The new McCarthyism, Trump, Vance, and their allies are hell bent on inflicting on us.

It appears the groups aligned with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are preparing to reboot an American version of the old East German Stasi,

this time with government workers in their crosshairs.

I remember the Stasi well.

Louise and I and our three kids lived in Germany back in the 80s and spent part of that time in a rural house just a few hundred feet from the east-west German border.

Our backyard was a double set of 20 foot tall, as I recall, razor-wired fences with guard tires and

machine gunners every few hundred yards. In the spring is the ground thawed in

the mornings the landmines in the sand covered no man's land between the two fences would

sometimes spontaneously explode. Nothing gets you out of bed like a bomb

going off next to your house. Most interesting to me though was East German

radio. I was learning German and listening to the radio both in the car and at home.

We didn't have a TV during the year our kids years our kids were growing up was great

practice. An elderly German friend who grown up before a World War II told me

how during the 1930s in the the German the East Germans had revived the practice although I was never

able to catch such a program when I'd occasionally tune in. Keep in mind this was a

country where East German school teachers were required to

ask children to draw symbols and objects they'd seen on TV. If they drew the logo

for West German TV, which was a distinctive clock, the family would soon get a visit from the infamous secret

police, the Stasi. The 2006 movie The Lives of Others is an amazing and powerful

look into life in that East German police state when it was run by

Vladimir Putin. I was reminded of those times when I learned that the Heritage

Foundation has funded a new group, the American Accountability

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