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THE NORMALIZATION OF EVIL: WE THOUGHT WE WERE FREE  
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Thom Hartmann
June 4, 2025
Hartmann Report
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_ How ordinary Americans became numb to authoritarianism—step by
chilling step _

,

 

_I fear our mistakes far more than the strategy of our enemies.
—Thucydides (470–400 b.c.), Pericles’ Funeral Oration_

It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem
that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis
by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.

THIS IS HOW FASCISM SEDUCES A NATION: NOT BY STORMING THE GATES, BUT
BY WEARING DOWN OUR ABILITY TO BE OUTRAGED. AND DONALD TRUMP, MORE
THAN ANY POLITICAL FIGURE IN MODERN AMERICAN HISTORY, HAS WEAPONIZED
THIS STEADY MARCH INTO MORAL AND CIVIC NUMBNESS.

Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would
attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked
bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press
the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war
criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in
office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That
can’t happen here.”

BUT IT DID. AND NOW THE REAL DANGER IS THAT WE’RE GETTING USED TO
IT.

LET’S NOT FORGET:

— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in
2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.

— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, it
was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a
protest” or a “tour.”

— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who
promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security
Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the
Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Musk’s
extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.

— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and
labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media.
Now it’s part of the daily churn.

— When a federal judge’s son was murdered
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a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges
are routinely
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and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US
Marshall’s Service to protect them.

— When Trump praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested
suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded
fast.

— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having written an
op-ed in the student paper critical of Netanyahu and threw her into
prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out
loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media
posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s
even discussing it any more.

— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020
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unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people
off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were
shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces
and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”

THIS IS THE PLAYBOOK. FASCISM DOESN’T ARRIVE WITH JACKBOOTS; IT
ARRIVES WITH MEDIA AND VOTER FATIGUE. AS THE POLITICAL THEORIST HANNAH
ARENDT WARNED, THE VERY BANALITY AND ORDINARINESS OF EVIL IS ITS
GREATEST WEAPON.

Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then
chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people
learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In
his 1942 diary
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wrote:

“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of
human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic
hideousness of our existence... and yet still hours of pleasure... and
so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”

SEBASTIAN HAFFNER, ANOTHER GERMAN OBSERVER, NOTED IN _DEFYING HITLER
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EVEN HE, A STAUNCH ANTI-NAZI, FOUND HIMSELF ONE DAY SALUTING, WEARING
A UNIFORM, AND MARCHING (AND EVEN SECRETLY ENJOYING THE FEELING OF
AUTHORITY ASSOCIATED WITH IT).

“To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote, “finally, with
astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a
swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”

AND MILTON MAYER, IN _THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE FREE
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DESCRIBED HOW GOOD, DECENT GERMANS CAME TO ACCEPT FASCISM. HE WAS A
CHICAGO REPORTER WHO, FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, WENT TO GERMANY TO
INTERVIEW “AVERAGE GERMANS” TO TRY TO LEARN HOW SUCH A TERRIBLE
THING COULD HAVE HAPPENED AND, HOPEFULLY, THUS PREVENT IT FROM EVER
HAPPENING HERE.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,”
Mayer wrote, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to
receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the
situation was so complicated that the government had to act on
information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous
that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released
because of national security....”

He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found
his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As
Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book
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“This separation of government from people, this widening of the
gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised
(perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or
associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social
purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so
occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath,
of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it
— please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree
of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion
to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well
explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were
detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one
understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these
‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must
some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a
farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his
head.”

IN THIS CONVERSATION, MAYER’S FRIEND SUGGESTS THAT HE WASN’T
MAKING AN EXCUSE FOR NOT RESISTING THE RISE OF THE FASCISTS, BUT WAS
SIMPLY POINTING OUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND JUST
“DO YOUR JOB” WITHOUT ENGAGING IN POLITICS.

“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see
exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each
occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait
for the next and the next.

“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others,
when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You
don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go
out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the
habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone,
that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing
as time goes on, it grows. …

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or
thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If
the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after
the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been
sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in
’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the
windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all
the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them
preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much
worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why
should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible
of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown
too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly
more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once,
and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed
completely under your nose.

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the
world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all
reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the
visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the
lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you
live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do
not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is
transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without
responsibility even to God.”

SOUND FAMILIAR?

STEPHEN MILLER’S RECENT MUSING ABOUT SUSPENDING HABEAS CORPUS TO
LOCK UP IMMIGRANTS AND EVEN PROTESTORS WITHOUT TRIAL? THAT WOULD’VE
SPARKED EMERGENCY HEARINGS A DECADE AGO. NOW IT’S BARELY A BLIP.

The Heritage Foundation’s _Project 2025_, a blueprint to purge
civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete
defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act
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the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells.
Instead, it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his
multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection,
delay.

It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly
chronicles
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New York Times_:

“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room
for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be
lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and
boredom on the other.

“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during
Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the
streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract
nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the
third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into
effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban
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targets more than five times as many countries.”

WHEN WE STOP BEING SHOCKED, WE STOP REACTING. AND WHEN WE STOP
REACTING, DEMOCRACY DIES.

But there is a path forward.

THE ANTIDOTE TO NORMALIZATION IS RESISTANCE. NOT JUST IN VOTING
BOOTHS, BUT IN THE STREETS, IN COURTROOMS, IN CLASSROOMS, IN
BOARDROOMS, IN PULPITS, AND AT DINNER TABLES.

Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the
dangers faced by democracies, said:

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what
is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to
meet it.”

WE MUST REGAIN OUR VISION AND RESENSITIZE OURSELVES. WE MUST RECLAIM
OUR CAPACITY TO BE APPALLED.

That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say
“that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say “That’s fascist
rhetoric.”

When he promises to use the military against American citizens and
sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we
don’t shrug; we organize.

When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of
vengeance, we don’t wait and see; we fight back now.

When armed federal agents hide their identification and their faces
the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people
off our streets, we call them out.

HISTORY WON’T FORGIVE US FOR SLEEPWALKING INTO TYRANNY. AND OUR
CHILDREN WON’T EITHER.

This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It
requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in
the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.

IF WE STILL BELIEVE IN THIS REPUBLIC, IN ITS IDEALS, AND IN THE SACRED
VALUE OF A FREE AND FAIR SOCIETY, THEN OUR ANSWER TO TRUMP’S
AUTHORITARIANISM MUST BE MORE THAN WORDS. IT MUST BE PEACEFUL ACTION.

Don’t get used to fascism.

Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.

_Thom Hartmann is a NY Times bestselling author of 34 books in 17
languages & nation's #1 progressive radio host. Psychotherapist,
international relief worker. Politics, history, spirituality,
psychology, science, anthropology, pre-history, culture, and the
natural world._

* Authoritarianism
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* Step by Step
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* Donald Trump
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