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Gina Carano Was Right: The Disturbing Parallels Between 2021 America and 1932 Germany…

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Actress Gina Carano became one of the highest-profile celebrity victims of cancel culture last week, when she was dropped from The Mandalorian, fired by Disney, and dumped by her talent agency. As most people know, Carano’s fatal error was believing she still lived in a society with genuine freedom of expression. Carano’s message was straightforward: Americans are being taught to hate one another, in a manner that disturbingly evokes Germany prior to World War II.

Disney denounced Carano’s post as “abhorrent,” and swiftly kicked her off the show. Reporting on the incident has invited passive bystanders to believe Carano said something anti-Semitic, when of course her post was the exact opposite.

Carano’s post was clumsy, the kind routinely seen from Baby Boomers posting on Facebook. But Carano’s post was ultimately much closer to reality than even her defenders realize. America’s political situation right now carries disturbing similarities to Germany just before the Third Reich. And it isn’t people on the right who resemble Nazis.

But first, a couple things this article is not:

-This is not a rant about “Weimerica.” There are essays claiming that America resembles pre-Nazi Germany based on the rise of transgenderism, a decline in sexual morality, or other social trends. Whether that comparison is valid or not, this essay is focused purely on political culture.

-This is not a shrill claim that “Democrats are Nazis,” that Republicans are treated on par with Jews in Nazi Germany, or anything of the sort. Instead, this is an effort to point out the worrisome and growing parallels between the political culture of late Weimar Germany, and the political culture that America is embracing with more fervor every day.

For decades, the rallying cry against the Holocaust has been “never again.” But “again” will only be “never” if we take care to understand what the precursors to politically-motivated atrocities look like, and stop them before they grow too severe.

Politicizing Everything

To the Nazi Party, everything was political. The party subordinated ever sector of society and every human endeavor to its broader political and social agenda. Recent breakthroughs in physics such as the theory of relativity, achieved substantially by Jewish physicists, were labeled Jüdische Physik (“Jewish physics”), and rejected in favor of Deutsche Physik (“German physics”). Christianity was marginalized through the promotion of Nazi-aligned “Positive Christianity.”

And of course, the Nazis were very interested in the ideological state of art. Well before seizing power, the Nazis founded their own party film office and wrote about film’s propaganda value. After taking power, they founded the Reichsfilmkammer, which controlled employment in the film industry. Membership was mandatory for any who wanted to work in the movie industry, thereby ensure total ideological conformity. No doubt that aspect would resonate with Carano, who besides losing her role in The Mandalorian was also dropped by her talent agency for expressing her views.

The same phenomenon shines through in the America of 2021. Progressives might express shock at how the Nazis politicized the field of physics, and then promptly turn around and assert that mathematics is a part of “white supremacy.” Another example of this happened just days ago:

The progressive organization “Showing Up for Racial Justice,” meanwhile, teaches that “worship of the written word” and “the belief that there is such a thing as being objective” are both signs of white supremacy.

Sports, previously a unifying part of American life and a refuge from politics, was completely politicized in the past season. The NFL stenciled “End Racism” into its endzones. Players were encouraged to wear the names of alleged victims of racism on their helmets. The list of allowed names showed a clear intent to kowtow to Black Lives Matter over all other causes.

Just about every organization, group, or hobby where adherents of left-wing identity politics are present is experiencing a “reckoning” (i.e. a capitulation to political demands). Country music? Racial reckoning. Birdwatching? Racial reckoning. Dungeons and Dragons? Racial reckoning.

Should Warner Bros. make a Harry Potter TV show? A decade ago, the only relevant question was “would people watch it?” Today, long essays argue that Rowling’s entirely irrelevant views on transgenderism mean a new Potter show is categorically unacceptable.

The political colonization of all American life can be seen in surveys. A 2016 poll found that liberals were about three times as likely to unfriend or unfollow a person online because of their political views. Seventy-one percent of Democrats say they likely or absolutely would not date a Trump voter, 24 percentage points greater than the inverse.

Violence as a political tool, bolstered by the state

Even when they did not officially hold power or command an electoral majority, Nazis were able to use violence to hurt their enemies and help themselves, benefiting from friends in high places — bureaucrats, judges, and business leaders — who, critically, helped them avoid consequences for breaking the law.

The single most famous beneficiary of this was, of course, Hitler himself. In 1923, Hitler and the nascent Nazi Party took over a beer hall in Munich, hoping to launch a “March on Berlin” and seize power much in the way Benito Mussolini had taken power in Italy after a march on Rome. The putsch was a mess and soon collapsed, with 16 Nazis and four police officers dying. Hitler was put on trial for treason, and convicted. But thanks to favorable treatment from the court system, Hitler was allowed to use his three-week trial as a soapbox for his political ideology. When convicted, Hitler received a five year sentence, but he served a mere nine months. Since Hitler was an Austrian national, he should have been deported from the country as well, but the favorably-disposed court simply refused to enforce Germany’s immigration laws (imagine that!).

More broadly, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s was wracked by low-level political violence. The SA, the Nazi’s paramilitary group, is still well-known today, but what is less known is that the Communists and even the Social Democratic Party also had their own violent paramilitary wings. The groups routinely disrupted each others’ meetings and rallies, but as tensions escalated, the Nazis benefited from a judiciary that was, on balance, more favorably disposed toward them. The Communist paramilitary group, the Roter Frontkämpferbund, was banned in 1929, but the SA was never given the same treatment.

