Joe Biden Has Picked Up the Nazi's Handbook, and He's Not Trying to Burn It...

Most people know about the Nazis and WWII and the Jews. A century later however what many people don’t realize is that the Nazis didn’t start out as the merchants of death they became.  They started out as anti-big business, anti-middle class, anti-capitalist and anti-Communist with only a relatively tangential focus on anti-Semitism.  For all of their efforts in the first decade of their existence the Nazi party attracted few adherents.  It was only in the early 30’s when they began to gain real traction, using the economic ruin brought on by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression to gain power. While nationalism and anti-Semitism were always part of their agenda, it was the post war economic disaster that was the golden ticket for a party who argued the Germans were suffering under the boot of oppression.  The Nazis promised to remove the shackles of Versailles, reenergize the German economy and as a result in 1932 they won the largest number of seats in the Parliament.  Leveraging this position 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 which allowed the cabinet to make laws with no parliamentary oversight.  In June of that year opposition parties were outlawed and in December the lines between party and government were erased.  In January of 1934 the last vestiges of opposition was eliminated when states lost their voice in government.  So in a period of less than two years the Nazi party went from a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the government and the people of Germany.  It was then that they unleashed their heretofore relatively subdued anti-Semitism.  From boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation via the Nuremberg laws and finally, the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that if we asked any German in 1932 would it be OK to gas and murder Jews, they would most certainly have said no. But within two years Jews would officially be defined as a different, inferior race, had their political and economic freedoms curtailed and within a decade millions would be dead. 

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. 

And so it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would like 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 in the United States like it’s never held sway before.

Consider the following: 

In the summer of 2020 Democrats rained hell down on American cities and citizens, by allowing and encouraging and funding urban terrorists to destroy private and public property, attack citizens and the police and kill dozens of innocent victims. 

In 2020 and beyond, after years of watching Democrats assail our election system, when anyone questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election they were branded as anti democratic conspiracy nuts and accused of supporting insurrection.

The relatively small riot that occurred on January 6^th 2021– primarily involving those who questioned the 2020 election outcome – was labeled an insurrection and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail.  At the same time there are a number of provocateurs who seem to have been involved about whom the FBI is stunningly disinterested.   

Illegally politicizing the Department of Justice, for the following 18 months the Biden administration and Democrats used the pretense of the “insurrection” to harass, intimidate, arrest and jail members of the former president’s administration, legal team and supporters.  This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender. 

Beginning in 2020, in response to the Corona virus, states and municipalities across the country (mostly run by Democrats) instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced the shutdown of schools, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or the damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were seen as enemies of the regime and were subsequently silenced as the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and deplatform them.  

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger and then proceeded to coerce private enterprises to enforce said mandates.   Questioning that policy or non acquiesce with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime and livelihoods were threatened and destroyed.

Inserting themselves into the localist of government activities, school boards, Americans who stood up and voiced their opposition to their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or accused of being racists because of the color of their skin have been branded as terrorists by the Justice Department.

All of this threatening, intimidating and jailing of the opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech last week where he stated:  Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. This was not a campaign speech, this was the President of the United States addressing American citizens… and he called 71 million of them terrorists.

Which brings us back to Germany in 1932.  Just as the Nazis used their toehold on power to take total control of the government and methodically use that government to first slander then marginalize then cleave from society the hated Jews who were said to be less than human, the Democrats have used their control over the media, local governments and federal agencies to take over the federal government and are now using that government to slander and marginalize and cleave from society the millions of Americans who disagree with their leftist agenda. 

And these are not just idle words, Joe Biden is the head of the United States government, with all of its resources at disposal, telling 71 million Americans they are a threat to the nation. And in case anyone missed the point, after having just passed a law to hire 87,000 new armed IRS agents, the administration hired Nikole Flax, who worked with Lois Lerner at the IRS when it was targeting conservatives during the Obama administration, to run the new division.   So Joe Biden and the Democrats have just created the largest armed police force in the nation and set as its leader someone associated with the targeting of their political opponents.  Joe Biden’s words are not just words… they are threats. He paints his political opponents as extremists and then exhorts his supporters to “confront” them.  “We’re all called by duty and conscience to confront extremists who put their own pursuit of power above all else.”

