February 27, 1933.  Monday.  It is exactly four weeks since the leader of Germany’s majority political party in the Reichstag (parliament), a man by the name of Adolf Hitler, was sworn in as Chancellor (prime minister) of Germany.  It is important to remember Hitler was elected.  In the beginning.  And it’s not like his campaign was “hey Germany… want a genocidal dictator who will plunge the country into a deadly and costly war with, well everybody in the civilized world, curtail you and your fellow citizens’ civil liberties, and generally make a mess of things?”  No, he was an ardent flag-loving nationalist who believed strongly in the greatness of Germany and the German people.  And he was a vegetarian.  And he had only one testicle.  And a funny moustache.

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I, the German Empire collapsed, leading to the establishment of a new constitutional democracy for its governance, known as the Weimar Republic.  While it fostered cultural innovation and granted new civil liberties, the Weimar constitution’s provision for direct presidential rule and emergency powers was exploited, undermining democratic institutions.  Extremist groups, on the Right and the Left, were unhappy with the loss of empire and with it a loss of national pride; they wanted to make Germany great again.  Hitler’s Nazi party promised to do just that.

On that Monday in February 92 years ago, Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch council communist (“council communists” do not believe in state socialism but rather “Councilism” or councils of workers who pursue their aims democratically) set the building that housed the democratically elected German parliament – the Reichstag – on fire.  Hitler and the Nazi party he led used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists were plotting against the German government; they successfully pressured Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties and pursue a “ruthless confrontation” with the communists.

Under the authority of the Fire Decree, the police – now controlled by Hitler’s Nazi Party – made mass arrests of communists, including all of the democratically elected communist Reichstag members.  With their main opposition literally out of the way, the Nazis swept the subsequent election on March 5th, expanding their control of the Reichstag and leading directly to their seizure of total power.  A dictator is born:  Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler.

This post is not a history lesson, it is a wake-up call, because in America, right now, as I type this, we are having our very own Reichstag Fire moment.  One of my favorite teachers, Mr. Reilly, had that Santayana poster that all history teachers have in their classrooms…

Our modern day Marinus van der Lubbe is a 22 year-old young man named Tyler Robinson, who committed an absolutely horrible, inexcusable act of politically motivated violence when he shot and killed conservative activist and unrepentant bigot Charlie Kirk, a close friend and ally of Donald Trump.  Before – that’s “before,” as in “prior to” – the shooter’s identity or motives were known, Trump immediately blamed “those on the radical left” in an Oval Office address to the nation, accusing them of rhetoric “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

When asked by Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends how our divided nation could come together after Kirk’s assassination, pointing out as she did, to her credit, that there were radicals operating on the Left and Right, Trump said he “couldn’t care less,” and went on to say:  “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy.”

I remember that game!  We used to play it when I was 8… if someone calls you a name or accuses you of something, hit ‘em back with “I know you are but what am I?”  But seriously, setting aside the fact that our president has the depth of thought, lack of insight, and rhetorical skills of a prepubescent child, his answer is absolutely terrifying because this is how polarization hardens into tribalism.  And tribalism – us vs. them – is the virus that has infected our country, fomenting the hatred that is propelling us toward a point of no return.

Now, at this point I should, as a well-trained former Catholic, beat my chest and recite “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” and fall diligently on my sword in a paean to “both-sides-ism” which holds that you can’t criticize the Right without criticizing the Left.  Bullshit!  In reality, more than three-quarters of all extremist-related killings in the US over the last 10 years have come from extremists on the Right, while the radical Left is responsible for only a fraction of them.

The Justice Department’s own study stated that Right-wing violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.  This study, published in 2024 and conducted by the National Institute of Justice, has very recently been deleted from the DOJ website; it is entitled “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism” and begins: “Militant, nationalistic, violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

The New Republic, in a piece entitled “DOJ Quietly Deletes Study on Politics of Domestic Terrorists,” concludes:  “It’s highly likely that the DOJ took this study down because it doesn’t fit with the narrative the GOP is trying so desperately to push about the left being to blame for the bulk of political violence in this country, willfully ignoring countless examples of that not being the case at all,” and offers this proof from the now-scrubbed study:

Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives … In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.

“DOJ Quietly Deletes Study on Politics of Domestic Terrorists,” Malcolm Ferguson at The New Republic

Um, admittedly, math is not my strong suit, but I do know 227 is a hell of a lot more than 42.

Returning to history, Hitler made the blanket accusation that it was the communists as a whole who were responsible for the Reichstag fire and used that as his excuse to eliminate them, his adversaries, from Germany and tighten his grip on power.  With the Reichstag Fire Decree he was able to do away with the freedoms of the Weimar constitution – expression, press, association, assembly.

As he inspected the burnt building, Hitler remarked, “Anyone who stands in our way will be cut down.”  Thousands of communists were jailed, including all 81 communist members of parliament.  Why do I mention this?  In the US today, Charlie Kirk’s death has galvanized Trump’s MAGA movement.  The white supremacist Matt Forney, in a post that has been viewed over one million times, compared Kirk’s death to the Reichstag fire; and then, taking a cue from Hitler himself, added:   “It is time for a complete crackdown on the left … Every Democratic politician must be arrested and the party banned under RICO … they caused this.”

Chilling.

But we are past the point of just dismissing Forney as a bigot and a crackpot as we have already seen the repression of “unwilling” academics, lawyers, journalists, civil servants, military officers, and judges, and reactions on social media have led to a wave of firings, talk show cancellations, and even the US state department warning foreign nationals not to praise or make light of Kirk’s assassination, instructing consulates to take “appropriate action” against any foreigners who do. So-called “hostile” (towards the Right) shows like The View and Left-leaning organizations like The Ford Foundation, a major private organization focused on reducing poverty and injustice, promoting democratic values, and advancing human achievement, are said to be in the administration’s crosshairs at present.

I’ll say it again… chilling.

Liberal democracy and the marketplace of ideas, some of which we might disagree with, it is based on are far from perfect, but they have been the source of peace, prosperity, and progress in the postwar (post-Nazi) era.  They are the very opposite of authoritarianism. 

But is it?  Remember Santayana.