I guess it’s time to quote from Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich again. Here, after describing the Nazification of culture and especially of the media, he recounts from his own long experience of Germany, the effects of these changes on ordinary people:

Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

Often in my own life and in the comments of many here, I recognize exactly what he’s saying: how useless it is even to try to make contact with those who have converted to the faith of hate and darkness.

Never say it can’t happen here. It’s happening here right now.