Hey man, you seem real, so I'm going to be real with you. First, thank you for voicing your concerns. Now I'm going to explain why they're unfounded and uninformed.

Let's set the baseline here. If your grandfather is still among us, please thank him for his service to our country and our allies. My grandfather was an electrician who worked on the Manhattan Project. He passed before I ever had a chance to know him. But my great uncle was a Waco glider pilot on D-Day. He watched the men in his ship get torn apart in a German briar patch when they crash-landed ten miles away from their intended LZ. He survived to tell me about it. I was maybe seven.

Since then, I have taken a keen interest in WW:II. I've interviewed dozens of veterans from the war over more than twenty years to preserve their personal stories of it. A B-24 navigator who fought over Italy. A client of mine who turned out to be a German tanker who lied about his age at 16 and ended up fighting with Rommel's Afrika corps against General Patton. A Pearl Harbor survivor. A Japanese gunner who had been part of the attack on December 7th, 1941 who brought his family to Hawaii to pay his respects.

I've personally visited the Arizona memorial, and the plaque on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri, the beginning and the end of America's involvement in the war. And I've personally visited the Dachau concentration camp outside Munich. I've stood by the ovens. I've seen the log books, the reconstruction of the barracks. I've sat quietly among the ghosts of that terrible place, listening to their echoes.

So, let's dispense with the assumption that you have a better grasp of the gravity of the word "Nazi" than I do. Because you don't.

Here's the reality none of you want to confront. When I or anyone accuses someone of being a Nazi today, we aren't talking about the Nazis in 1943-45 when they were at the height of their evil. We're talking about the movement in its adolescence. Post Weimar Republic, but before its ascension to total power over what had been a democratic society. Late 1920's, early 1930's. Because that is where we are, right now.

Democratic norms and institutions are being deliberately subverted. The very idea of law and order is being actively suppressed by those in power, for the sole purpose of maintaining power. Minority groups are being scapegoated and targeted by the government. We LITERALLY have camps of "undesirables" where women and children are being held without access to due process or habeas corpus rights. Families torn apart with no plans to reunite them or records kept to even make it possible. Supporters of the man responsible shouting "Lugenpresse" at media outlets who dare to report the truth.

I have personally seen all of this happening, in real time. I have personally spoken to people who saw this all happen before, and are crying out to warn us that it's all happening again.

Your "lots of people" are rubbed the wrong way by what I say because they are afraid to confront reality. They've bought into the fantasy that "It can't happen here." It is happening here. Right now. In front of their faces. Every asylum-seeker detained or turned away at our border against our laws, every trans person drummed out of our military, every Muslim banned from crossing our border because of their country of origin...

It's happening here. Right now. And I do not give a solitary fuck who I upset by telling the truth. Because I'm trying to keep our Nazis stuck in the 1930's. Heaven help us if they make it to the 1940's.