“I love the person he used to be but I despise the person that he is now. He is not my son.”

Those are the words of JoAnn Crowl from Ohio, a mother with cancer. She spoke to CNN for their investigative report on the roots of the riot as if her son is dead. Her son Donovan isn’t dead, just in a cult strong enough to carry out the attempted coup. JoAnn wasn’t done:

“And I still have a hard time believing that he did what he did. If he gets 20 years in prison, he’ll be 70 years old before he gets out of there. Trump doesn’t care about any of those people that stormed the Capitol for him. He doesn’t care one iota about them.”

Now, here is Donovan, the son, when asked about whether he feels bad for what he did, after hearing how his family felt:

“Well, actually, the things I did I was hanging out with some of the wrong people it seems like, but I didn’t really do anything so I feel pretty good that my case will come out and show that…” 

And then while slamming the cell hatch: “I don’t watch your garbage, anyway.” 

It used to be a rite of passage, high school or college kids would get a detailed look at Hitler’s Germany, all of it seeming so incomprehensible. Germany, the most sophisticated nation on earth in the 1920s-1939, the leader in physics, medicine, music, engineering, all of it, collapses into Nazism in under two decades. Now, the students outside the MAGA cult will sense how it can happen, even when not fully appreciating the context.

Because this is how it happens, an obsession, a cult of personality, and an absolute madman. Another rioter identified in the show said he believes Trump was “anointed by God.” That’s a cult. The other thing associated with cults, dictatorships, and madmen, they all rise from the hard right, nationalism, much of it based on “whiteness” feeling threatened. Make of that what you will.

We were and are told, frequently, “It can happen here.” This is how.