A profoundly tragic question that history suggests an answer to: not in any decade soon. I was looking at some anti-immigrant cartoons from the 1920s and 30s yesterday I collected. The reminded me of the movement starting the first and second decade to set up Americanization schools and official American textbooks of simplified white history advocate for by the teachers union (all white) and funded in part by the klan. The hatred was profound, but again not new. Although it led to the expulsion of over a million “Mexicans” by the government in California to Mexico—many of them actually American citizens born there and never visited Mexico, so a deporting of American citizens—that also had been done before the Civil War in California, mass deportation of Mexicans. There was also burning down of several “Chinatowns” in the 1880s in California and driving out all the Chinese workers from Boise where they were settling once completing the railroad work.

History foretells what’s to come, since we as individuals and in groups have been living it our whole lives. We make the choice to continually use it to educate and stand up for moderation, reason, careful study and open dialogue, for what it right. I don’t we have a choice, given how easily the fear mongering is from the demagogues you list, all on the right. The service of those speaking up and recognizing history of repression, both present and past, are doing the real work of democracy as much as those brave enough to struggle. For that I thank you as always.