An American Gestapo Is on the Streets and, Worldwide, Jews and Universities Should Be Alarmed.
When common sensibilities are gone, chaos and fear fills the gap. So it was in 1930s Germany, and so it is in our 2025 Trump version of fascist America.
Fascism is defined as “extreme right-wing, authoritarian, intolerant, racist or nationalistic views or behavior,” and I’m fed up with being told we ‘dare not’ conflate what is going on under Trump-Musk government with the rise of Adolf Hitler.
By whose definitions ‘dare we not’?
· Under the current administration, a tsunami of firings flooded the the bureaucracies that turn the wheels of government,
· agencies created by Congress are illegally attacked and dismantled by unelected civilians,
· university students holding opinions opposed to the government are kidnapped off the streets by unidentified thugs, jailed without charge, and threatened with deportation,
· our elected president threatens the military takeover of sovereign nations,
· under the guise of “Restoring Truth in American History,” the present government has taken over such institutions as the Smithsonian Institution and Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
· has used blanket-tariffs, or the threat of tariffs, to coerce economic advantage, thus beginning an international trade war, and possible world economic crash.
· Trump unilaterally threatened to leave NATO, the World Trade Organization (WTO), NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), and other alliances, and
· supports the Israeli genocide in Gaza, as well as illegal Russian claims on Ukraine.
As for that last item, President Trump is currently hosting Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister (and a fugitive from the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide) in the Oval Office. It is Netanyahu’s expressed purpose to discuss relief from tariffs.
A week ago, on March 31st, the Guardian UK reported that Israel killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers one by one, according to the UN. Workers on a mission to help colleagues were shot, execution-style, and buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza, says the UN Humanitarian Office.
‘Never Again,’ Israel’s motto, apparently means never again only for Israelis. The Holocaust was a genocide, but Jews can’t skate by for decades on that excuse, once they choose to commit their own, and world opinion counts the Gaza massacre as just that.
Is it mere coincidence that this week the Oval Office officiates a meeting between two international leaders, one a fascist and the other a perpetrator of genocide? Worldwide Jewry should pay attention, lest they grind their moral high-ground in the blood of Gaza. Reputations, once lost, are sometimes impossible to redeem.
On the matter of kidnapped university students,
As Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk made her way to an interfaith center to break the Ramadan fast Tuesday, plainclothes officers, some masked and in hoodies, like street thugs descended on her, security video shows. Within about a minute, they whisked her away in handcuffs.
Ozturk, a 30-year-old from Turkey, is a Fulbright scholar working on a PhD in child study and human development on an F-1 student visa, clearly a threat to society at large and, ohmigod, a Muslim as well. Better hustle her off, screaming and handcuffed, into an unmarked van. the Turkish government has condemned her arrest, viewing it as unjust and politically motivated.
Today, a week after the thuggery, she remains detained and uncharged at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Basile, Louisiana. Following her arrest, she was transported through multiple states before being detained in Louisiana. Unlike the Gestapo, ICE doesn’t beat down your door in the middle of the night, they kidnap you in broad daylight off the street in black hoodies, like the thugs they are.
Thousands Protest the ICE Abduction of Tufts Student, as Trump attacks at universities intensify. "She was abducted by armed agents of the state because she dared take a stand against genocide," said one supporter of Rumeysa Ozturk. As organizers noted that 370 people have been arrested in the Boston area by ICE in the last week—with officials calling some "collateral" in Trump's mass deportation campaign—demonstrators chanted,
"Free Rumeysa, free them all!" and, "Come for one, face us all!"
Rumeysa is not the only victim, as universities crack down on campus protest. Harvard’s answer to Trump’s threat to withhold government funding is to quail in fear, place the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee on probation and ban the organization from hosting public events until July.
Fight fiercely, Harvard!
If it weren’t for a nearby security camera, we wouldn’t even know that.
500,000 citizens across the nation gathered in Hands Off Rallies on Saturday to protest the Trump administration’s attacks on civil rights, free speech and the slash-and-burn tactics of Elon Musk.
Personally, I’m through with avoiding the comparison of this administration with 1938 Weimar Germany, and our president with Adolph Hitler.
The resemblances are too stunningly comparative.
If history is to be ignored and rewritten by those who would be advantaged, it is the patriotic duty of every citizen to stand up and be counted. As an American writer living abroad, for the first time in my very long life I am concerned about my safety in revisiting my country. My writing has a small audience, but key-words are easy tracers to authors, as Rumeysa Ozturk’s experience proves.
These are dangerous times. No less authority than Voltaire, in the age of Louis XIV, wrote “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
And it may well be dangerous.
But, in the long run, it was dangerous to be silent in 1938 Germany.
And I, along with millions of my fellow Americans, refuse to remain silent.