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Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk at the hands of yet another young, white, male shooter whose motives are entirely* unclear at this point, Republicans were quick to point fingers at Democrats for creating a hostile atmosphere by calling Donald Trump and his supporters Nazis, fascists, and far-right. This, they proclaimed, must stop… or else.

We gotta be honest, trying to dictate to Americans what they can and can’t say, and threatening them with consequences if they don’t comply, sounds like some real fascist-level stuff.

This is especially true if the people who are supposed to be cowed into silence in this way are the ones pointing out that Trump and his supporters are trying to turn the United States into an authoritarian regime.

As for their resistance to Nazi comparisons, we get it. Nobody likes to be called a Nazi. People who aren’t Nazis (or think they are not) don’t like it because the Nazis were the worst. And people who are Nazis don’t like it because it makes it more difficult for them to do Nazi stuff because nobody likes Nazis. 

Although, to be fair, a plurality of GOP voters (41 percent) said before last year’s election that they would vote for somebody who said Adolf Hitler did some good things, which is more than the combined number of Republicans who said this would get them to vote for that candidate’s opponent (19 percent) or who would stay home and not cast a ballot in that race (17 percent). 

If you are a regular WhoWhatWhy reader, then you will know that we have written extensively about this topic (and if you are not but want to be, you can sign up to one of our newsletters here). 

Earlier this year, we argued that, while Trump’s supporters may not be Nazis (and that the president himself fortunately isn’t like Hitler at all), they would have made good ones, which applies even more to some of the white nationalists who play key roles in his administration.

But we’ll get to Stephen Miller in a moment.

The main takeaway here is that the similarities between the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany and of MAGA in today’s United States are striking.

In large part, that’s because both Trump and Hitler used the same authoritarian playbook to seize and cement power.

But there are also ways in which the parallels are simply eerie. The aftermath of Kirk’s tragic death is shaping up to be one of those.

And that brings us to a guy named Horst Wessel (and, to be clear, this is not a comparison between the two men themselves but rather their deaths and what came/comes next).

Wessel was an early supporter of the Nazis. He joined the party in 1926 and was a member of its paramilitary wing. In 1930, he was shot in the head by a Communist and died in the hospital a few days later (as opposed to this week’s assassin, the killer back then actually was a known far-left street thug).

Up to that point, this wasn’t an overly remarkable story. Political violence in the Weimar Republic was off the charts at that time and clashes between Nazis and Communists in the streets of Berlin and elsewhere were a common occurrence.

What happened next, however, was. 

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, turned Wessel into a martyr behind whom he wanted the Nazis to rally. “A nation only honors itself when it honors its dead,” Goebbels said in 1933 about Wessel. “One man rises above any movement as a symbol, and that movement then does well to keep this symbol whole and pure.” 

And Goebbels certainly did that. 

A poem that the deceased had composed became the lyrics for the official fight song of the Nazis (and later the second anthem of the Third Reich); the Berlin district in which he was killed was renamed into Horst Wessel City; monuments were erected in his honor (including in the Dachau concentration camp); and streets, schools, and squares throughout Germany were named after him.

Goebbels added that Wessel was “aware of the bitter taste of death, but he accepted it because it was necessary for Germany and because it was necessary for the German people.”

Now, nearly a century later, another authoritarian movement and a new demagogue are getting ready to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr behind whom the MAGA movement can rally, and whose death can be used to crack down on those who oppose it.

Which brings us to Stephen Miller. 

On Friday night, he went on Fox News to do just that. “I have not shared this before with anybody, but the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven, was, he said, that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” he told Sean Hannity, the face of the propaganda outlet. 

Well, that’s convenient, Stephen.

Mind you, while the MAGAverse desperately wants Kirk’s murderer to be a rabid left-winger who was radicalized when Democrats said that Trump and his supporters pose a threat to democracy, there isn’t really any evidence to support that. 

But proof is also not required. After all, their movement lives in a reality that the president and Fox News created. That is why a nebulous cabal only known as “they” are being blamed for what happened. 

You may recall that “they” were also supposedly trying to kill Trump, even though the would-be assassin from Butler, PA, was another young, white male, and there is still no evidence suggesting that he was radicalized by any left-wing group, ideology, or rhetoric.

Doesn’t matter. To every person on the right, “they” did this — and “they” must pay. 

Kirk’s widow Erika also made that clear. “The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God’s merciful love,” she said in a televised speech in which she called her husband a “martyr.”

While we will obviously cut a grieving widow a lot of slack, we cannot stress enough that there is no “they” here. “They” didn’t kill her husband; a 22-year-old man, who by all accounts acted alone, confessed to the murder.

However, with him in custody, who else could be made to pay? 

To Miller, the answer to that question is clear. “There is a domestic terrorism movement in this country,” he told Hannity. 

Who are these “terrorists”? Miller isn’t overly specific, but we can infer that it is “radical left organizations” that call him a Nazi. 

“And my message is, to all of the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate: you want us to live in fear, we will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, take away your freedom,” Miller added. 

Once again, that sounds awfully fascist. And because it does, we have a pretty good idea what’s going to come next. 

First, Republicans will lionize Kirk and castigate anybody who points out that he held some pretty reprehensible views on a wide range of issues.

You can expect the party’s performance artists to come up with all kinds of plans to memorialize Kirk. We’re already seeing this with proposals to have him lie in state or to put a statue of him in the Capitol. 

As you may recall, Goebbels calls this “honoring the dead” and finding one man “to rise above the movement as a symbol.” 

The more troubling part is what Trump, Miller, and many other rightwing influencers are calling for, which is for the government to target groups they don’t like — even though those have nothing to do with Kirk’s assassination.

But, just like Wessel’s death in 1930, for an authoritarian movement, this is an opportunity that is too good to pass up. 

Of course, if we’re wrong and this administration is nothing like the fascists of yesteryear, then Trump, Miller, the talking heads on Fox News, and all those right-wing influencers will surely apologize for their rush to judgment, acknowledge their own role in fomenting political violence with their rhetoric, and urge everybody to take a step back. 

If they want to convince us that they’re not a threat to democracy, then they can do that. 

Absent that, however, we are going to keep calling a spade a spade… and a fascist a fascist.

*Anybody who claims at this point to know his motive, whether it’s Republicans saying that he was radicalized by left-wing ideas or Democrats suggesting that he was part of a far-right faction of MAGA that felt Kirk didn’t go far enough in his views, is lying and being highly irresponsible.