ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- As a storyteller, I remember to begin with a tale.

In August 2005, I spoke to a group of retirees in their 70s and 80s. Those were whippersnappers compared to Julie, a 100-year-old woman who approached me.

Julie wanted me to know that everything happening now -- armed masked men disregarding due process, entering homes without judicial warrants, snatching up people, etc. -- has occurred before.

It happened in Germany, she said. From 1933 to 1939, the Germans needed someone to blame for their troubles. They settled on history's original scapegoats: the Jews. Look it up, Julie said.

I did. But, before sharing my findings, I need to referee a rhetorical shoving match between two Jewish officials in Pennsylvania.

Last month, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner -- a former criminal defense and civil rights lawyer whose father was Jewish -- described U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as "a small bunch of wannabe Nazis." The Democrat said the agents were relying on a "fascist playbook." Saying no one was above the law, he vowed to prosecute federal agents who harm U.S. citizens or break state laws in his city.

"If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities, we will find you, we will achieve justice and we will do so under the Constitution and the laws of the United States," Krasner said.

Where has the Democratic Party been hiding this guy? We need more people like him. What we have plenty of are cautious and cowardly officials who don't want to offend anyone because it could prevent them from moving up.

Which brings us to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is also Jewish. He recently appeared on Fox News to call the comparison to Nazis "abhorrent" and "wrong."

Shapiro is likely running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. So his moral compass might need an adjustment.

Krasner -- who claims that white supremacists are sending hate mail, threatening to put him in a "gas chamber" -- doubled down.

"Gov. Shapiro is not meeting the moment," Krasner told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "The moment requires that we call a subgroup of people within federal law enforcement -- who are killing innocent people, physically assaulting innocent people, threatening and punishing the use of video -- what they are."

Referencing Shapiro, Krasner added, "Just say it. Don't be a wimp."

Shapiro is wrong, and Krasner is right. Given what we see with our own eyes, the word "Nazis" is close enough for government work.

What Julie was talking about was the Nuremberg Laws. Enacted in 1935, the anti-Semitic statutes intended to marginalize Jews

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor made it illegal for Jews and Germans to get married or engage in extramarital intercourse and unlawful for young German females to be employed in Jewish households.

The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only individuals with German blood were citizens. Everyone else was a "subject" of the state with no citizenship rights. A later decree spelled out that Jews were not citizens but "enemies of the race-based state."

Anyone could see where this path would lead -- except perhaps for that deaf-dumb-and-blind portion of the German population that didn't know because it didn't want to know.

Most Americans don't know the history of their own country -- let alone another one. So when they hear words like "Nazis," they dismiss them as hyperbole.

Scott Galloway is pushing back. The podcaster, NYU professor and best-selling author -- whose mother was Jewish -- is determined to force Americans to acknowledge the ugliness they refuse to see.

"We have sites where we're shipping sometimes U.S. citizens or people suspected of being illegal immigrants to places outside of our country, such that they no longer are subject to the same protections as citizens," Galloway recently told Sirius/XM radio host Michael Smerconish.

"The technical term for that is concentration camps," he said. "You know, Hitler didn't start with Dachau or Birkenau. He started with laws. He started with ignoring the rule of law and co-equal branches of government. So while I think it'd be unfair to call ICE agents Nazis, I don't think it's unfair to use history as a reference to convince people it could happen here."

Fair enough. Galloway is right that the Nazis' reign of terror didn't start with gas chambers, mass graves and concentration camps. It began with years of "otherizing" Jews so as to pave the way to those things.

As for the road we're on now, where does that lead? The answer is obvious: Nowhere good.

========

To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate, Inc.