Remind me, when do the Hitler comparisons stop sounding exaggerated?

First, they came for the neocons, but I was not a neocon so I said nothing….

John Bolton’s house was raided by federal agents in the early morning hours of August 22nd. It was not a document request, not a subpoena, but an FBI raid — the showy and scary kind, with streets blocked off and boxes summarily removed, by uniformed federal officers arriving in black vehicles, targeting the home of a seventy-six year old man who has worked at high levels in several Republican administrations, including the first Trump administration, back before all the “deep state” (i.e., rational and experienced) people were expelled in favor of the bootlicking fanboys and girls of the second Trump administration, who owe their entire public lives to Donald Trump, and would sell their own mothers to maintain their positions in Trumpworld.

Bolton’s crime, of course, or at least the one for which his home was raided, for which his personal security was previously removed, and for which he is now subject to a long and costly legal fight over fabricated nonsense, is simply this: He dares to speak critically of Trump in public, to describe actual events and decisions he personally witnessed in which Trump showed himself to be ignorant and incompetent, and to refuse to swallow the new Republican party line, which is that anything Trump does is good for America, even when it is obviously a sell-out to Vladimir Putin or some other tyrannical enemy of The United States.

While the raid was still ongoing, Kash Patel, bootlicker number 17, issued this official social media post from FBI headquarters:

NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission

Allow me to fill in the (obviously intended) implied meaning of this message.

NO ONE is above The Law. The Law = Donald Trump and his chosen facilitators and henchmen. The FBI’s mission is to serve Trump’s wishes and stifle his critics. If you speak against Trump, publicly question Trump, or reveal things that place Trump in a bad light, the law will seek you out and destroy your life. Look at John Bolton today, and then think twice. NO ONE is above The Law. YOU could be next.

There is nothing ambiguous or confusing about this attack on John Bolton, just as there is nothing ambiguous or confusing about Trump’s blanket pardon of January 6th criminals, or his sudden transfer of Ghislaine Maxwell to a cozy low-security prison, or his gradual normalization of deploying the U.S. military or National Guard on American streets, including in neighborhoods with no special problems and with unexceptional crime rates, or his use of masked, unidentified thugs as a federal secret police force to assail and terrorize immigrants, many of them people with jobs and families but with (allegedly) questionable legal status, or his coercive partial takeover of major corporations such as Intel.

Using unidentified bruisers as a secret police force to intimidate and root out undesirables. Demanding an ownership stake in major businesses, in defiance of every principle of economic liberty and limited government. Gerrymandering the economy (global and domestic) with executive edicts and threats to determine winners and losers. Threatening critics or anyone with dissenting views with legal and financial retribution to create a general atmosphere of silent acquiescence, as everyone looks over his shoulder and tries to protect himself against “being the next one.” Assigning incompetent lackeys and hangers-on to major positions in one’s hierarchy in order to ensure complete obedience and the subversion of any deference to the rule of law in favor of the rule of one man, the dear leader.

Back in my days writing for a popular conservative forum, I was always one of those who eschewed the hoary comparisons of any modern leader (including those I disliked most, including even Trump in his early days) to Hitler, or Stalin for that matter. These days, I wonder exactly where the line is, beyond which such comparisons stop sounding like hyperbolic absurdities (which they always did before), and start sounding like reasonable and useful historical reference points.

Certainly Trump cannot, in practice, do to his opponents or dissenters what Hitler did (or what Putin does today) — but is that for lack of desire, or merely because some tatters of the American constitutional system, which were designed to prevent such executive abuses, remain partially operative?

Surely Trump does not wish to kill off an entire ethnic or religious group — but with a man like Stephen Miller running much of his administration’s “immigration policy,” can it be denied that Trump is leaning very hard into the rhetoric of paranoia, hatred, and scapegoating toward non-white people and people from “failed countries,” which is to say people with uncivilized genes?

Of course Trump is not trying to eliminate the free market outright — but hasn’t his second administration made very bold moves and statements toward direct government control and manipulation of certain businesses and industries judged to be of national importance, a practice which used to be regarded as one of the defining characteristics of fascist economic policy?

Well, let’s just say that the line separating hyperbolic absurdities from useful historical reference points is getting more difficult to locate each day, in this time when NO ONE, as bootlicker number 17 declares, is above “the law.”