Voices of Humanity

This is how fascism takes hold

Feb 03, 2026

Image from ABC News Minneapolis

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Watching ICE thugs rampage through American cities, terrorizing immigrants and others with brown skin, shooting white witnesses, we have to ask, why are they doing this? Why now, and what’s the point? They’re not going to get rid of immigrants. Rich people won’t let that happen; immigrants do much of the work that makes billionaires fortunes. How does turning city streets into war zones help anyone?

We know the answers to these questions; we’ve seen this movie before. ICE looks exactly like Hitler’s SA, short for Sturmabteilung, German for “storm troopers.” The Nazis set up the SA, known as “brown shirts” because they wore self-bought brown clothes, to attract poor, disaffected, violent young men to their party. They set them loose to attack Jews, Communists, and labor organizers in the streets. Their job was to intimidate Hitler’s opponents and create chaos. They were thugs.

The only difference between the SA and ICE is that ICE agents wear masks and draw federal pay checks.

This is why the battle against ICE is an existential crisis for America. The people promoting these assaults on cities are consciously seeking to repeat Hitler’s agenda in America, and we know how that story ends.

I’m not saying Trump is Hitler; he’s a con artist, a 79 year old reality TV star trying to get richer. But he listens to groups like the Heritage Foundation, who want to roll back the New Deal and the last century of American progress. He has close advisors like Stephen Miller who quite openly speaks of immigrants as subhuman, and Marco Rubio, who promotes wars of conquest in Latin America and the Middle East. They want to be the script writers for a puppet President in a reality TV show called American fascism.

President Trump already leans in that direction. If Hitler had been half the grifter Trump is, his book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) might have been called Make Germany Great Again. It’s all about how superior German culture is and how they have been brought down by Jews, communists and bankers. He said Germany had to build up its military, take possession of more land, and suppress inferior outsiders like Slavs and Jews, as well as deviant Germans like gays.

Sound familiar? Just swap in immigrants for Jews and Latinos for Slavs and you’ve got the same program. Hitler was not a grifter, though. He was a revolutionary, an ideologue who believed parliamentary democracy had to go. To thrive, Germany needed a strong leader, the opposite of majority rule. Hitler’s deep hatred for non-German immigrants reminds one of Stephen Miller’s hatred for Latinos. Marco Rubio’s obsession with overthrowing Latin American governments reminds one of Hitler’s constant invasions.

Hitler wanted to overthrow German democracy, but like all people, most Germans feared revolution, even if their government was failing them. Social upheaval is too dangerous. The Nazis founded the SA to create chaos and suppress Nazism’s enemies, so that people would turn to Hitler for order. And it worked.

What Nazis did with the SA is not an analogy for what’s happening with ICE. It’s a playbook that people like Miller are following. ICE is deliberately creating chaos and panic. We can’t know for certain, but this chaos might go all the way to civil war. Some would argue that Minnesota is already there.

Why now?

Immigration has been controversial in the US since the country began. Violent, racist anti-immigration policy didn’t start with Trump. ICE began in 2003 as part of the war on terror. But only in this Trump term has ICE become a $150 billion army rampaging through streets. Since capitalists prioritize stability and profit, and deporting workers and students destabilizes the economy and hurts profits, why is the billionaire class allowing this, in many cases promoting it?

The reason is the same process that drove German capitalists to support Hitler. As poverty and income disparity increase, people become more disaffected and desperate. The billionaires know they need more force to control us, more division to keep us fighting each other, and new wars to keep us distracted. They need to quash strikes, protests, and speech that could turn into class war. They need some form of fascism.

Classing Trump, Miller, or Rubio as fascist depends on how you define fascism. I’m using it in the broadest generic sense: a system in which working people have no rights, while government and corporate power has no limit. Government can do what they want without respecting local, national, or international law.

A fascist system always has a designated out-group for people to hate. In Germany it was Jews. In the US, it’s brown-skinned immigrants. In Israel, it’s Palestinians.

ICE and the IDF

You can’t blame Israel for Stephen Miller. Although Jewish, he does not appear to be a rabid Zionist. Long before Miller’s rise, the Israeli military (IDF) was training American police forces. My group Jewish Voice for Peace started a campaign called Deadly Exchange, which details the cooperation and training between US law enforcement and the IDF.

The exchange is deadly because US cops learn to treat our people like Israel treats Palestinians in the occupied territories. Ordinary citizens are an enemy population in need of constant surveillance and suppression. That’s not how police treat civilians if the goal is social order.

Activists in Black and Indigenous communities have long thought of police as an occupying army, but the IDF teaches them to think of themselves as occupiers, which makes them quicker to use violence against the people they police. ICE agents don’t go to Israel for training — I’m not sure they get training anywhere — but their leaders go and learn militarized policing like we are seeing in American cities. Video of IDF in Palestine looks just like ICE in Minneapolis. The relationship is close; ICE has an office in Tel Aviv, supposedly to ‘fight terrorism.’ Jimmy Dore reported that 121 IDF veterans work for ICE in Chicago alone.

Israel, ICE, and Miller employ the same language to dehumanize their opponents. Murdered Palestinians are always “terrorists,” even if they’re five years old. Contradicting widely available video evidence, ICE victims Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis were immediately called “domestic terrorists” by Stephen Miller and Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem.

Although all politicians lie, leaders’ choice of words tells you what they’re about. Colombian or Trinidadian fishermen blown up by US planes become “narco-terrorists.” President Trump calls unarmed, poverty stricken immigrants coming across our border an invading army of rapists. America’s colonizers called the Natives “savages” to justify massacring them. People who commit genocide always blame the victims. 21st Century America is going that way, and ICE is currently leading the charge.

What happens now?

Revolutionaries of the Right move fast, and liberal appeals to Congress or courts won’t stop them. ICE has defied scores of court orders already. Congress could slow them down by stopping their money, but it hasn’t happened. Democrats won’t stop ICE unless their donor class agrees.

We’re at the point in German history where the super-rich came over to Hitler, because their society was falling apart and they feared people would turn on them. The majority who despised Hitler weren’t organized enough to stop their liberal leaders’ betrayal. Are we going to see the same thing here? And what can we do about it?

Again, Trump is not a geriatric Hitler. He’s aging and showing signs of dementia, and I don’t see a replacement anywhere in MAGA’s ranks. But that doesn’t mean the policies of people like Rubio and Miller can’t go forward. It depends on what the billionaire class decides, and on how the military reacts. . The military are the only force strong enough to stop the fascist takeover, or they could join it. Generals might tell Trump and Miller to stand down, but that would be a radical thing for them to do. Whether something like that happens partly depends on our ability to organize, get the truth out, and resist.

Nobody seems sure what to do, but here are ideas that keep coming up in my feeds.

● Organize your community, your workplace or school. Have honest conversations; learn who your friends are. Invite people into your organizations. Everyone is looking for direction now, and they could join with us or with MAGA.

● Don’t be afraid to take actions like strikes or militant demonstrations. That’s how movements are built. They will involve risk, but I think it’s time for risk.

● The National Guard or the military might be coming to your town. Befriend them, talk with them about what’s happening. If there are armed people in your community, get to know them and perhaps join them.

● Don’t forget what’s happening in the world outside. Every crime the US Empire commits or supports in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, they eventually do to us here. Oppose every war.

This is the fight of our lives, and it will be long and frightening. Build your community now. Free Palestine!

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