A few hours after Election Day 2020, with the notion of a “stolen” vote already the hottest topic in politics, I wrote a piece explaining why such an idea wasn’t ridiculous.

It wasn’t because I believed that the 2020 election was “stolen” (I don’t), or because I supported President Trump’s fiery, sometimes conspiratorial rhetoric (again, I don’t).  But what struck me was the claim by Trump’s critics that the suggestion of election improprieties was simply absurd and insulting.  I said the following at the time, discussing the classic ethical question of whether it is just to murder baby Hitler:

The crux of the [Hitler] question is whether it is ethical to kill someone when he is still an innocent child, long before he commits crimes against humanity.  Many people would say that the greater good absolutely demands it.  Others would say that there is no excuse for violating a core principle of morality, not even for Hitler.

Now consider a softer, if equally impossible hypothetical.  You can travel back in time and manipulate the elections of 1930, 1932, and/or 1933 in Germany to prevent Hitler’s rise to power. No killing is involved.  Just ballot and voter fraud.  And the hypo assumes that your scheme would be effective.  Would you do that?  I think we can all agree that a substantial percentage of the population would.

Now recall that we’ve been told for the past four years that Trump is essentially an American Hitler, or on the way to being Hitler.

While I find that comparison silly, the lesson here is that there are plenty of people who truly believe it’s apt to analogize Trump to Hitler.  From their point of view, present-day America is at the “1932 or 1933 in Germany” phase.

With all of that in mind, do you think such people would hesitate to adopt a “by-any-means-necessary” mentality in a close race?

I don’t.  Not for a second.

Emphasis added.  At the time, I was quite certain that continuing to equate Trump with a person widely recognized as the worst of the past century (if not in history) would result in more and more rationalization about what is ethically, morally, and politically acceptable to stop him.  Later in the piece, I added:

Again, these [vocal Trump critics in the media and the Democratic Party] are the same sort of folks whose proposed solution to alleged norm-busting by the GOP is to eliminate the filibuster, pack the courts, add a couple of new states to change the composition of the Senate, and, of course, abolish the Electoral College.  To repeat: they propose these measures as an alleged defense of norms.  They do so without a hint of irony.

What I didn’t anticipate at the time was that Trump would be attacked as vigorously by media and political opponents after he was out of office as he was while he was in office.  This makes sense in hindsight, as these folks clearly saw Trump as a continued threat, such that they needed to be relentless in their dogged efforts to prevent a second Trump term.

The obvious problem is that this relentlessness requires ever-escalating warnings, fearmongering, and, ultimately, tactics.  Our own American media and many politicians have demonstrated little reluctance to call Trump “Hitler” for the past eight years—and continue to do so.

Now, we’re here.  And I’m not sure what it will take to pull us back from the edge of the abyss before we fall in.