None of this means that by 2025 we’ll have concentration camps filled with emaciated conservatives, but it’s not like there’s no precedent.  But unlike the Germans after 1932, Americans still have the opportunity to do something about this, to make their voices heard, to change the course of history.  This November in all 50 states there will be elections, and in most there will be a Democrat on one side and a Republican on the other.  In every single case, whether for dog catcher, governor, senator or any office in between, they should pull the GOP lever.  The GOP is far from perfect and their candidates and representatives are at times questionable, but at the end of the day, they are not Democrats.  They are not the party that is taking the country down the totalitarian path that wrought so much damage and spilled so much blood in the last century.  No, Republicans may be flawed, but voting for them will likely not be fatal to the Republic.  The same can’t be said about Democrats.

Don't Look Now But The Democrats of 2020 are Eerily Similar to the Nazis of 1933...

One of the brilliant things about the United States’ founding fathers was their understanding of human nature. They understood that it is the nature of man to seek to accumulate power. It’s been that way throughout human history. The seemingly unquenchable thirst for the accumulation of power has created empires across the globe. In Africa you had the Egyptians, the Songhai and the Carthaginians. Asia had the Ming, the Han, the Mongols, and of course the Ottomans. Europe had the Greeks, Romans, and the Spanish. The Americas had the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas. The British eventually assembled an empire that literally circled the world.

The parts of the world that were not subsumed into giant empires were part of smaller civilizations of varying sizes that operated, in most cases, through the accumulation of power via conquest and slavery. It was usually the conflict or potential conflict with competing powers that dictated how large a nation or an empire would grow. Because, after all, it is largely a trait of men to seek to accumulate more power until prudence dictates not doing so – and even then in some cases prudence is not much of a deterrent. And that applies even more to competing powers within a state than to those between states.

Our founding fathers knew this and decided to craft a Constitution to yoke the darker nature of men. Thus we have the federal system, where states have some powers and the federal government has others. The federal government would handle most large national issues while states would handle those closer to the people.  We have a separation of federal power between three theoretically equal branches of government. Within the legislative branch – which at the time of writing was expected to be the first among equals – there is a separation between the houses, and within the houses different powerbases. The states appointed Senators and the citizens elected the Representatives. Add to all of this the staggering of terms of office and you have a vehicle that was designed to limit the powers of mobs and keep any single group from being able to play on the emotions of men and take power.

And finally of course, for the single most powerful limit on the accumulation of government power, you had the Bill of Rights which clearly articulated the rights of the people, both individual and collective, that could not be tread on by the government. Free speech, a free press, free practice of religion, the freedom of assembly, a right to be secure in their persons and homes, and most important of all, because it protects all the others, the right to bear arms.

Our Constitution, like its authors, was and is not perfect, but over the years it’s evolved to ban slavery, grant equal application of laws and to expand suffrage. What is perhaps most interesting about the American Constitution is the fact that it’s guided the country for 233 years without a standing army of enforcers. Yes, there is an army of course, but it’s not used to keep citizens in line, because there is no line to be kept in. America was, for most of its history, a nation defined by freedom. Citizens could largely go about and do and say what they wanted. They could buy land where they wanted. They could start just about any kind of business they wanted. They could worship as they wanted. They could say anything that came to their minds… although whether or not that was prudent is another matter. Americans could move from place to place without permission of the government. They could, at the end of the day exercise their freedom, and that came from the Constitution. Barack Obama accurately stated “Generally, the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can't do to you. Says what the federal government can't do to you. But it doesn't say what the state or federal government must do on your behalf.” Obama meant that as a criticism of the document, but the fact is, that is exactly why our nation has endured and our freedom has endured so long and allowed us to change the face of the world along the way.

Which brings us to America circa 2020… Virtually all of those key elements that have kept our nation and her citizens free are today under direct assault… largely by the Democrat party and their partners in the media, academia, BLM and Antifa.