The result was a persistent pattern. Nazis could use violence as a political asset, to intimidate and threaten their opponents and demonstrate strength, without facing meaningful legal consequences.

It takes only the most basic powers of pattern recognition to see that, today, it is the left that enjoys far greater leeway for political violence. In spring 2016, attendees at a Trump rally in San Jose were assaulted by a mob of demonstrators, while police stood aside (allegedly on the mayor’s orders).

In October 2019, two members of the Proud Boys were sentenced to four years in prison each for their role in a brawl outside New York’s Metropolitan Club. The sentences were remarkable, because prosecutors could not produce any victims for the men’s actions. The black clad people they fought with, likely members of Antifa, refused to cooperate with the police at all.

While right-wing hooligans were sent to prison for an entire presidential term over an attack with no known victim, Antifa professor Eric Clanton assaulted strangers with a bike lock. His punishment? Thanks to sympathetic prosecutors, his four violent felonies were turned into a single misdemeanor and he received three years of probation.

The apotheosis of this trend came in the summer of 2020, though. Last summer, the left effectively launched and then egged on the worst riots in the U.S. in nearly 30 years. As rioters looted and burned Minneapolis, eventually causing $500 million in damage, future vice president Kamala Harris urged supporters to donate to a bail fund to get arrested rioters back on the streets.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo openly suggested there was nothing wrong with less-than-peaceful “protests,” provided of course he was sympathetic to their aims:

With hundreds of small businesses still smoldering, Wellesley professor Kellie Carter-Jackson appeared on a Slate podcast to explain that “Big structural change in America doesn’t happen without violence.”

When rioters shifted from looting small businesses to targeted attacks on American heritage, Nancy Pelosi dismissed it as nothing. For her, of course, it was all part of the usual playbook:

In Portland, Antifa rioters clashed with police and federal agents for weeks on end. When they encountered resistance, The New Republic described it as a “historic federal crackdown on dissent.”

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. The historic crackdown on dissent is coming right now, against the right.

The Capitol riot stands out precisely because it was one of the only moments in the past half-century where right-leaning protesters used the tactics that the left has embraced routinely. Now, government officials are openly boasting that this manhunt is the most aggressive in FBI history:

The flood of protesters who streamed into the Capitol that day left federal authorities with an equally immense task: finding and charging those responsible. Last month, acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin said, “The scope and scale of this investigation in these cases are really unprecedented, not only in FBI history but probably DOJ history.”

So far, federal prosecutors say they’ve charged approximately 234 people for their alleged roles in the riot and opened over 400 investigations into possible criminals. [CBS News]

According to Sherwin, “almost all” of the 234 people charged for the Capitol riots are charged with “significant federal felonies” carrying penalties of at least five years in prison.

In a remarkable coincidence, exactly 234 people were also charged for their involvement in riots during Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. In the end, exactly one was convicted on a felony charge. He served four months.

Group guilt, conspiracy theories, and blood libel

A central myth for the Nazis was the “stab in the back,” the claim that Germany’s defeat in World War I and all its subsequent problems were due to treason from within, especially by Jews.

The myth was false, but crucially, it exploited real facts to exert a hold on the public. The leaders of the 1919 Communist uprisings in Germany, like the Spartacist uprising in Berlin and the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, were substantially Jewish, which Nazis exploited to promote the idea of a “Jewist plot” to lost World War I. For the Nazis, it was never enough to oppose Communism. The party routinely blasted the concept of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” conveniently merging its most-hated ideology with a scapegoat ethnic group.

From this, it’s easy to draw a parallel to the endless witch hunt for “white supremacy” in every sector of American life. Jim Crow was real, and for a century after the Civil War racism was a very real part of American law and American society.

By now, though, “institutional racism” is little more than a conspiracy theory. Laws at all levels of government prohibit racial discrimination against blacks, often with severe penalties for doing so. Admissions at thousands of American schools expressly give favorable treatment to non-whites. Federal contracting gives favorable treatment to minority-owned firms.

Yet as set-asides and preferences pile up, the level of grievance only goes greater. Now, The New York Times promotes the 1619 Project, whose creator Nikole Hannah-Jones asserts that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” Books with titles like White Fragility, Whitelash, and White Rage shovel the blame for America’s challenges on the one racial group it has become acceptable to attack with impunity.

Over time, the ability to criticize whites as a group has transformed into more openly hateful and racist rhetoric. Last summer, The New York Times published a piece by columnist Charles Blow, which tarred white women as “instruments of terror,” collectively sharing guilt for torture and mass murder.

“There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies, and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing,” Blow wrote (emphasis ours).

Rhetoric on white Americans frequently veers into the outright dehumanizing. For instance, in late January, Middlebury College hosted a virtual event titled “Middlebury’s Opportunity to Facilitate the Demilitarization of White Bodies.” The description of the event says that “in order to make any progress toward establishing and sustaining a genuinely representative democracy in the United States, Whiteness must be demilitarized so that bodies designated as ‘White’ might become human.”

Shortly after the Capitol riot, The Washington Post published an opinion column explaining that even non-white people could be guilty of “whiteness,” because in fact being white simply means being evil:

Multiracial whiteness reflects an understanding of whiteness as a political color and not simply a racial identity — a discriminatory worldview in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others. [WaPo]

Cynical hunts for internal enemies

“Reichstag Fire” has become an idiom for a reason. Shortly after Hitler became chancellor in 1933…

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