Like I said, it’s incredibly naive to think this problem goes away when Trump does.

Not just fleeing debt or crimes. People tend to be pretty well familiar with the British Empire using Australia as a penal colony, but that didn’t really get going until after the American Revolution. Before that they just used the 13 Colonies. Not quite as far to travel, bit cheaper.

We’ve largely blotted out that particular perception, though, replacing it with pilgrims in funny hats fleeing religious persecution. Which, there were those too, of course, but there was also quite a lot of every other sort of person.

The idea that the world united against the horrible atrocities of the Nazis is post-war propaganda. Your average person didn’t know anything about what was going on until photos of the camps made their way home as we pushed into Germany itself. Most countries didn’t give a shit about the Nazis until they were on their doorstep. Most people said, “Hitler’s only saying that stuff to get elected. Once he’s in office, he’ll calm down, you’ll see.” And then they said, “Well, if we leave him alone, then he won’t bother us.”

Many people across Europe and North America actually agreed with Hitler’s views about the Jews before “The Final Solution.” Antisemitism was common across Europe and North America, if not the globe. In Mein Kampf, Hitler refers to America as the sisterland across the ocean that shares his values.

The phrase “Make America Great Again” was used by the pro-isolationism political group the America First Committee, who formed in 1940 and dissolved after the attack on Pearl Harbor, who largely opposed support for the UK. And they had over 800,000 members from all different backgrounds (from Democrats and Republicans to communists and anti-communists) with major tones of antisemitism and pro-fascist support amongst its leaders and speakers. They dissolved 4 days after Pearl Harbor and joined the war effort, not to fight the Nazis but to protect the US.

The Nazis were inspired by the treatment of Native Americans when they started their camps, and we had our own camps for Japanese Americans. We hated the Chinese when they came here, and we hated the Irish as well. Most ethnic groups coming to the US settled in communities of their own culture from their homeland. That’s why the culture is so varied here, even across a single state. To quote somebody else, “Racism is as American as apple pie, and some people will see hatred of the first as hatred of the second.”

I remember the days after 9/11, when attacks on black people doubled, attacks on Jews tripled, and Muslim parents were asking their kids if they wanted to change their name to something more American to avoid being bullied. That racism has always been present. It was just often couched in the lie of being edgy jokes or just that one racist uncle at the family party. The biggest differences today are that they’re no longer afraid to say it openly, and the number of young men caught up in the rhetoric of the online fascist pipeline that gives them a target to blame all the problems in their life on. The ironic racist jokes of their teen and childhood years stopped being ironic at some point and became their actual beliefs.

In 2016 they said it couldn’t happen here. They laughed at the idea of trump getting elected. They were shocked when he was elected and racism once again reared its ugly head. In Germany they said it couldn’t happen here and look what happened. Now we have Trump, the racists have come out of the woodwork, project 2025 was revealed and we’re very close to the end of America if we don’t do something.

The idea that Nazi sympathisers were a fringe group is an vast oversimplification of history. Yes, America chose to fight against the Nazis, but there were huge racist/eugenist movements at the time that included high-ranking politicians and military personnel. Look up the America First movement for just one example.

I first learned about this from the podcast ULTRA. I kept having to check their sources and do further research, because what they said sounded so wild that I felt I should have already known it. Instead it’s just another example of people not wanting to teach their uncomfortable history like the Tulsa race massacre, Indian residential schools in the US and Canada, the Tuskegee syphilis study, etc, etc, etc.

Also, I’d suggest you learn about the history of Nazi Germay. The Nazis weren’t this huge supermajority of the German population, they just had people in the right positions, took power by force, and the populace went along with it. It’s not hard to see parallels with a lot of events in US history where if things went just a bit different the USA could have become a racist, authoritarian state.