The Pro-Riot Left Is Following the Nazi Playbook for Seizing Power
This time in our country’s history is frightening, baffling, and tempting. We’re frightened by the sight of native-born radicals assembling pallets of bricks for illegal aliens to hurl at police. We’re baffled by police chiefs, mayors, and governors offering law enforcement personnel as sacrificial lambs. And we’re tempted to stick our heads in the sand, falsely blame President Donald Trump, and back down on our steely resolve to repatriate an army of more than 10 million invaders that Democrats and their pet judges wish to vote in our elections.
I say tempted, because it’s a sin to betray your country, even for the noble goal of seeming moderate, winsome, and “Christian.”
Permit me, as an obsessive history nerd, to try to assuage your fear, dispel your bafflement, and help you resist the Enemy’s temptation. Drawing on decades of study, which included researching and writing multiple books on political extremism, I will explain what’s happening in America and how it happened before.
Weimar America
In the 1920s, a defeated Germany groaned under the harsh reparations the victorious Entente had imposed at the Treaty of Versailles. It had lost vast territories, some of them with majority German populations — in violation of the 14 Points promised by Woodrow Wilson. Its government was unpopular, a republic based in Weimar which monarchists and Communists alike considered illegitimate. Crucially, the nation’s army had been hacked down to a rump of only 100,000—it couldn’t grow any larger without violating Versailles and inviting a French invasion.
In this troubled context, the racialist neopagan National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazis) arose, claiming that it was the only force strong enough to prevent a Communist takeover. (The Communists, backed by the Soviets, had indeed seized several cities in 1919 and almost prevailed.) The Nazis were led by an orator of unparalleled power, who was also a genius political schemer with a grand vision of national restoration and expansion. You probably know his name. History Youtubers call him “Moustache Man” to avoid getting demonetized.
Moustache Man’s plan for gaining power ran along two tracks. On the one hand, build party organizations and engage in propaganda to try to win elections. On the other, build an army of street thugs who would crack the heads of enemies and terrorize hostile voters. In a properly functioning State, his brown-shirted street gangs should have been imprisoned for attacking Socialist rallies, beating up Catholic youth groups, and murdering the (equally violent) Communists in the streets.
Anarchy for Me, Tyranny for Thee
But that didn’t happen. Judges in town after town, city after city, sympathized with the Nazis’ patriotic rhetoric. They didn’t really believe that the Weimar Republic was legitimate. They considered the Brown Shirts to be perhaps overzealous warriors in a cause that was truly just. And so again and again, when Brown Shirts and those they’d attacked got hauled into court, the Socialists or Catholics would go to prison for fighting back while the Nazis who’d assaulted them got off with slaps on the wrist. (George Floyd riots and January 6, anyone?)
Even when Moustache Man led an armed attempt to overthrow the government — the Beer Hall Putsch — and should have been shot for treason, he only got two years in a cozy prison. The warden who sympathized with him gave him a spacious cell and let his private secretary, toting a typewriter, visit. On it, Mein Kampf was written.
Moustache Man emerged a national hero to citizens frustrated with Germany’s weakness, and when the Great Depression broke the back of the country’s economy, Moustache Man’s party surged in popularity, gaining one-third of the votes in the Reichstag. One-third. You shouldn’t be able to seize power when two-thirds of citizens oppose your party’s program. How did it happen, then, that in 1933 Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany?
Peace at Any Price
It’s soberingly simple. His brown-shirted gangs had gained control of Germany’s streets. They could terrorize opponents, and go completely unpunished. Other parties couldn’t safely rally, or in some places safely vote. And the timid, short-sighted conservatives who led another one-third of Germany’s voters were afraid to confront the brown-shirts in the streets. That would mean civil war, one which Germany’s stunted little army might even have lost.
So the minority of fanatics who’d gotten away with murder bullied the sane, patriotic parties into giving it absolute power, then suspending the Constitution.
The story ends, of course, with Hitler invading most of Europe, getting millions of Germans killed and their cities reduced to ruins, exterminating millions of innocents, then killing himself like a coward in the ruins of his bunker.
The Nazi Playbook in Play in Los Angeles Today
The Left in America isn’t following the Communist playbook, which succeeded once in Russia but failed in every developed country. The Left is following the Nazi playbook that succeeded in highly cultured Germany. The organization Antifa was founded by the Soviets in the 1920s to try to seize power in Germany, and has existed ever since. It learned the lessons of its failure and the technique of Nazi success:
- Gain power over the courts.
- Seize control of the streets.
- Terrorize your enemies.
- Intimidate the moderates.
- Threaten civil war.
- Offer your own regime as the only peaceful alternative.
Whether they know it or not (I think many do), Democrats like Gavin Newsom are implementing the Nazi playbook in our own states and cities. That’s what Donald Trump faces.
Corrupt or partisan judges are flouting the law in an attempt to cripple the executive branch as it exercises its constitutional powers. Mobs of violent protestors are attacking federal law enforcement. State governors and mayors are refusing to help enforce just, constitutional laws. And they’re counting, as the brown shirts once did, on the majority population and its legitimate government choosing surrender over struggle.
That’s what we face: a fork in the road as stark as the one Germans faced in 1933. Whether we end up with tyranny and ruin depends on what our leaders choose to do next.
Pray hard.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.