I’m grieving. Going through the stages. This week was anger. The grief isn’t because “everyone I know is a Nazi.” They aren’t. That’s the problem. That’s what makes it so hard. The grief is watching history repeat itself in real time while good men look away, or worse, celebrate.
Seeing what was coming, trying to warn people, and now watching its arrival in force as those I once respected, revered even, continue to cheer.
That’s the grief.
That’s what Hannah Arendt meant about the banality of evil. Not that evil is boring, but that it doesn’t require villains. Just people who’ve decided looking away is easier than looking. That the tribe matters more than the principle. That the cognitive dissonance is someone else’s problem.
“Deport them all” only refers to “illegal immigrants”—until it doesn’t. Until American citizens are living in fear, carrying their passports when they go outside while their homes are invaded and they’re dragged out handcuffed in the snow because “you don’t have the same accent I do.”
We’re already there. It already happened. It’s not theoretical anymore. Minnesota is the very definition of tyranny.
“I find this argument boring and lacking substance,” my friend says. “Trump’s a lot of things, but he’s not a tyrant.”
My friend isn’t a Nazi. He’s a good guy. He considers himself a rugged individualist. A patriot. He’d help his immigrant neighbors. He’d give you the shirt off his back.
And he’ll keep finding each individual argument boring and lacking substance, right up until the moment it’s undeniable, even to him, until the people he’d help are gone, and then he’ll say it happened so fast, no one could have known.
We knew.
I knew. I told him. He found it boring.
The grief isn’t “my friends are monsters” but “my friends are human, and this is what humans do, and it’s not enough, and it’s never been enough, and that’s the whole story of how these things happen.”
The true horror of the holocaust wasn’t the gestapo and gas chambers, it was normal people, good men and women, going along because to do otherwise would make them uncomfortable. Cause social friction. Cast them out of the tribe.
It was the ambivalence.
Arendt watched the Eichmann trial expecting to see a monster and saw a bureaucrat. A man who didn’t think. Who followed procedures. Who would have been perfectly fine in a perfectly fine system. The horror wasn’t what he was. The horror was what he wasn’t.
The grief is watching good men I know and respected choose comfort over conscience, one small accommodation at a time, and knowing exactly where that road goes because I’ve read the history. The machinery of atrocity runs on ordinary people doing ordinary things—filing paperwork, following procedures, retweeting without thinking, finding the arguments that would require them to act “boring and lacking substance.”
My friend isn’t a fascist. He’s a good guy who just doesn’t want to think too hard about what he’s supporting because thinking too hard would cost him something. His sense of himself. His community. His peace of mind. So he doesn’t think. He finds it boring. He moves on.
And that’s enough. That’s all it takes. That’s always been all it takes.
Anger is clean. At least it has somewhere to go.
The part that comes after is much harder.
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“my friends are human, and this is what humans do, and it’s not enough, and it’s never been enough, and that’s the whole story of how these things happen”
Concise statement of the tragedy. It’s not cinematic Big Important Moments That Test A Person’s Soul. It’s the daily life that affords the illusion of distance so people follow exactly the plan that was satire in The Screwtape Letters.
People fail a test they don’t even know is happening because they expected grand announcements that would be a break with their day-to-day activities.
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The irony is these people just love quoting the “They came for the…” litany and yet still can’t see that’s literally what’s happening right now.
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I remain bemused and saddened by how many people focus on the story part of history instead of realizing that humans were involved. People just like us. I’ve seen historians publicly pooh-pooh The Great Man theory of history. That’s not my area of expertise.
In my areas of expertise, one hard thing to get novices to transition to being peers while understanding what peer review means. There are things that we don’t bother to question because the evidence is so stark. Not that one experiment that one time that was written up by that one group. Not “it was written in a book so it cannot be questioned”. Evidence that you can check for yourself.
“Nullius in verba” because we can check. Very little of the science is really Newton as a lone genius reading from the universe’s text. Most of the time, it’s normal people who have invested the time and energy to explore. It’s very much arguing ideas over lunch, just like normal discussions on logistics of the 4th of July barbecue or finally getting that roof fixed.
They are regular people who skip out on Thursday afternoon to watch movies, keep a bag of skittles in their desk drawer, tell jokes, have hobbies, and love their kith and kin. One of the interesting things that happens is students get to know the faculty at the regional comprehensive universities (e.g., Western Washington University) and say, oh, I could do that. Yeah, almost no one is Einstein or Newton.
But the competition is still fierce for those academic positions and often requires moving cross-country multiple times, fronting money one may not have to do so, and spending a good decade making the trade-offs between current life and the desired life of a scientist.
How is this relevant? It’s similar in my mind to the disconnect between “the vague idea of what should happen” and the lived stark reality of what that path means every day woven into normal life that includes planning for lunch, the household chores, and the occasional stomach upset.
The big dramatic moments only come after weeks/months/years of daily life. The movie-like montage never happens. Instead, it’s choosing the right thing every day. Every step. Every uncomfortable moment.
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“When force is used before accountability, when investigations are delayed, that is the erosion of liberty. That is the definition of tyranny.”
from speeches given in Los Alamos on Friday.
https://losalamosreporter.com/2026/01/30/scenes-and-speeches-from-fridays-student-anti-ice-walkout-event-at-ashley-pond-in-los-alamos/
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I feel a little less alone day by day. People are standing up. People are speaking out. We’re scattered, but we’ll find each other.
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Yeah. Still is sad and disheartening to go find new people instead of being able to count on current loved ones.
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