EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: ‘I fear that the U.S. government will drag my neighbors back home to the same fate’
I was fortunate to have spent a semester abroad during college — in Costa Rica during the spring of my junior year. I consider it one of the greatest experiences of my life.
My trip took place during a time of turmoil in Central America; to the immediate north, the Nicaraguan civil war was raging as the communist Sandinista government was fighting the U.S.-backed “Contra” rebels.
Like today with the current administration, progressives were rather united in their opposition to virtually anything the Reagan administration supported, including its backing the Contras. And the mainstream media’s treatment of Reagan wasn’t unlike that which Donald Trump deals on a daily basis.
The difference, of course, is the latter holds office in the internet/social media age where there is nigh-instantaneous reaction to any action or utterance.
Still, there were leftists who let fly the Hitler/Nazi comparisons during the former’s two terms in office. Former Democratic Missouri Representative William Clay, for example, said Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”
Correta Scott King worried before Reagan’s first election (1980) that the U.S. would “see more of the Ku Klux Klan and a resurgence of the Nazi Party.”
Other Republican chief execs have dealt with similar nonsense.
Which brings us to Emory University student Josselyn St. Clair, who’s studying abroad in the alleged “progressive utopia” of Germany this semester.
St. Clair writes in The Wheel that “with each Stolperstein — small plaques on the stoops in front of apartments dedicated to Jewish residents the Nazis murdered — that I trip over, I fear that the U.S. government will drag my neighbors back home to the same fate that overwhelms me.
“Adolf Hitler’s Gestapo once terrorized the streets that I now walk down, and I am paranoid at the fascistic parallels I see in Trump’s ICE as it rips families from their homes and deports them to prisons this administration plagues with torture and death.”
St. Clair notes she is “frustrated” by how Berliners “view the erosion of rights within the United States as dispositional and as though Americans can do nothing to change it” … but this fills her with a sense of “patriotism” in support of Americans at home challenging Trump.
These alleged anti-MAGA patriots also contradict the previous view St. Clair had of Americans as “unintelligent” … who “would let the Trump administration blindly lead Americans to the slaughterhouse of our country’s undoing.”
Because of those standing up to The Donald’s “dictatorship,” the Emory sophomore now “recognize[s] the brilliance” of her countrymen.
Let’s see: ICE is like the Nazi Party’s Gestapo, the Trump administration is torturing and killing people and “eroding” our rights, and Trump is a dictator despite something called an “election.”
Seems to me St. Clair’s initial impression of Americans was the correct one — just not in the way she thought.
MORE: Professor: The term ‘Nazi’ is ‘not strong enough’ to describe Trump supporters
