"Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains." - Dorothy Thompson, "Who Goes Nazi?" (August 1941)
So she predicted Stephen Miller.
The most powerful part of Thompson's essay, the part that speaks to me the most, is where she describes an emigre being more American than the Americans who don't think he's an American:The people in the room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power.
My political hero Thomas Paine emigrated from England but upon landing on American shores became the loudest voice advocating for American independence, inspiring the Declaration of Independence, because his spirit and democratic ideals were proto-American, more enthusiastically so than much of the population that had lived their whole life in the colonies and been there for generations. Another great American patriot - Frederick Douglass - was more American than the Americans who didn't merely see him as not an American but as less than human.
And in this current moment, the tyrants who persecute because they feel they are blood and soil Americans defending the "homeland" from imaginary enemies are less American than the people they are persecuting.
No, the masked secret police demanding to see people's papers and/or disappearing them for the crime of being not-white in public are traitors to the American ideals they claim to protect.
