Malum en Se

Though I believe Donald Trump is the strongest argument yet for repealing Godwin’s Law, I’m not going to make a direct comparison between Trump and Adolf Hitler.

What I will ask is simpler, and much harder to dodge: setting Trumpism aside entirely, are you for or against the actual policies of Nazi Germany?

Once you strip away the uniforms, symbols, and historical branding, what remains is a regime built on horrors no sane person should support.

Dictatorship over democracy
The Nazis destroyed free elections, crushed political opposition, and turned the state into a one-party authoritarian machine.

Censorship and suppression of dissent
They silenced critics, controlled the press, criminalized opposition, and made independent thought dangerous.

State propaganda
They flooded public life with lies, mythmaking, fearmongering, and leader worship to manipulate the population.

Racism as public policy
They built government around the idea that some races were inherently superior and others inherently lesser.

Antisemitism as a governing principle
Hatred of Jews was not incidental. It was central to Nazi ideology and policy from the beginning.

Persecution of minorities
Jews, Roma, disabled people, gay people, political dissidents, and others were targeted, stripped of rights, imprisoned, and killed.

Destruction of civil rights
Privacy, due process, free speech, free association, and equal protection under law were gutted.

Rule by fear and political violence
Paramilitary intimidation, arbitrary arrests, concentration camps, and terror were tools of governance.

Eugenics and forced dehumanization
The regime embraced the idea that the state should decide who was fit to live, reproduce, or even exist.

Militarism and aggressive conquest
They glorified war, invaded other countries, and treated human life as fuel for nationalist ambition.

Genocide
This is where the road led, by design, not by accident: industrialized mass murder.

So yes, the real question is pretty simple: if someone cannot plainly say they are against those policies, what exactly are they trying so hard not to admit?

And yes, if you’re a mindless Republican troll, you’ll probably give a thumbs-up to every item on that list without even pausing to think. But I want you to reach back to a time before the indoctrination, before this became your whole personality.

Think back to grade school, sitting in a classroom while your teacher showed a film about Nazi Germany. Did the child you once were watch a dictatorship crush democracy, weaponize propaganda, persecute minorities, strip people of rights, and march toward genocide, and think, “The Nazis are getting a bad rap. They were only trying to make society better”?

And if your teacher was bold enough to let the film keep rolling, past the part where Jews, human beings, were marched into furnaces and incinerated, did you cheer? Did you giggle?

If you did, there would have been no debate and no commentary. You would have been sent straight to the vice principal’s office for the rest of the period, and a note about your antisocial behavior would have gone home to your parents.

Of course you didn’t. Because even as a child, you understood that this was evil. Not complicated. Not misunderstood. Evil.

So what changed? Did history change? Or did you sink so deep into partisan tribalism that you can no longer recognize horror unless it arrives wearing your team’s colors?

Why did the child you once were know it was evil to hurt innocent people, but the adult you has learned to look away when the victim is Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and U.S. citizen shot by an ICE agent?

Why did the child you once were know, without coaching, that killing an innocent person was evil, while the adult you has learned to muffle conscience beneath rhetoric, tribalism, and after-the-fact rationalization? Because that is what this is: a strained attempt to excuse the shooting of Alex Pretti, a U.S. citizen and ICU nurse, despite video evidence showing him with a phone in his hand, trying to help a woman whom agents had shoved into the street and pinned to the ground, then shot only after another agent had already pulled a handgun from his waistband. Then, when footage emerged of Pretti kicking an ICE vehicle’s taillight 11 days earlier, you treated that unrelated prior clash as though it conferred moral permission in retrospect, as though yesterday’s anger could become today’s warrant for death.

Why did the child you once were know, instinctively, that using fear against children was monstrous, while the adult you has learned to absorb it as policy? How else do you explain your willingness to watch a five-year-old like Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a blue bunny hat, become the face of an enforcement operation, allegedly used as bait to lure adults from his home, then marched into detention and repurposed as a symbol in somebody else’s political pageant?

Why did the you who sat in that classroom understand that authoritarianism always starts by teaching the public not to care who gets humiliated, seized, or killed, so long as the cruelty is aimed downward?

Why did the younger you know that propaganda was dangerous, but the older you will repeat whatever story justifies the outcome, even after video contradicts it?

Why did the earlier you understand that rights either belong to everyone or they mean nothing, but now you act as if due process, safety, and dignity can be withheld from whoever the state has signaled out for removal, by any means necessary?

In the end, this is not really a question about Nazi Germany. It is a question about whether you still possess the most basic moral instinct you had as a child: that abusing the powerless is wrong, that terrorizing families is wrong, that killing innocent people is wrong, and that no flag, slogan, or party label can make it right. The child you used to be knew that. It is the adult you who is in danger of forgetting it.