The best political commentary I’ve read in months:

Gore Vidal, one of America’s best chroniclers of empire, once provided instruction to a British interviewer expressing confusion over the radical hostility Republicans showed toward Barack Obama, and the former president’s inability to react with equal aggression: “Obama believes the Republican Party is a political party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

 That mindset is now threatening to devour everything in its path, while its current figurehead, Donald Trump, provides encouragement to violent extremists, giving the Proud Boys — a militant far-right organization whose members have committed hate crimes — the chilling order, “Stand back and stand by.”

From “There’s only one political party in the United States — the other one has descended into madness“