If there’s one thing about learning history that people should know, it condems them to watching the world repeat its worst mistakes.

Take for example a very clearly hostile subject who grew up in a violent, racist Colorado home building a militant plan for mass murder and sharing it with local police.

… elaborate plan to stockpile guns, ammunition, body armor and a homemade bomb to become “the next mass killer.” […] So began a day of terror Aldrich allegedly unleashed in June 2021 that, according to sealed law enforcement documents verified by the Associated Press, brought SWAT teams and the bomb squad…

At this point in 2021 the subject basically approaches police as a domestic terrorist on a short fuse, boasting about assault rifles, ammunition and bombs in a residential neighborhood.

For some strange reason, instead of being properly treated, removed from being a threat to society, police closed the file by reasoning police couldn’t infringe on “assault property” rights. Did they reason that the suspect’s guns were more protected than the human lives he threatened?

Historian protip: That’s a subtle yet important reference to slavery (e.g. slave catchers). Sherman’s fast victorious march that burned across the Confederate South operated on the sound humanitarian principle that lives matter more than property. The U.S. military practices Sherman doctrine to this day. Thus an American law officer saying they refuse to seize or destroy war-making property (assault rifles) is likely intentionally on the wrong side of history.

The suspect very predictably took the pile of guns warned about and went on in 2022 to carry out a domestic terror attack killing 5 and wounding over two dozen.

Many more Americans would have died except for a non-white military veteran nearby who charged and quickly disabled this terrorist — he grabbed the attacker’s holstered pistol and severely clubbed him with it.

The turn of events begs the giant question whether Colorado Police facilitated terrorism.

Now go back and read about the mass murder of Americans in 1921 Tulsa, keeping in mind it was due to the America First (KKK) platform of police turning a blind eye to terrorism based on hate.

And also consider back then that it was non-white military veterans who stood up to the terrorists.

Tragically the overwhelming America First mob in Tulsa couldn’t be stopped, including fire bombs dropped from airplanes, and they destroyed the city.

What happened next?

The “know nothing” KKK celebrated by building themselves a “secret society” meeting hall on the ruins, where “invisible” men conspired to seal records and… prevent anyone from finding out anything, let alone mourning the dead or knowing the direct role police and firefighters played in facilitating terrorism.

Back to today, although there are many more examples in American history like Tulsa, the Colorado Police are playing a very familiar looking know nothing card.

…charges against Aldrich were dropped and there was no effort to seize their weapons under Colorado’s “red flag” law for reasons the district attorney and the sheriff have refused to explain because the case is sealed.

[…]

El Paso County is especially hostile to the state’s red flag law, as one of 2,000 counties nationwide that have declared themselves a “2nd Amendment Sanctuary,” opposing any infringement on the right to bear arms. It passed a resolution in 2019 specifically denying funds or staff to enforce the law.

[…]

“We’re not going to be taking personal property away from people…” Elder said as the law neared passage in 2019.

Being an official opposed to any infringement seems now likely to be proven as someone inhumanely valuing property over the lives of Americans.

The difference here between 2021 and 1921 unfortunately is therefore best measured in terms of politicians enabling intentional rise of unregulated technology intended for terrorism.

One person today with less or even no power can easily acquire mass casualty assault weapons making their attacks far more like a repeat of the racist Tulsa mob even without one.

Police in 1921 probably very cruelly rationalized that rich white oilmen shouldn’t have “personal property” seized, even when that meant planes dropping napalm on communities to destroy as many Black lives as possible (elimination of prosperity, especially targeting military veterans).

And that is the history lesson here, which says Tulsa immediately should have become required reading in America. Instead the case was sealed to hide police failure to act on obvious terrorism signals.

America generally had been starved for risk based transparency and accountability that has worked in places like occupied Germany after WWII.

If police cadets in Colorado were screened on America’s long history of ambivalence to hate crimes (e.g. America First), and required to focus on and prevent yet another atrocity from white terrorists, then maybe 2021 would have seen swift action by police to immediately halt an open plan for mass murder.

As many people are just starting to realize (since Ye thinks it helps him politically in America to say it directly) Republicans support Elon and Trump because they like Hitler a LOT.

On October 3, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West (now Ye) attended Paris fashion week wearing a shirt that said “White Lives Matter.” Three days later, the Twitter account associated with the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee (ranking member: Jim Jordan) tweeted, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

The GOP only just deleted this now, weeks later. Why now?

When Ye tweeted on October 8 that he wanted to go “death con 3 on THE JEWISH PEOPLE,” the House Judiciary GOP’s tweet stayed up.

Awkward.

Stoking hate seemed just fine for the GOP until…

Ye is now saying very openly to prominent American men who clearly like Hitler, that he likes Hitler too, and thus wants to dine with them and be counted among the worst of them.

