Ordinarily, I abhor political comparisons to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. No matter the similarities with other authority figures, however authoritarian or totalitarian, Hitler represents a particular sequence of events in world history, and this particularity is glossed over in such comparisons. The comparison of public figures to Hitler is often based on intellectually lazy equivalences of evil. Such comparisons often focus on the authoritarian tendencies in all governments in a way that avoids nuance, rigor, and specificity, and additionally haphazardly flatten differences in regime types. This simplistic comparison is especially troubling now, when it has proliferated to the point were not only politicians of all stripes are subject to it, but even professional athletes, actors, and others in celebrity culture are called fascist whenever they do or say something divisive. The critique of fascism loses much of its weight when it is ascribed to anyone and anything that we don't like.
I too am guilty of these comparisons, as a young radical critiquing the George W. Bush presidency, for the far-right, nationalistic militarism seemed to fit in nicely with a wider critique of fascism. As I studied, learned, and grew intellectually, however, I came to see these easy comparisons as dishonest and stifling to the formations of deep understanding of particular regimes and how their power might be resisted. Yet, despite my aversion to what I (and others) refer to jokingly as
reductio ad Hitlerium,
we seem to have arrived at a Weimer moment in United States' American politics. We are quite evidently
witnessing a figure running for the highest elected office in the U.S. who is by every measure modeling himself, his movement, and his rise to power on the populist far-right rhetoric of European fascism in the mid-20th century. This person is, of course, Donald J. Trump.
Comment: There are many states in the US that snatches young Native Americans from their homes and places them in foster care for bogus reasons. Bottom line it's big money for the state.
* Each year, South Dakota removes an average of 700 Native American children from their homes. Indian children are less than 15 percent of state's the child population, but make up more than half the children in foster care.
* Despite the Indian Child Welfare Act, which says Native American children must be placed with their family members, relatives, their tribes or other Native Americans, native children are more than twice as likely to be sent to foster care as children of other races, even in similar circumstances.
* Nearly 90 percent of Native American children sent to foster care in South Dakota are placed in non-native homes or group care.
* Less than 12 percent of Native American children in South Dakota foster care had been physically or sexually abused in their homes, below the national average. The state says parents have "neglected" their children, a subjective term. But tribe leaders tell NPR what social workers call neglect is often poverty; and sometimes native tradition.
* A close review of South Dakota's budget shows that they receive almost $100 million a year to subsidize it's foster care program.