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September 7, 2022

Most people know about the Nazis, WWII, and the Jews. What many don’t realize however is that the Nazis didn’t start out as the merchants of death they became. They started out as anti-middle class, anti-capitalist, and anti-communist, with a relatively tangential focus on anti-Semitism. Their roots, though, fertilized their monomaniacal future.

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For all its efforts in the 1920s, the Nazi party attracted few adherents. It was only in the early 1930s that it began to gain traction, using the economic ruin from the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression to gain power.

While nationalism and anti-Semitism were always part of Naziism’s agenda, it was the post-war economic disaster that was the golden ticket for a party arguing the Germans were suffering under the boot of oppression. The Nazis promised to remove the shackles and reenergize the German economy. As a result, in 1932 they won the largest share of seats in parliament (36%), and Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933.

Once in power, the gloves came off. The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was used as a premise to target political opponents and curtail civil liberties. A month later, Parliament passed the Enabling Act, allowing Hitler’s cabinet to make laws without legislative participation. In June 1933, Nazis outlawed opposition parties and, in December, the lines between party and government were erased. In January 1934, the Nazis eliminated the last vestiges of opposition when states lost their voice in government.

Image: A viral internet meme following Biden’s unprecedented speech.

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In two years, the Nazis went from being a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the German government and people. It was then that they unleashed their previously subdued anti-Semitism, from boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation (Nuremberg laws) and, finally, to the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that, if we asked any German in 1932 whether it would be okay to enslave and murder Jews, he would most certainly have said no. But within two years, Jews would officially be defined as an inferior race and have their political and economic freedoms curtailed. Within a decade, millions would be murdered.

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came,” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public.

So it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would want you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade. For just over two years, we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold as it’s never held sway before. Consider the following:

In the summer of 2020, Democrats rained hell down on America by allowing, encouraging, and funding urban terrorists who destroyed property, attacked citizens and the police, and killed dozens of people.

In 2020 and beyond, despite years of watching Democrats assail election integrity, anyone who questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election was branded as an anti-democratic conspiracy nut and accused of supporting insurrection.