Today, after West explicitly praised Hitler on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars podcast, the tweet came down. “I see good things about Hitler also,” Ye said. […] Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler.”

That has apparently ripped the hood off, exposed the inner voice of the GOP.

Ye isn’t pretending to “know nothing” about men who love Hitler.

Ye isn’t saying the phrase “America First” just to avoid saying he sees real benefits of Nazism.

That is something of a problem for tongue-twisted fascists who are used to comfortably hiding in the open. As I’ve written before, being exposed for who they really are — being identified and responsible — worries the American disinformation artists.

Some Americans openly lavish praise on terrible men like Andrew Jackson, General Lee, or Woodrow Wilson… yet go quiet on Hitler.

A truly horrible human who deserves no praise (Andrew Jackson) even can have his portrait put up prominently in the White House, while hinting it symbolizes political methods of Hitler!

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement…. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s.”

Jackson represents deception, corruption, slavery and genocide. Calling him their inspiration for a “new political movement…exciting as the 1930s” means only one thing — Hitler. Get it? “Throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks” is a nod to the “permanent improvisation” mindset of Nazism.

There’s always a line, even among these men who claim there’s never a line. In this case the Republican party regularly embraces Nazism and dances around the subject openly, while it quietly dictates that nobody ever should use the word Hitler.

America First, infamous before and even during WWII for loving Hitler, tells its followers today to wave the racist Betsy Ross flag or their “Simply Southern” Confederate battle shirts… yet leave their swastikas covered or hidden. The line is meant to be sure someone doesn’t ruin the charade. It’s a curious thing really, given what is wrong with Hitler, when Jackson gets his portrait put up, or a government representative from Iowa floats an enemy flag on his desk.

“America First” simply is a reference to Hitler studying American leaders from places like Boston, San Antonio, Detroit or DC to copy their methods of state sanctioned crimes against humanity.

Nuremberg, Germany was the well documented place where Nazis said they could improve racism because they’d be more refined and less obvious than “barbaric” Americans oppressing Blacks. German Nazi meetings very openly used American history as their blueprint. Yet Americans today bend over backwards to claim ignorance of this very strong connection.

First modern concentration camps? America. First cyanide gas chambers? America.

Zyklon-b is the very awful sounding German word Americans say when they want to ignore the fact that Germany copied deadly pesticide use on people from America.

Auschwitz infrastructure looks like Wilson’s racist border control setup in Texas for a simple reason — it was an intentional copy, right down to the “showers” turning into ovens.

America First.

That connection to Nazism making it the second act is not what is taught in schools however, where America First and “great again” get flaunted as if not simply praising Hitler.

Ye is throwing venerable “know nothing” tactics upside down, similar to how almost a decade ago he took others’ low key antisemitic mumbling present around American music and turned it out loud and proud… into a 2005 Grammy award.

I mean you can’t say his fast paced strategy of becoming more obvious in hate speech hasn’t paid for him in the past.

Ye openly loving an infamously genocidal German fascist shows he isn’t as afraid (or dishonest) as others to spread the hate they mean, and sees it as his ticket to share in their success.

Perhaps next he will ask America if Hitler could love Ford’s ideas and try to put them into practice with Nazism… why would it be ok for Elon to spread violence and hate speech like Ford (and Hitler) but not for Ye?

Ye is an American celebrity being far more direct and honest than Elon and Trump who have praised Nazism and Hitler while trying to pretend they weren’t.

In the end, they’re all wrong and should’ve been shut down a long time ago. Ye’s comments about Hitler are disgusting and wrong, especially as even subtlety of Elon and Trump caused unnecessary deaths and harms. Things will only get much worse if the ugly ignorance of fascism goes unchecked, if the GOP sentiment isn’t stopped now. Deleting that tweet isn’t nearly enough.

One peculiar point that I’ve heard proponents of Robert E. Lee repeatedly raise on forums is from a dusty old rumor about his role in the deeply troubled Mexican-American War (1846-1848).

President Polk intentionally worked to aggravate Mexico and provoke a war. On January 13, 1846, Polk ordered American forces into deeply disputed territory. In April, an army of approximately 4,000 men lead by General Zachary Taylor entered the Nueces Strip, a contested territory that Mexico and many Americans regarded as never having been a part of Texas. Polk knew this action would antagonize Mexican military forces stationed within sight of Taylor’s army at Matamoros. Colonel Hitchcock, who served with Zachary Taylor’s army, could see the real intention of his deployment from his vantage point on the front lines: “We have not one particle of right to be here. It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.” […] Historian Amy Greenberg has also shown how racist attitudes that saw Mexicans as racial inferiors and anti-Catholic bigotry enabled American soldiers and leaders to justify extreme violence and what we would now regard as war crimes against Mexican forces and civilians.

