Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt
Today, marks a momentous day in the history of the world.
Eighty-seven years ago this morning Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and set in motion a global Holocaust that would kill more than 80 million people around the globe and the annihilation of six million Jews, along with millions of other ethnic minorities declared to be untermenschen, which meant “subhuman.”
My friend Dean Blundell took this photograph yesterday as we walked with our sons —both 20-years-old—down the main thoroughfare of Dachau, past the poplars:
Walkway toward Dachau. Photo by Dean Blundell
The monuments are searing.
At one end of the camp—not far from the gas chambers and ovens—there is a Protestant church, a Catholic shrine named Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel and the Jewish Memorial, which is overwhelming.
The Jewish Memorial forces its visitors to descend a ramp that was a dominant feature of the killing facilities of Auschwitz, where no human being who walked down the ramp ever returned.
The Jewish Memorial designed by architect Hermann Zwi Guttmann. Photo by Dean Blundell
The design of the Jewish Memorial symbolizes the descent into the darkness of the Holocaust. At the lowest point, light streams in from an opening in the roof. The menorah symbolizes the survival and continuity of Jewish life past the murder of six million Jews. Photo by Dean Blundell
They were turned to ash. That is always, for me, the most important recognition when walking the grounds of such a place. Every inch of it is a cemetery. The human remains are everywhere, spread in the soil forever.
Never Again written in five different languages. Photo by Dean Blundell
Our sons were very quiet.
They asked many questions.
How could this happen?
Created by Yugoslav sculptor Nandor Glid, and inaugurated in 1968, the central monument includes a chain-link relief symbolizing prisoner solidarity. The relief displays various colored triangular identification badges that the SS forced inmates to wear, representing categories like political prisoners (red) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (purple). Photo by Dean Blundell
Dachau Memorial by Nandor Glid. Photo by Dean Blundell
I told them it was an important question, and at some level, a very simple one.
I said what caused this was hate, indifference and a terrible lie, but for them, in this moment of history, that was not the main point for them to take away from their day.
They seemed confused, but Dean and I challenged them.
“One day at a time” was the answer I was looking for.
One day at a time.
Last night, JD Vance, an American fascist, travelled to Michigan, and said the following:
I was trying to understand what would motivate a person to say these things … and I realized that there’s something about Abdul El Sayed that is very evil, and on the rise in the United States of America today. It’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a common nation, fighting for every single person, whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or Black or brown, but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others, and that is how, ladies and gentlemen, you destroy the United States of America.”
Vance asked that voters reject El-Sayed in November, and “reject the people that try to divide us one race against the other.”
A psychiatrist would call this projection because, in fact, what JD Vance is accusing his enemies of doing is precisely what he has done over and over again in the style of a good Hitler man from back in the day.
These words, spoken by Stephen Miller, a true Nazi at the fascist rally dressed up as a memorial service for the assassinated white nationalist Charlie Kirk, could have easily rolled off of Joseph Goebbels’ tongue.
This is precisely what the Nazis believed:
We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.
Erika stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up city, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves and the darkness into the light. The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.
It is what they still believe.
Dorothy Thompson, called the “First Lady of American journalism,” and who became an eyewitness to the rise of Hitlerism, wrote a column for Harper’s Magazine that sought to explain “who goes Nazi?” It endures perfectly as a primer for understanding these troubled days, and perfectly describes Stephen Miller with this paragraph:
It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
Last December at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest event, JD Vance uttered these words:
In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.
Why did he say this?
Does he believe white men around America are being forced to apologize for being white?
He knows this is nonsense, but he also understands the power of his lie, which is the same as his calumny about Haitians eating dogs in Ohio.
He is preaching the gospel of grievance to losers who are intoxicated with the idea that their failures are heroic, and their excuses virtuous. It is the same message that rose from the Munich beer halls. It is among the greatest lies ever told.
It is the gospel of the Klansmen and the creed of the Nazi.
It’s a narcotic for the weak and feeble-minded.
It proclaims one race superior to another, while simultaneously declaring the superior races are not so superior that they can escape the machinations of the inferior races, which are to blame for every misfortune that has ever befallen on the victims. They are also those who are always somehow the “master race.”
The logic of fascism makes perpetrators victims, and victims perpetrators, in an upside down world where might makes right, and the law of the jungle is the law of the land.
Again, these comments by Stephen Miller in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in January 2026. They are the words of a Nazi:
We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.
They are the words of a MAGA.
They are one and the same.
I do not know—and neither do you—what is happening in the Dilley detention center in Texas,, but I do know these are the members of the board of directors of CoreCivic, which runs Dilley, and who profit like the SS once did from the system of brutality they engineered to exploit suffering:
- Mark A. Emkes, chair of the Board
- Patrick D. Swindle, president and chief executive officer
- Stacia Hylton, board member
- Devin Murphy, board member
- Thurgood Marshall Jr., board member and chair of the risk committee
- Alexander R. Fisher, board member
- Catherine Hernandez-Blades, board member
- Dawn Smith, board member
- Stacey Tank, board member
- Nina Tran, board member
It is evil. It is wrong, and we all know it is happening.
There is no person with any common sense who could walk through Dachau without thinking deeply about what is happening in America.
How did Auschwitz happen?
First, there was Dachau.
How did Dachau happen?
First, there were the lies.
How did the lies take root?
Indifference.
Why was there indifference towards an evil that could have been stopped?
This is the question Americans had best start reckoning with.
I have said for 12 long years that fascism did not rise in the 1930s because it was strong, but rather because democracy was weak.
There was something particularly poignant for me reading the words of John Roberts’ blistering dissent over the corrupted Supreme Court allowing Donald Trump to continue destroying the White House, despite his destruction being illegal.
The person who made Trump above the law was John Roberts, who lit the Constitution and the republic on fire with his ruling that placed Trump above the rule of law.
How did Dachau happen?
Lawless men declared that they were the rule of law—and they were.
Jokes became crimes.
Dissent became treason.
Human beings became subhuman.
That’s how.
Steve Schmidt
Steve Schmidt is a political analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. He served as a political strategist for George W. Bush and the John McCain presidential campaign. Schmidt is a founder of The Lincoln Project, a group founded to campaign against former President Trump. It became the most financially successful Super-PAC in American history, raising almost $100 million to campaign against Trump's failed 2020 re-election bid. He left the group in 2021.
