I wish folks would stop comparing America to Nazi Germany. That's a lazy-ass, evasive argument.

When folks make this argument, what they are doing is framing evil as something that's foreign, exceptional, and imported rather than something indigenous, cultivated, home grown, and structurally American. And so, Nazism becomes the ultimate benchmark of horror, and everything else is measured against it.

So by this logic, unless the U.S. is building gas chambers and death camps with the same iconography, its violence is somehow lesser, different, or not yet “that bad.” This allows Americans to remain in a perpetual state of “not quite Nazi."

It also erases the fact that many of the ideas the Nazis implemented were learned from, inspired by, or legitimized through American practices. Because the ideological and material roots of what the Nazis built were already visible in the United States.

When Germany constructed its racial state, its camps, its laws of blood and purity, its systems of mass detention and legal disappearance, it was not inventing these logics from scratch. American eugenics laws, Jim Crow segregation, lynching culture, forced sterilization, Indigenous removal, and racialized citizenship regimes were openly studied, cited, and admired by Nazi legal theorists and racial scientists. The U.S. was the world’s most successful large-scale experiment in racial hierarchy enforced by law and violence. Germany learned from it.

When folks say “this is becoming Nazi Germany,” they invert the historical flow of influence and turn the U.S. into a potential victim of fascism rather than one of its early laboratories. That narrative recenters white innocence and treats authoritarianism as an infection from Europe instead of a homegrown product of settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism.

So if ordinary Germans in the 1930s and 40s had looked honestly at what was happening around them with the gas chambers, killing fields, racial laws, child separations, and human beings reduced to property and numbers, they could have easily pointed across the Atlantic and yelled: Americans! KKK! White supremacy! This is the same architecture of domination, just industrialized and accelerated.

The Klan had already perfected mass spectacle terror. The U.S. had already normalized racial cleansing, biological determinism, legal non-personhood, and the idea that entire populations could be managed, removed, sterilized, imprisoned, or killed for the health of the nation. Germany did not leap into barbarism. It systematized a colonial and racial logic that had been running for centuries, with America as one of its most advanced models.

That’s why the Nazi comparison is so damn backwards. It casts the U.S. as a potential future version of Germany, when historically Germany was, in part, a student of America’s racial order. The lineage runs from European colonialism to American slavery and Indigenous genocide to Nazi racial law and not the other way around.

The Nazi comparison also allows people, especially white liberals, to experience moral outrage without confronting their own inheritance. Nazis are safely monstrous. They are “other.” They let Americans locate evil in goose-stepping uniforms and foreign accents instead of in sheriffs, school boards, immigration courts, zoning laws, policing, family separation, child cages, surveillance, and bureaucratic cruelty with polite paperwork and legal language.

ICE agents are not Nazis. They do not need to be. They are operating within a long, continuous American tradition of slave patrols, Indian removal, convict leasing, segregation, COINTELPRO, and mass incarceration. Call them what they are, which are products of an unbroken system of racial control.

What we are witnessing is not the collapse of American democracy into something alien and evil, it is the tightening of all the evil-ass fucked up logics that have always been here. Right here!