Paul Gregg: Marching toward hate

I was having lunch with my 90-plus-year-old mother the day after Donald Trump’s acceptance speech. She asked me if I had watched the speech, which I had. I asked her her thoughts.

I was a little taken aback when she said, “I haven’t seen that much hate in one room since the Nazis.” My mother would know a thing or two about hate speech and its terrible potential.

Born in Luxembourg, which borders Germany, in 1924, she was a witness to that party’s hateful rhetoric, and her family was a victim of its consequences.

Maybe this living historian’s fears are over the top. But there is no denying we have seen Trump use his campaign to single out certain ethnicities and religions, identify them as the source of our problems and offer remedies to rid our nation of them. This is well-documented.

He has offered himself as a savior of sorts, the “only person” who can solve these problems.

How a political party that was once filled with good and decent people has morphed into a white nationalist movement that spews hate and dissension is mystifying and frightening. It sounds eerily familiar to those who have lived it before.

This story was originally published August 13, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "Paul Gregg: Marching toward hate."