This week was the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you have seen or read some of her quotes online. Something that was probably unthinkable on the day she died, Arendt’s words and thoughts have become intensely relevant to the current moment in American history.

Arendt was born in 1906 in Germany, into a secular Jewish family, and studied philosophy at several German universities before earning her PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 1928. As the Nazis rose to power in 1933, she fled Germany — first to Paris, then, after the Nazi invasion of France, to the United States in 1941. In America, she worked in refugee aid organizations, served as a researcher and editor for several Jewish cultural institutions, and helped recover cultural property stolen during the war. Her formal academic career took shape in the 1950s, and she went on to teach at major universities, including the University of Chicago and The New School for Social Research.

Arendt became one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century. Her landmark book The Origins of Totalitarianism examined how regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia took shape, tracing their rise to antisemitism, imperialism, and the collapse of traditional political structures. She later stirred intense public debate with Eichmann in Jerusalem, arguing that Adolf Eichmann’s crimes reflected the “banality of evil,” which is the unsettling idea that ordinary people can commit atrocities simply by obeying orders without critical thought. This was due to her impression during the Nuremberg trials that Eichmann was not a superhuman monster but instead a boring, sad, efficiency-obsessed man.

She also pointed out something people often overlook in those old photos of the WWII concentration camps — not just the guards or the officers, but the clerks, the maintenance workers, the accountants, the ordinary folks strolling through the gates with their lunch pails as if they were heading into any other workplace. For them, it was just a job, a routine, a set of tasks to get through before going home for dinner. And that, she suggested, is part of what makes it all so unsettling.

She’s talked about how uncomfortable these questions make people, and how often the response is to wave them away instead of thinking about what they really mean. That refusal to look too closely, she argues, helped enable some of the worst horrors in our history. And the worrying thing is that we haven’t really stopped doing it. We still slip into the same patterns, still turn away from hard truths, still treat systems as neutral simply because they feel ordinary. It’s a reminder that the danger isn’t only in the dramatic moments of history, but in the everyday choices we’d rather not examine.

Right before her death, in 1973, she told an interviewer the following:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

I cannot imagine what she would make of our current media environment and this roaring shit show of an administration. She would be greatly alarmed. I sometimes wonder how surprised she would be, but then again, I don’t think she could have envisioned anything like the rise of the smartphone and social media. The idea of misinformation videos that you can watch any time you want, people making a lot of money creating these videos, and an algorithm that controls which videos you see would seem like a nightmare to her.

I’ll end with a final quote of Arendt’s.

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion, fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

The last word offers a lighter note and goes to Flo and Joan.