The left is today using the blueprint of the Nazi party to bring America as we know it to an end. Although the Nazi party came to power legally, constitutionally in Germany in 1933, prior to that the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung - SA) had spent a decade using violence and intimidation to cow some Germans into submission while simultaneously emboldening others to take up their cause. Once the Nazis were in power it was game over for a free Germany. The model of using the freedoms / rights afforded citizens of a nation to take control of that nation and then eviscerating those very laws and rights that allowed them to come to power in the first place can have staggering results. The Nazis took a dysfunctional post WWI Germany and turned it into an extraordinarily efficient killing machine, both of its own citizens and millions of others as it set the world on a course of war. That model of gaining power followed by death and destruction has proved highly effective in modern times from Robert Mugabe to Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping.

And today the left is seeking to use that very model to destroy America. Not sure? Just listen to them. They want to pack the Supreme Court. They want to eliminate the Electoral College. They want to eliminate free speech. They want to take away your guns. They have no compunction about using the IRS to stifle opposition. They have no problem using the FBI to overturn a fair election. They want to defund the police. They want to expropriate your property. They seek to rewrite American history. They want to implement laws based on race. They want to decide what communities look like. They want to keep schools and churches closed. They want to obliterate science. They want to decide what art you see. And of course they want to control the means of production to save the planet from the fiction of global warming.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Make no mistake, Democrats do not decry the violence in the streets, they seek to harness it. Make no mistake, Democrats hold no love for the Constitution other than how it can be used to bring them more power. Make no mistake, the Democrats don’t care one iota about your freedom or your liberty and they will take them in a heartbeat, if you let them. And this is not a bug in their system, it’s a feature. The Democrat party in 2020 no longer has a vested interest in freedom. Their only goal is power and subjugation. “Think what we believe or you’ll be cancelled.” “Say anything we don’t like and you’ll be cancelled.” “Support our opposition and you’ll be cancelled.” Today mostly what they do is get you fired, kicked out of school and shamed on social media, but with amorphous “hate crime” legislation advancing on every front, soon there will be literally no place to hide, because words no longer mean anything so the woke can literally characterize anything as “hate”. Taken individually some may argue these are nothing like Hitler’s fascist state. Perhaps, but collectively they are as clear a portent to the future as was Mein Kampf.

The most telling thing about this situation is that it’s not actually the Democrats per se leading it. It’s the Twitter and Facebook mobs. It’s the fascists at BLM and Antifa. It’s academia and the media. The Democrats (who nonetheless agree with all of it) are too spineless to actually believe in anything other than power. They are not leading, but rather playing catch-up, trying to run to get out in front of a parade that’s already in progress and pretend they're leading it to keep the money flowing in. Once in power – i.e. having the White House and both houses of congress – they will enact every over the top progressive policy BLM and George Soros can come up with because they understand that if they are not on the bleeding edge of wokeness, the mobs will simply replace them with people who are even more hardcore.

One wonders what the reaction to all of this will be from Americans who still value liberty and freedom… will they go quietly into that not so good night or will they “cling to guns or religion” and decide to push back against the new fascism?

War and Liberty - The Enemy Within

Today, when people talk about winning World War II, they often talk about freedom defeating tyranny. That is mostly true as the United States, the UK, Canada and Australia were indeed democracies. But it was not tyranny we went to war against. Indeed one of the powers that helped defeat Hitler was itself a dictatorship that only declared war on Hitler after having been invaded.

Adolph Hitler didn’t suddenly become a dictator in 1939 or even 1941. He had been a dictator for years before war broke out. While he didn’t start out as such, soon after getting power legitimately in January of 1933, he became one. Mussolini similarly became dictator three years after coming to power legally in 1922. At the same time, in Japan Emperors had ruled without opposition for more than two generations. Dictatorship, as unseemly as it might be, is rarely a reason to go to war – however it can be a great motivator once war is declared.

We also hear people talk about WW II as a fight against evil. Again, while true, we did not go to war against evil. The Nazi’s came to power on a platform imbued with anti-Semitism and for most of the 30’s they were engaged in marginalizing, quarantining and murdering Jews and others who didn’t fit the profile of their superior Aryan “race”. In Asia the Japanese had been massacring Chinese for years, and in one of the most horrific events in modern history, they raped, mutilated and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children in Nanking in 1937.

