Is This America’s Reichstag Fire Moment?

How Authoritarians Use False Emergencies (Like Walls) to Seize Absolute Power

It’s the longest government shutdown in US history. Federal workers are rationing their insulin. Worse, there’s no sign the government will reopen. All because a rogue authoritarian President is holding a nation hostage over a Great Wall, having conjured up a completely imaginary border crisis, by demonizing little children seeking refuge as supernatural monsters with the mighty powers to…wreck the world’s most powerful country.

Dear reader, any reasonable person could, without hyperbole, say, wow, that looks suspiciously like the beginnings of fascism. All of which raises the question. Is this America’s Reichstag Fire moment?

In case you don’t know the story, it goes something like this. in 1933, just a month after Hitler was sworn into power — after everyone who’d warned he’d do terrible things was ignored, ridiculed, or erased — the Reichstag — Germany’s then Congress — mysteriously burned down. As soon as the fire was called into the police, Hitler had an emergency decree passed, which suspended civil liberties, can curtailed freedom of the press, assembly, privacy, and suspended habeas corpus. Bang! Hitler’s hold on power was now consolidated. The fire is now generally accepted to have been…