It’s incredible what kind of xenophobic rhetoric goes almost unnoticed in the era of Donald Trump.

Last Thursday, Maine Republican Party Vice Chairman Nick Isgro used the party’s Twitter account to publish an extraordinary thread of tweets arguing that the influx of immigrants into the country was causing a spike in serious diseases, and that “to protect Mainers & Americans, we need a pause on migration from countries that haven’t eradicated these diseases until we can figure out what is going on.”

Comparing rhetoric to that of the Nazis is rarely productive, but this sort of thing comes right out of the playbook of the Third Reich. There was a notorious poster widely published in Nazi-occupied Poland asserting that Jews carried typhus. Look it up on Google. Then ask yourself: How did we get here?

Taylor Asen

Portland

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