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.

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.

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.

The riot that occurred on January 6, 2021, 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, among the crowd were provocateurs in whom the FBI was suspiciously uninterested.

By politicizing the Department of Justice, the Biden administration and other Democrats have used the “insurrection” pretense to harass, intimidate, arrest, and jail Trump’s supporters, members of his administration, and his legal team. 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 COVID, primarily Democrat-run states and municipalities across the country instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses, and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced school shutdowns, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were unconstitutionally muzzled when the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and de-platform them.

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger; then coerced private enterprises to enforce them. Questioning that policy or non-acquiescence with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime, so the government and allied businesses threatened and destroyed livelihoods.

When Americans stood up to school boards, complaining about their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or being accused of being racists because of the color of their skin, Biden’s Justice Department branded them as terrorists.

The Biden administration’s threatening, intimidating, and jailing of its opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech on September 1, when 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 officially addressing American citizens…and calling 70 million of them terrorists.

This 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 first to slander, then marginalize and, finally, to cleave from society the hated Jews who were said to be less than human, the Democrats first used their control over the media, local governments, and myriad alphabet agencies to take over the federal government and are using that government to slander, marginalize, and cleave from society the millions of Americans who disagree with their leftist agenda.

These are not just idle words: It’s Joe Biden, the head of the American government, with all the resources at its disposal, telling 70+ 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 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. 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’re threats. The leader of the government 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. Still, unlike the Germans after 1932, Americans can do something about this, making their voices heard and changing the course of history.

This November there will be elections nationwide; most will have a Democrat on one side and a Republican on the other. In every single case, whether for dog catcher or senator, conservatives should pull the GOP lever.

The GOP is imperfect, and its candidates are sometimes questionable, but at the end of the day, they’re not Democrats. Republicans are not the party that’s taking the country down the totalitarian path that wrought so much damage and spilled so much blood 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.