Allegedly the highly decorated U.S. General Winfield “Trail of Tears” Scott was some years later overheard assessing it all with this phrase:

Success in the Mexican War was largely due to Robert E. Lee’s skill, valor and undaunted energy.

Such a statement makes little sense in terms of military history. More interesting is that the closest that the above oft-quoted phrase gets to being from Scott himself is that it was only ever overheard and paraphrased.

We don’t actually find any records from General Scott saying these specific words. There’s far more readily available evidence of the reverse, as historians suggest that Scott himself was responsible for a strategy of tragedy.

Here’s a good example, and probably the real source of confusion. It’s a publication out of the hasty second rise of the KKK, attributed to Lee’s personal assistant (who was blind at the time, not kidding) that inadvertently exposes the story’s disconnect.

Or, more precisely, we are meant to believe words written by a blind man who was Lee’s close companion… without much evidence of any of them being true. The attribution to Reverdy Johnson also lowers credibility since he’s a crazy character known for arguing Blacks couldn’t be American citizens (1856 Dred Scott case) before falsely trying to convince people in 1872 “there’s no KKK in the South“.

Yeah, that’s Reverdy, just a plain old wrong side of history guy. He also was blind in one eye after 1842 because he shot himself in the face while “practicing” for a duel with Henry Wise.

Armistead and Reverdy turning up as sources of the phrase attributed to Scott is problematic; it’s some seriously shaky scaffolding upon which two revisionists tried to prop up an awful Lee. People today strut about the Internet saying General Scott said something about Lee, yet ignoring the rather important source (and timing) details here that undermine it.

Reverdy was truly awful. He literally positioned himself as a lawyer intent on protecting and preserving the KKK when it faced being destroyed by President Grant’s newly formed Department of Justice (notably also after Grant had recalled Reverdy). Who wants to believe Reverdy honestly overheard anything from Scott? I mean do you think Reverdy didn’t just make up bogus stories, or that Lee’s personal assistant didn’t just make up bogus stories? Did I mention both of these men couldn’t see?

But let’s say for the sake of argument Scott did in fact think the whole war’s “success” should be dropped on Lee’s shoulders, not just because a sightless Armistead and a scurrilous Reverdy arguably went about stuffing unwanted words into Scott’s mouth.

The greatest military and political leader in American history, President Grant, gave us this related insight about that war:

“He called the Mexican-American War our ‘most evil war,'” [bestselling and award-winning presidential biographer Ronald C. White] said, describing how Grant opposed political ambitions that aimed to expand the U.S. border across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. “He said he should have resigned. For Grant, the very idea that a large country could attack a smaller country was the most immoral venture the United States had ever embarked upon. And that’s why after the Civil War, all the way to the end of his life, Grant would visit Mexico, had friends in Mexico, and admired Mexico’s struggle to become a liberal democracy.”

Anyone who wants to commemorate such evil ambitions, as Grant put it, would invite easy criticism.

If Lee is to be credited for the “most evil war” shouldn’t monuments to him mention the massive casualty rates, American soliders killed en masse, while invading a country on false pretense and lies?

Of the 90,000 U.S. soldiers who served in Mexico, nearly 14,000 died, a death rate of 15.5% – the highest rate of any foreign war in U.S. history.

The easy answer might be memorials depicting such brutality and failures in war (what Lee’s supporters today try to pretend shows “his success“) further bury Lee under his mountains of failure — yet another reason to tear down his image.

“If you go to the mall in Washington, D.C. there’s no monument to this war there, one of the very few to which there’s no monument,” says Peter Guardino, author of ” The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War,” and a historian at Indiana University. “This was a war of conquest for us. We fought this war to take territory from another country. We were successful. But it’s still not the kind of thing that people want to talk about.”

Lee was an aloof, aristocratic suicidal maniac who unnecessarily discarded his own soldiers with abandon (as I’ve written before).

…an unhappy military career, which took 30 years to earn Lee the rank of colonel. By the decade before the [Civil War], Lee had become subject to spells of deep depression, fits of morose behavior, occasional outbursts of violent temper and an obsession with death that amounted to “an almost suicidal tendency.”

That’s a far more accurate telling of Lee’s sentiment after his performance in the Mexican American War, versus the seemingly bogus words attributed to Scott that make Lee sound like some kind of bouncy happy Klan. Oops, I meant clam.

America won the war for a number of reasons, not least of all because Mexico was economically weak, politically distracted and militarily lacked supplies to fight off the invasion.

To put it bluntly, if someone highlights Lee as a “success” they likely are trying to falsely represent the evil and immoral political stunts in Mexico. Lee’s proponents aren’t doing his horrible traitorous reputation any favors by spreading old Reverdy’s bogus propaganda again.

As much as I love recent books like Ty Seidule’s 2021 “Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause“, they don’t cover this particular part of the myth enough.