Post 769 - June 10, 2025

The day after the Reichstag fire in Germany, on Tuesday, the 28^th of February 1933, President Hindenburg signed the Reichstag Fire Decree into law. That piece of legislation ended the Germans’ right to Habeas Corpus. Gone was their freedom of expression. Gone was their freedom of the press. Public assembly in Germany was banned. From that point forward, the Nazi’s were allowed to tap into telephone conversations and to intercept civilian mail.

About a month later, the head of the Berlin Fire Department, a guy named Walter Gempp, was fired for claiming the Nazi’s were involved. He said there had been a delay in notifying the Fire Brigade and that he’d been kept from using everything he had at his disposal to fight the flames.

In 1937, the Nazis arrested Walter Gempp claiming he’d abused the power of his office. In 1939, Walter Gempp was found dead in his jail cell.

The Republicans seem to be trying to make what’s going on in Los Angeles their own Reichstag fire. Their Big Beautiful Bill, which, in addition to lining the pockets of the already rich, radically expands the rights of ICE to arrest and deport almost anybody they like, is facing tough opposition on the Hill. Nobody wants it. Like the Reichstag Fire Decree, if this Big Beautiful Bill is signed into law, we will lose rights that we will never get back without fighting a major war against this administration.

By creating chaos in Los Angeles, the hope is that the rest of the country will be so horrified that they will come to embrace this heinous legislation and allow it to pass.

In 1933, people got their news from the radio or newspapers. Once the State assumed control of both those platforms, they could say anything. Eighty-two years later, our social platforms and widespread internet usage mean that the Republicans can’t stop the spread of information they don’t want us to have. They can, however, spread an overwhelming amount of false information to drown out the truth. Failing that, they can simply create enough confusion so that nobody who isn’t paying close enough attention will be able to clearly make out what is happening.

All the violence in Los Angeles is concentrated in one contained area. The clashes aren’t occurring in the neighborhoods where actual gang members live. The National Guard is combating peaceful protestors in the parking lot of a Home Depot. If you don’t know the city of Los Angeles, the distinction is likely lost on you. Most of the other residents in the city are hearing about it the same way the rest of us are – online.

Michael and I are staying in his dad’s timeshare, which is just a couple of miles outside of Provincetown, Massachusetts. It isn’t fancy, but I am writing this in bed and looking out the window at the bay across the street. We are close to being out at the furthest tip of Cape Cod. I can see the skyline of Provincetown in the hazy distance.

Provincetown has long been a refuge for the underserved and marginalized people in the LGBTQ+ community. At the time of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, we had a President who never once mentioned the disease by name despite the millions who suffered. Washington ignored us. People came here to the end of the earth to die in peace, surrounded by strangers who cared for them.

Ptown is also where the Pilgrims first landed in 1620. They were escaping persecution in Europe for their beliefs. Just down the road from where we are staying is a beach called First Encounter. It is the place where those initial clueless political refugees first met the Nauset people who were already living here. Unsurprisingly, that meeting didn’t go all that well. Arrows were shot. Guns were fired. Nobody was hurt, but it was an inauspicious way to begin a relationship. That skirmish usually doesn’t make it into the simplified historical accounts we usually hear of the Pilgrims’ arrival in the New World.

From this distance, it is hard to know which news stories to believe and which to dismiss. Which events are consequential and which ones are merely distractions? Unless you happen to live in the four-square blocks currently under siege by federal forces in Downtown Los Angeles, the only thing you know about what is currently underway is what you are hearing. Even if you were in that contained area, you would only know for sure what you were seeing unfolding directly in front of you. That proximity, however, might mean that you were too close to the action to be able to take in the big picture.

A clear assessment of any given situation requires multiple inputs from multiple angles. The people reporting in from that multitude of vantage points need to be clear-headed and unbiased, or else the final overall view becomes skewed. The more I read and the more I watch, I realize that there will never be anything that comes close to a historical account that isn’t slanted in one direction or another. Even the most well-meaning of reporters bring their own innate biases to their stories.

The weather out here on the Cape has been cloudy and rainy. Last night it was downright cold. Today looks much the same. Not exactly beach weather, but I’ll take it.

There’s an iconic photograph of JFK standing on a beach in Hyannis in a white Irish fisherman’s sweater that I always think of when I’m out here off-season. I have a similar sweater I should have brought with me this time. It was so hot in New York, though, that it never crossed my mind that it wouldn’t be as bad here.

While we’ve all been distracted by what’s going on in Los Angeles, President Kennedy’s nephew, RFK Jr, just got rid of the entire vaccine advisory committee of the CDC.

Among other things, those experts helped determine, through scientific analysis, what the makeup of each year’s annual vaccines should be. They help guide physicians through inoculating us all through not only the now annual COVID season but also through the flu season. Sometimes they predict more accurately than others, but with these people gone now, how will anybody have a clue what to expect?

The Republicans’ firing of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the cutting off of their funding also means that we will soon not be able to predict the weather accurately.

My iPhone app weather widget hasn’t been all that accurate lately. It’s meant to be sunny tomorrow out here, but who knows if it will be? I’m not much of a beach person, anyway. I do like reading a book out near the water, but sitting on a patio with a good book while it’s raining outside is just as good.

The soft splash of waves on the sand or the scattershot dripping of rain on a roof are about as soothing a pair of sounds as one could ever hope for. While I am listening to them, I am imagining the sound of fires burning, people yelling, and bullets being fired in downtown Los Angeles.

The Republicans are creating that mayhem, and they can stop it. They just don’t want to. They want us so anxious and so scared that we will accede to anything they demand.

It’s time to breathe deeply and start saying no. Stop all this. Just, no. You aren’t fooling most of us, just some of us. Those of us who can read have had enough of it. Stop, now.

No.