Reductio ad Hitlerum: Why ‘Trump is Hitler’ isn’t just empty rhetoric

Hillary Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, preached a cardinal rule of the left: to accuse opponents of precisely what they are doing. The former first lady recently accused Donald Trump of being Adolf Hitler, a charge repeated by leading Democrats, with Kamala Harris defaulting to the boilerplate “fascist.” The reductio ad Hitlerum was once the last rhetorical refuge for someone losing an argument, like a drunk at the end of the bar. Over time, the Hitler slander became politicians’ first resort, serving several valuable purposes.

Demonizing someone as Hitler is a justification for violence against them. On July 13, a 20-year-old with no tactical experience somehow evaded the Secret Service, gained access to a rooftop fewer than 150 yards from the stage where Trump was speaking, and fired eight shots, grazing Trump’s ear, killing rally attendee Corey Comperatore, and wounding two others.

For coincidence theorists, it’s all pure happenstance. In reality, the Trump-as-Hitler jihad signals a convergence going back nearly a century.

Common enemies

Consider the account of British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, author of the magisterial “Chronicles of Wasted Time.” In the early 1930s, Muggeridge visited the Soviet Union as the Moscow correspondent of the London Guardian but planned to remain as a partisan of the communist regime. Joseph Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine, which claimed millions of lives, changed the journalist’s mind but inspired Hitler. As Muggeridge explained, Soviet communism and German national socialism were essentially Slavic and Germanic versions of the same tyranny. This was confirmed by a distinguished resident of Hitler’s regime.

Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi was born in Hamburg in 1926 to a Liberian father and a German mother. More than half a century later, as a naturalized American citizen, Massaquoi wrote “Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany,” a remarkable account first published in 1999 and now more relevant than ever.

Barred from university, Massaquoi read James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Such authors became an “indispensable survival tool” against “constant racist attacks.” Massaquoi survived because “unlike Jews, blacks were few in number and relegated to low-priority status.”

For supporters of Biden and Harris, people who want the nation to be great are deplorables — the Untermenschen — and this lays the groundwork for violence against them.

The German National Socialists hailed their virtue and blasted communist evil, but Massaquoi found their propaganda “a distortion of facts.” The truth was, “in their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany, the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.”

And they did.

The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact divvied up Europe between the regimes, which both invaded Poland in September 1939, starting World War II. During the Pact, Stalin handed German Jews directly to Hitler’s Gestapo. For details, see “Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler” by Margarete Buber-Neumann. After the war, Stalin swung the people of the USSR back to their habitual anti-Semitism, branding Jews “rootless cosmopolitans.” That was also the case in the communist regimes of Eastern Europe.

Witness the Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia with its 11 executions. As director Robert Rossen (known for “All the King’s Men”) testified to Congress, the victims “were all hung, in my opinion, for being Jews and nothing else.”

Anti-Semitism remained a component of the left in the 20th century, culminating in its collaboration with Islamic terrorism. For example, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine deployed the “Che Guevara Group Brigade” to hijack an Air France flight in 1976 that wound up taking hostages to Idi Amin’s Uganda. The Che Guevara squad consisted of two Arabs and Germans Wilfried Bose and Brigitte Kuhlmann, who were also members of a leftist group called the Revolutionary Cells. The Baader-Meinhof group, another leftist German terrorist organization, showed similar tendencies.

The late Christopher Hitchens could easily imagine Andreas Baader as “an enthusiastic member of the Brownshirts.” Some members were recruited at the University of Heidelberg’s Socialist Patients Collective. One of them, Ralf Reinders, planned to destroy the Jewish House in Berlin, once gutted by the Brownshirts, “in order to get rid of this thing about the Jews that we’ve all had to have since the Nazi time.” The contemporary left also has a “thing about the Jews.”

In the style of the PFLP and PLO, the left construes the Middle East conflict as colonialism, a doctrine expounded on by Marx and Lenin. October 7, 2023, the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, caused campuses to reverberate with shouts of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” meaning Judenrein, the goal of Nazi Germany. The American left is down with it.

Rainbow supremacy

Ivy League campuses like Harvard couldn’t figure out whether their DEI policies, speech codes, and “woke” measures against bullying applied to calls for genocide against Jews. As Harvard’s then-President Claudine Gay said, it all depends on the “context.”

The Nazis touted their master race theories, and the communists hailed the “new Soviet man.” As it happens, the United States of America is developing its own brand of Übermenschen through the LGBTQ construct, construed as a “community” possessed of extraordinary powers. Consider Sneha Nair, a Biden-Harris appointee at the National Nuclear Security Administration and co-author of “Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament.”

Nair claims queer people “make fewer errors, discuss issues more constructively, and better exchange new ideas and knowledge.” Not only that, “queer people have specific skills to offer that are valuable in a policy and diplomacy context.” The alphabet people are just better, but there’s more to the intersectionality now.

Democrats appear to believe that national socialist Germany allowed “Klaus’ Assault Rifles” shops on every corner, calling for citizens to “Get your Sturmgewehr and Schmeisser today!” As Stephen P. Halbrook showed in “Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and 'Enemies of the State,'” the German National Socialists ruthlessly suppressed ownership of firearms. They used the registration records of the Weimar Republic to find out who owned guns and barred possession of ammunition. The government crusade against “assault weapons” is more like Nazi policy than people might think. See also Halbrook’s “Gun Control in Nazi Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance.”

California’s Firearms Violence Research Center at UC Davis aims to find out “who owns guns, why they own them, and how they use firearms.” As in National Socialist Germany and its occupied territories, “ve vant zuh names.” The state also requires background checks for ammunition sales and uses them to confiscate guns. These are not the only National Socialist-style measures the people now face.

The groundwork for violence

During the pandemic, government health bosses — white coat supremacists — demanded vaccination papers for entry to various establishments. Dr. Deborah Birx branded the uninfected “non-symptomatic carriers,” suddenly, it was “your papers, please.” NIAID boss Dr. Anthony Fauci promoted vaccines that failed to prevent infection or transmission, even for children — the least vulnerable group. Fauci was commanding a medical experiment on the entire population, but comparisons to Josef Mengele are unfair — to Mengele.

Since then, the United States of America has become more like National Socialist Germany, not less. Witness Joe Biden’s September 1, 2022, speech, which looked like something staged by Leni Riefenstahl. The Delaware Democrat also compares Trump to Hitler and calls Trump’s supporters “garbage.” For supporters of Biden and Harris, people who want the nation to be great are deplorables — the Untermenschen — and this lays the groundwork for state-sponsored violence against them.

Black American Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi, who died in 2013, would be shocked. So would those Americans who actually defeated the Nazis, liberating their captive nations and concentration camps. Fewer than 70,000 of the veterans remain, and they pass the torch to generations since born.

The Ansis — American National Socialists — are coming. Fight them on the internet, in the academy, and fight them at the ballot box. Sooner or later, everybody will have to pick a side.