I have a friend, Oleg, who grew up in the Soviet Union. He described himself to me as at first a believer in the Big Lie, then a doubter, then a skeptic, and now is an enemy. He's a good graphics artist too.

He runs The Peoples Cube, which you may surmise from the above graphic.

FDR, to make good on a campaign promise to clean up the stock market, appointed Joe Kennedy, Teddy's father. When asked why he put the biggest crook in the market in charge of it, FDR said it takes a crook to catch one.

I was once audited by the State of Texas, which is a commonplace these days, after a (now-defunct title company) was closed down for fraud. He was making a gambling book in his escrow account. The owner, by the way, was the county Democrat chairman. After I got to know the state officials, and they knew that I wasn't stealing, they relaxed and told me of some ways to cheat that I would never have considered.

I know a woman afflicted with a stalker, who is also a registered sex offender. She did nothing; he's fixated. She was completely powerless to see the signs in him, for he presented himself at first in ways which he knew, from his vile experience, would be ingratiating and pleasing. She didn't have the experience to know the signs.

Just so on the Cube, where the people who have the finest antennae are the Russians who grew up under the stink of totalitarianism.

Modern Americans do not have the experience to see what's happening now. We've been too comfortable, too fat and happy, for too long to have an institutional memory of totalitarianism. And we're sitting ducks, and the jack-booted thugs sneer at the Jeremiahs crying in the wilderness. "What? That right-wing extremist? Pay that wingnut no mind. I'll make you very happy. You're getting sleepy...You're getting sleepy..."

The problem is that these days it's hard to run a satire site because reality is far stranger than anything that most satirists could come up with.

Unless they grew up under different circumstances and know, from the stripes on their backs, the memories of oppression, and the arbitrary and capricious exercise of state power what the early-warning signs are.