we don't have…detention centers? You can make that term more toxic if you're trying to free a specific sympathetic population, like children, but most of the victims here are single men who also deserve freedom.
Pop quiz: What crime were the Nazis tried for at Nuremberg?
Did you guess something like genocide? That was part of it. But the first charge, and the primary motivation for trying the Nazis, wasn't specifically about the Holocaust; it was “crimes against peace.” After two devastating world wars, the international community wanted “never again” to mean: never again should any country start an aggressive war, because the consequences to the entire planet could be too devastating.
Only in the 1960s did that narrative shift, largely because the U.S. and the Soviet Union decided that they didn't want the same prohibition applied to them.
When we define “never again” as being strictly about the Holocaust, it becomes too easy to let ourselves off the hook. Nothing is as bad as that, so we can't compare ourselves to it. Things couldn't get that bad. We haven't gone that far. Which means almost any atrocity short of murdering 6 million people isn't “far enough” to sound the alarm about and move heaven and earth to stop.