At the end of the day it was not tyranny that America went to war against, although our enemies certainly were tyrants. It was not evil America went to war against, although our enemies were certainly evil. No, it was aggression that America went to war against. Specifically, it was aggression directed towards us and secondarily against our allies. The United States did not engage in WW II until the Japanese attacked our forces at Pearl Harbor in 1941 – although the United States had been providing aid to the British and the Chinese for some time. And while Congress declared war on Japan the next day, it did not do so against Germany until after they had declared it on us.

Why does any of this matter? Because freedom matters. Because understanding that freedom’s not just preserved simply by defeating an enemy on the battlefield matters. While the Axis was indeed a threat to American liberty, German and Japanese atrocities made it easy to rally support against them. Rallying support for freedom against an enemy is much easier if that enemy is a viscous, ruthless killing machine. It’s far more difficult if the enemy of freedom is someone who’s ostensibly trying to help.

And that’s what makes 2014 different from 1941, or 1944 when D Day was launched 70 years ago this past Friday. During WW II the enemies of freedom were tyrants doing despicable, abhorrent things, and doing them largely over there. Eventually they targeted the United States and we engaged. Today, while there are enemies of freedom who do despicable, horrific things largely over there, the biggest enemies of freedom are over here and appear far less menacing. Indeed they couch their tyranny in the paternal pleas for “fairness” or equity or protecting the children. It’s hard to raise an army people who claim to be trying to help. But make no mistake, they are just as dangerous in the long run. This battle will not be fought with guns and bombs and the enemies of freedom aren't nearly as easy to identify as those flying the swastika or Rising Sun flags.

For Barack Obama and the rest of the big government cabal – which includes many Republicans – nothing less than American freedom is the enemy:

• Economic freedom is hard to maintain when they have regulated the American economy into virtual stagnation. Insufficient jobs and more government largesse leads to more people falling out of the workforce and becoming wards of the state. Today the Labor Force Participation Rate is at its lowest in almost 40 Years and fully half of Americans live in a home that receives government benefits.

• Intellectual freedom is difficult to maintain when government is snooping on your every move and listening to virtually every word you say. 

• Political freedom is hard to maintain when the government uses its police power to harass its enemies and allows unfettered entrance to those who do not share our values.

• Liberty itself becomes somewhat unrecognizable when virtually every element of your daily life is regulated by nameless faceless bureaucrats in Washington and beyond. They may not yet tell you when to get up, when to go to the bathroom and when to go to bed, but it’s only a matter of time as virtually every single thing you interact with every day is regulated. Who must live in your neighborhood. The type of plastic your alarm clock is made of. The amount of sugar in your cereal. The amount of water your toilet flushes. What kind of gas your car must use. The kind of car seat you must have for your kid. What you can give that kid for lunch. What they must learn in school. What your boss must pay you. What constitutes overtime. How many minorities your bank must lend to. Who can contribute how much to political campaigns. What people can say on the radio or TV. What the cable companies can charge you.  What information Google can collect. What a company can say on the label of a can of corn. The kind of refrigerant used in your refrigerator. The kind of light bulbs in your night stand. Not to mention the confiscatory tax rates and a tax code that even its enforcers can’t understand. There’s virtually nothing you do in any given day that does not require Uncle Sam’s stamp of approval at some point along the way.

In substituting for Rush Limbaugh last week Mark Belling wondered if the United States today could rally a force to defeat… well, anything. That’s a good question because it appears to be the case that the nation that rallied itself to defeat the greatest menace in human history is unable to recognize the threat to liberty right in its midst. Seventy five years ago the German and the Japanese conduct made them an easy target against whom to focus American attention and energy. Today, after a half century of the cancer of big government liberalism crippling American prosperity and eviscerating American freedom, perhaps it will be its flowering in the person of Barack Obama that will finally bring about its downfall. The soft tyranny of liberalism may not be as easy to recognize as the tyranny practiced by our enemies in WW II, but it is no less important to defeat. I hope Mark Belling will soon find himself pleasantly surprised.