COME SEE THE PROJECTION INHERENT IN THE PROGRESSIVISM.

In June, Common Dreams regular Thom Hartmann sounded a warning about fascism.  He thought he was describing what Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis were after.

Is it possible this could happen in America? That all these "small steps" would one day lead to a dictatorial form of government that has so cowed the people, the politicians, and even the business community and media that it can't be challenged?

Doesn't the nation rise up and protest the destruction of its own democracy? Don't the people pour into the streets?

Let the record show that social media companies, the legacy press, and many major corporations were on board with the corona tyranny and a weak form of critical theory as operating principles, long before that hysterical speech in Philadelphia.

Mr Hartmann's brain-brother Milton Mayer spoke with some Germans, who noted a phenomenon akin to turning up the heat under the pot slowly, with the frog not catching on.

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."

Perhaps it started with "fifteen days to slow the spread." Or perhaps with making the schools a little more inclusive, or bail conditions a little less onerous.  Don't carry on, don't be unsociable.

"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."

These days, that little boy might say "racist" or start tossing pronouns around. But in Mr Hartmann's Wolkenkuckucksheim, it's the Democrats going to jail. Please.