David French

This is where the law didn't really protect them, that they were at the mercy and the whim of the government.

They were at the mercy and the whim of sort of the shock troops of the Nazi regime.

And if we don't want to use Nazi analogies, I think we can actually use an American analogy that works really well, and that would be the Jim Crow South analogy.

In the Jim Crow South, you had a normative state that was enjoyed by white Southerners.

They lived in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and they had free speech rights, and they had free association rights, and they had economic opportunity.

But then you had a prerogative state that applied to Black Americans in the South, and they lived at the mercy and at the whim of the government or even of just their white neighbors.

could end their lives at their will and at their whim.

And so this is not something that is unique to Germany.

This is something that happens when you have rising authoritarianism, is that the authoritarian segment of society acts with impunity

And it sustains itself in part by making sure that large numbers of people don't experience that.

That so long as they live their normal lives and they don't interfere with the government, they get something that looks very routine.

And I used to think, how did Jim Crow happen?

How does stuff like that happen?

And I don't wonder anymore.

I don't wonder anymore because as soon as you can allow a large segment of the society to live normal lives, even while you oppress others, it takes a lot to rouse the majority to do anything on behalf of the minority.

Yeah, I think that's a great point, Emily.

And it sort of shows that it's always so wrong to describe – I hear a lot of people describe Trump as dumb.

I think that's just totally wrong.

He's in many ways diabolically shrewd.

And one element of his diabolical shrewdness is that –