https://mronline.org/2026/02/07/american-fascism-is-both-homegrown-and-imported/
https://youtu.be/6dAvs-oDaBE?si=VM-iu57xRUCZZ5Ue
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American fascism is both homegrown and imported
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continue to wreak border violence upon U.S. cities, an amateur Historikerstreit is playing out on social media over the origins of white supremacist authoritarianism under President Donald Trump.
Hobby historians and academics turned content-creators are at odds over whether America in 2026 is more comparable to Nazi Germany or to the many instances in the U.S.’s own history of racial terrorism.
“ICE is the American Gestapo,” wrote bestselling author Stephen King tersely on X, a reference to Nazi Germany’s notorious secret police.
Savala Nolan, a racial and social justice scholar at UC Berkley Law, disagrees.
“ICE is not the gestapo; ICE is ours. It’s a manifestation of the same systems and beliefs that animated slave patrols, military conquest against the indigenous, vigilante night riders, and German Shepherds on Black ppl,” she posted on Instagram.
True, these homegrown, historical continuities are hard to miss when one looks at ICE’s and CBP’s campaign of terror against American communities of colour.
But calls to integrate the autochthonous origins of Trump’s anti-immigrant persecution in analyses of the current moment should not obscure the historical influence Nazism has had on American fascism, even if it is true that Nazism itself “was inspired by America’s institutionalized racism and indigenous holocausts,” as Haydar Ali, a Toronto-based rapper, poet and writer, reminds us.
America First
One of the most prominent examples of American fanboying of Nazism was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh who, in the words of antifascist folk singer Woody Guthrie, “flew to old Berlin, got him a big Iron Cross and he flew right back again” and “started an outfit that he called America First.”
Though it is inaccurate that Nazi-admirer “Lindy” started the non-interventionist America First Committee, which Guthrie references in his song “Lindbergh,” he did join the short-lived movement midway and became one of its most prominent spokesmen.
Trump, both by his own admission and his unilateral military actions in Latin America, West Asia and Africa, is no isolationist.
Yet his appropriation of the loaded “America First” slogan and his interpretation of it as a sort of Star-Spangled Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles foreign policy vision does lend credence to the adage that the past does not necessarily repeat itself, but it most definitely rhymes.
Then there was George Lincoln Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party (ANP) in 1959.
Dubbed the “American Fuehrer,” he is credited with popularising Holocaust denial in America and once described his reading experience of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as having “bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding.”
The ANP enjoyed widespread media publicity (in no small part due to its open embrace of Nazi uniforms and iconography), and Rockwell’s White Power politics had a lasting impact on far-right movement building in the U.S.
Cosplaying Nazism
The predatory behaviour of ICE and Border Patrol under the command of Homeland Security (DHS) and the climate of fear they create warrant both slave catcher and Gestapo comparisons.
But the reason Nazi analogies are so readily invoked is not least because of how proudly the Trump regime itself employs Third Reich imagery and language in its public communications.
A video showing the recently demoted Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino in Minneapolis sporting a Gestapo-style “Klepper Coat” that mirrored the agency’s uniform, CBP insignia and all, attracted widespread condemnation, with users accusing him of “Nazi cosplay.”
A day after ICE killed Renee Good, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who has frivolously accused both Good and Alex Pretti, the latest civilian to be shot dead in the besieged Twin Cities by Trump’s henchmen, of “domestic terrorism,” gave a press conference in which she stood behind a podium that displayed the words “One of Ours, All of Yours.”
This Nazi-era call for collective punishment is believed to be linked to the Lidice massacre of 1942, in which SS forces razed an entire Czech village in retaliation for the assassination of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Jewish holocaust.
Two days later, the Department of Labor posted an 11-second propaganda clip on X captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage, a slogan hauntingly evocative of Nazi Germany’s “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!” (“One people, one realm, one leader!”).
Pigeonholing fascism
Highlighting the parallels between Trump’s America and Hitler’s Germany should not minimise or erase the uninterrupted continuities of anti-Native and anti-Black violence perpetrated by “Johnny Law” throughout the U.S.’s blood-soaked, racist history.
But it should also not come as a surprise that white supremacists in a settler colony built on the extermination of Indigenous nations and the chattel enslavement of Black bodies would admire and emulate ideologies of racial superiority and totalitarian modes of oppression from the “old country.”
Especially not when many of these alt-rightists, including Trump, are descendants of uninvited settlers from Germany, the birthplace of Nazism, which renders the task of pigeonholing the geographical origins of white American despotism somewhat moot.
In America, fascism has always been both homegrown and imported.
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