An Open Letter to Undecided Voters, Protest Voters and Unparticipating Voters
Do Your Homework! Our Lives Depend on It -- Especially Yours.
Dear Undecided Voters, Protest Voters and Unparticipating Voters:
If you still remain an undecided voter, a protest voter or an unparticipating voter after learning Donald Trump is an Adolph Hitler fanboy, all that demonstrates is that you support fascism and a dystopian Christian Nationalist theocracy. It also screams you don't care about your fellow Americans who are marginalized and vulnerable because the current cost of milk infuriates you.
Hugs and kisses,
Laura
P.S. Below are some reading and film recommendations I want you to enjoy.
If you have no idea what Project 2025 is, where have you been this year? If you have not read it, you need to.
The Heritage Foundation, a destructive conservative thinktank led by Opus Dei member Kevin Roberts puts its doorstopper fascist and authoritarian policy manifesto, which writer and radio host Dean Obeidallah called the 21st century Mein Kampf, online to recruit like-minded people to its team. If Trump wins the presidency again, Project 2025 will go into effect. This plan will replace career civil servants with Trump and Vance loyalists, eliminate the Department of Education, further decimate women’s reproductive health and reproductive justice, end first amendment protections, abolish social security, increase medical costs, slash Medicaid, force the disabled to meet work requirements, strip disability benefits for veterans, explode use of the death penalty, exacerbate racial health disparities, increase environmental racism and environmental destruction along with many other anti-democracy dystopian horrors.
How Project 2025 Will Ruin Your Life
’s essential Substack deconstructs and analyzes what Project 2025 has in store for all Americans — even those who think they would be fine under a Trump-Vance Christian Nationalist theocracy. Her newsletter goes much more in depth than my own few posts on Project 2025 that you can read here. After leaving her Christian Nationalist childhood and young adulthood, best-selling and acclaimed novelist and memoirist Watkins uses her life experience and knowledge to translate Project 2025's rhetoric and warn of its dangers. Consuming her work alongside Project 2025’s policy handbook will make you aware of what we are all in for and what we will all lose if Trump becomes President again. Worse yet, if Trump is removed as President by the 25th amendment, Vance, who authored the forward to Project 2025’s newest book, becomes the United States’s 47th President.On Tyranny (non-fiction handbook)
I wrote my book review of historian Timothy Snyder’s necessary handbook a few months ago. You can read my review here. In his concise text, Snyder provides 20 lessons from history and shows what we can do to stay aware of rising autocracy and preserve democracy.
It Can't Happen Here (novel)
Published in 1935, Nobel and Pulitzer-Prize winning American author Sinclair Lewis's speculative novel imagines the United States embracing fascism and electing an autocrat who suspends civil rights and liberties. Chills anyone?
The Plot Against America (novel and limited series)
The late Philip Roth's novel presents an alternate U.S. history that has the U.S. electing the popular aviator, Nazi sympathizer, America First supporter and anti-Semite Charles Lindberg as U.S. President during World War II. What results is an even more broken America that targets, terrorizes and oppresses its Jewish population. HBO adapted the narrative into a limited series in 2020.
Look Who's Back (novel and film)
Think Hitler committed suicide in the bunker and is now erased from mankind? Think again. Fascism, Nazism, strongmen and autocracy never go away if we don't extinguish them. Timur Vermes 2012 novel, which is often funny as it is terrifying, was adapted into a 2015 film that for now can still be watched on YouTube.
They Thought They Were Free (non-fiction history)
Former Associated Press journalist Milton Mayer interviewed 10 lower middle-class German men who were pro-Nazi during Hitler’s totalitarianism. With Mayer, they shared the men’s still positive memories of Nazism and living under Hitler’s version of Hell. The 1955 book remains in print; new readers will discover how easy it is to be taken in by autocracy if a person is vulnerable, empty, insecure or bitter about their situation in life.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (non-fiction history)
William L. Shirer as a Chicago Tribune and CBS correspondent reported from Germany as Hitler rose to power, during World War II and during The Nuremberg Trials. Shirer’s takes a granular view of The Nazis’ rise and collapse. exposing how fragile democracy is if people are not active and don’t critically think.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (non-fiction history and philosophy)
German-American philosopher and intellectual Hannah Arendt, a Holocaust survivor, examines the roles anti-Semitism, imperialism and racism play in forming totalitarian regimes. Throughout her life, Arendt stridently supported pluralism and people utilizing their ability to critically think in order to question and confront oppression and autocratic politicians and leaders.
Patriot (memoir)
The late Alexei Navalny's memoir about his life and his fight for Russian democracy was published this week. He began working on it after surviving his first Putin-backed assassination attempt and continued his autobiography from prison. I purchased my copy yesterday.
Sophie Scholl — The Final Days (film)
Charting college-student Sophie Scholl and The White Rose's anti-Nazi resistance, arrest, show trial and execution, the 2005 film honors Scholl’s bravery and sacrifice while forcing viewers to contemplate if they would do the same to resist totalitarianism.
The Nasty Girl (film)
The Nasty Girl is based on a true story. What begins as a German high school student writing an award-winning essay soon turns into the girl's more thorough investigation that reveals her German hometown’s complicity with The Nazis and The Holocaust.
Downfall (film)
The late Bruno Ganz's phenomenal performance is only one incredible part of this devastating film about the final days and hours of Hitler's rule and The Nazi regime.
A Night at the Garden (short film)
Nominated for an academy award, this short documentary film captures a forgotten event from American history. Using archival film, director Marshall Curry reveals a 1939 American Nazi rally held on George Washington's birthday in New York City's Madison Square Garden.
For my readers in the United States and my U.S. American readers living abroad, check your voting registration at IWillVote.com If you are not registered to vote or you have not voted in years, you can also register to vote at IWillVote.com.
If you want to add to your vote’s power, consider a volunteer opportunity at mobilize.us.
Absolutely fabulous compilation of literature and other media to warn us all that it can indeed happen here! Thank you for this public service.
An excellent introduction to the literature and films on this subject. Unfortunately, at just over a week until election day, this piece may be about a year late. But... if it had come out a year ago, it wouldn't have gotten the traction that it might right now. It's like seeing what a con man Trump is. Some of us saw it in 2016 if not earlier. Others of us will not ever see it. Even as he brings disaster down upon us and the country in general.
It's always that way with con artists. They spin and concoct a fiction for the mark. A fiction that will get the con something he wants at the expense of the mark, who will be the poorer for it, though they may or may not realize it. Or won't admit to it. Because of peoples egos, even when they realize they've been had, they hate to admit it. Or admit they were part of it. That's why I hold out little hope for the hardcore MAGA people. No matter what happens, they will say Trump was a great hero. They are massively invested in it and can't afford (psychologically) to get out. Trump makes other people guilty with him. One of the secrets of the trade.
So... I don't know it this piece will change any minds, but even if it helps even just a few, that is a good thing.
Ideally... the whole country would read it and be converted to the true faith of democracy, freedom, and respect for everyone's rights.
In a perfect world.