Meet America’s Nazi Hunters
Trump’s election in 2016 had Democrats fearing the drumbeat of fascism. They found a clever way to fight back
“America has just elected a fascist. How are we supposed to deal with this monster?”
This is a tweet from someone named Ellen Kurtz shortly after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016.
But before we dive into the importance of Ellen Kurtz, let’s quickly address the idea that Trump is a fascist.
Fascists do not:
- reduce the tax and regulatory power of the state over the individual
- appoint ‘originalist’ Supreme Court justices who are strict adherents to Constitutional freedoms
- refuse to start wars
Fascists do:
- increase the power of the state via tax and regulation
- use state security services to spy on their opposition
- exploit the media to create false narratives (hello Russian collusion)
- use wars to mobilize popular support
Okay, back to Ellen Kurtz. It’s late 2016 and Kurtz is looking around at her American neighbors and thinking, oh my God, this is exactly like Nazi Germany in 1938.
She was desperate. So she decided to act.
Luckily she was in a position to do something because she was already running a voting rights group called iVote.
(Though let’s be honest, it’s not really about voting rights, because every person aged 18 and over already has the right to vote.)
So Kurtz isn’t talking about voting rights like most people talk about voting rights.
She’s actually talking about stripping away the basic safeguards for election security that are shared by every modern country in the world — like ID, signature checks and traceable ballots to verified registered voters.
And if she succeeds, US elections will end up looking nothing like elections anywhere else in the modern world.
Now Kurtz is smart. Not smart about history maybe, but she’s smart about politics so she looked around the country and asked herself, ‘what can I do to make a difference in the next election?’
And she came up with something interesting: secretaries of state.
It’s not the first thing most people would think of, but Ellen realized that in close elections in key battleground states, to win you need to control the who, how, when and where of counting votes.
And that person is the secretary of state, especially in places like Arizona and Michigan where new secretaries of state were up for election in 2018.
It wasn’t going to be easy. But Kurtz’s group iVote had connections to the billionaires, PACS and many Soros-backed entities that lubricate Democrat candidates and causes around the country.
And before long she was flush with cash.
In Arizona, iVote helped raise an unprecedented $3.2 million for Katie Hobbs, helping her overcome a 14 point deficit against her GOP rival and become the first Democrat secretary of state in Arizona since 1991.
And you can be sure that Kurtz was happy with Hobbs. Because Hobbs had described Trump’s supporters as neo-Nazis.
So like Kurtz, she was onboard with the fascism thing.
Kurtz was also interested in Michigan, where the elections for secretary of state were usually dull affairs that attracted little attention from out of state.
But not in 2018.
Kurtz’s group sent a cool $1 million to the Democrat candidate Jocelyn Benson, setting a state record for spending in a secretary of state election.
Benson won, becoming the first Democrat secretary of state in Michigan since 1995.
And you will never guess, but it turns out Benson is obsessed with Nazis too.
It was her thesis at college.
And in 2014 she was a board director at the Southern Poverty Law Center when it decided to put Ben Carson on a list of extremists alongside neo-Nazis.
(Carson is black of course, but Benson did write about Nazis in her college thesis so I guess that makes her an expert.)
And like Hobbs in Arizona, this meant Benson was also onboard with the fascism thing.
Now fast-forward to 2020 and what happened?
You already know. Chaos.
Local Democrat officials threw out the common-sense standards that had governed American elections for years, and they achieved complete chaos.
Not by accident. By design.
Because when fascism arrives in America, and you’re convinced the country is awash with neo-Nazis, there is no more room for good governance, fair votes and transparency.
It’s a war. And there are no rules in war.
