Since I was about 10, my favorite book has been Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Another of his great wartime novels is Sword of Honour, a book about, amongst other things, the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. That deal, a 22 month alliance between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, enabled the Nazis to secure their Eastern flank and thus attack Poland, which they divided up with the Russians.

The pact’s moral and political meaning is that groups as supposedly ideologically disparate as the Nazis and the Soviets were not that different after all. Both violent lying thugs, both out for power at any cost. Waugh’s protagonist Guy Crouchback thinks this about the pact.

“News that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities brought deep peace to one English heart . . . The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.”

I posit we are today engaged in this nation in a similar fight. The mobs of the populist right, as evidenced by the more virulent cult of personality Trump supporters, combined with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, are our modern not so dissimilar groups. All violent lying thugs, both out for power at any cost. Our modern hysterically emotional, fact-dismissing, rabid, and groveling to cult of personality age in arms.

I am not talking about people who understand that the Trump administration was far better than the current administration and thus want to see it return to power if Biden or Harris is the alternative. I count myself amongst that crew if Trumps wins the 2024 nomination. I hope he does not.

And I’m not talking about your standard hack liberal or moderate who voted against Donald Trump because they found his persona and tone odious in the extreme. Although I voted for Trump twice, I sympathize with their outlook.

I’m talking about those who took part in or supported the assault on the Capitol. I’m talking about those who post social media images with Trump folded into the arms of Christ or further conflate him with a deity. I’m talking the “Biden is not my president” gits who rightly criticized it when the left said it about Trump, but now have no problem saying the same thing. Peas in a pod, they and the leftists.

I’m talking about the gullible, ignorant, frothing followers of Sydney Powell or Lin Wood, those whose fever swamp brains truly believed Biden would never be inaugurated, Democrats would be indicted and all arrested prior to January 20th, or that a Q-like military coup was coming to keep Trump in power. Many of these people still hold these types of views.

I’m also talking about any supporter at any time of the racist thugs of Black Lives Matter and or Antifa, groups who murder, pillage, and destroy people and property at the drop of a hat. They and the most rabid Trump supporters are two sides of the same coin, just as were the Nazis and the Soviets. Reasonable people, those of either party who do not advocate violence, fantasy, or unconstitutional actions to drive their political agenda, must fight these dangerous cretins until, when this kidney stone of a political climate passes into mist, adults retake the citadels of government power and ideological discourse.