You didn’t have to quote Eco, you just repeated his buzzwords without context. And no, we’re not “reliving Germany in the 1930s.” That comparison gets thrown around by people who know how that decade ended but not how it actually unfolded. Germany in the ’30s had a one-party regime, a silenced press, outlawed unions, political imprisonment, and a militarized propaganda machine. The U.S., for all its dysfunction, still has open elections, a free press, armed political opposition, and a population that can’t even agree on a movie to watch, let alone a dictator. So maybe instead of reenacting Weimar trauma on Lemmy, you could start by actually reading the essay you’re invoking, or that history book you just recommended.