Just a few months ago this average Arkansas guy was praising Hitler, and Trump, as if they were all in the same camp.

…December 2024… he stated that he would “take a bullet for” the president, adding that Trump, 79, doesn’t “make many mistakes and when he does he’ll figure it out and he’ll fix it and I trust him.”

[…]

Outside of fighting, Mitchell is also known for being a proud farmer in Arkansas and for his comments describing Adolf Hitler as a “good guy.”

“I really do think before Hitler got on meth, he was a guy I’d go fishing with,” Mitchell said on the ArkanSanity Podcast in January. “He [Hitler] fought for his country,” he added.

A good guy? What exactly was “good” about Hitler “kicking out the greedy Jews” before 1938 as opposed to after? This framing isn’t just ahistorical ignorance; it’s revealing what is actually admired. It’s apparently normal in Arkansas to say out loud “love that guy Hitler, hate that Jews and gays survived and he didn’t”.

The “Hitler was fine until drugs” narrative is historically nonsensical and morally bankrupt. Hitler’s antisemitism, violent authoritarianism, and territorial ambitions were fully formed in the early 1920s. The Beer Hall Putsch was 1923. Mein Kampf, praising the racism of Henry Ford, was published in 1925. The methodical legal destruction of Weimar democracy was in 1933-1934, the Nuremberg Laws were 1935 and Kristallnacht was 1938… all before documented substance abuse started.

The false “drug cause” narrative serves a specific purpose: it lets “drug war” adherents admire Hitler’s core antisemitic project—the persecution and expulsion of Jews—while falsely externalizing industrial genocide as a drug-induced deviation. This totally fake compartmentalization allows praise for exactly what Hitler set out to do from the beginning, yet blame to be pushed onto substances as “unfortunate excess” in achieving goals.

The Arkansas context matters because it’s not idiosyncratic. This is a regional political culture with deep roots in Lost Cause mythology, where you can venerate Confederate leaders, celebrate “heritage,” and react with fury when called racist.

The same mental infrastructure applies to Hitler: admire the aesthetics of power, the mythology of national revival, the “fighting for his people” narrative, while externalizing the genocide as either propaganda, an unfortunate excess, or a drug-induced deviation from his “true” character. Hitler was an Austrian who took over Germany and murdered millions of his own people. He fought for himself at everyone else’s expense.

We’ve just established this average Arkansas guy praises Hitler and claims that drugs excuse genocide. Now watch what actually breaks his Trump support… Epstein files. Seriously.

“The first thing for me was he didn’t release the Epstein files—they’re even acting like they didn’t exist,” the 31-year-old said [he’s] “not with Donald Trump no more.”

“I don’t support him, I don’t like him, I think he’s a corrupted leader, and it took me a while to come to that conclusion, but I finally am coming to it.”

Still likes Hitler. Suddenly hates Trump. What’s revealing here is the transactional, personality-driven nature of American politics. Hollywood good/bad framing, as documented by “The Act of Killing“, is a dangerous god/devil binary of disinformation that short-circuits actual understanding.

There’s no engagement with ideology, policy, or governance. Hitler becomes “a guy I’d go fishing with” based on totally fraudulent vibes (people who grow up in Arkansas will praise Hitler, make anti-Semitic statements and even decorate their homes with swastikas, yet say they are deeply offended if you dare to accuse them of being Nazis).

There’s a specific strain of white identity politics of America where overtly praising Hitler can coexist with angry offense at being called a Nazi, because in that framing, “Nazi” means a BAD person to them, and they separate that from being a “patriot” who believes in Hitler’s ideology (racist genocide).

They’ve carved out rhetorical space where you can admire Hitler’s “nationalism,” his “fighting for his country,” his “strength,” and even his diet and his preference for roads with no curves, while treating the Holocaust as either exaggerated, incidental, or the result of him “going bad” on drugs.

It’s a Holocaust inversion common in Arkansas mixed with American exceptionalism: we could have that kind of genocidal obsessed strong leader without those genocidal consequences.

Trump thus gets all their support until one specific grievance—the Epstein files—becomes the sudden breaking point. Not family separation, not January 6th, not fraud convictions, not bankruptcy, not the documented pattern of sexual misconduct, not illegal detention, not racism, not ignorance, not authoritarian rhetoric about terminating the Constitution. But this one thing.

This pattern—where support for authoritarian figures is based on parasocial identification rather than principled analysis—makes democratic accountability almost impossible.

Treating politics like drinking buddy tests means vetting based on whether they’ve “gone bad” on a random moral issue, not engaging with what makes authoritarianism dangerous: the systematic concentration of power, the elimination of institutional constraints, and the targeting of vulnerable populations.

The Epstein angle is particularly telling. It suggests he believed Trump would release the files, that this was somehow a litmus test for anti-establishment credibility. But why would someone with Trump’s documented history in those circles, with his public statements about Epstein and young women, with his own allegations—why would that person be the one to expose it? The cognitive dissonance required is extraordinary. Trump lies about everything, hurts everyone, but this… this?

This is the danger of the “good guy gone bad” narrative. It prevents people from recognizing authoritarian projects even as they’re the ones building it.

The hollowness at the core of personality-cult politics is terrifying.

There’s no there, there.

No analysis of how power works, how wealth concentrates, how institutions get captured, how rights get stripped away systematically.

It’s all just vibes, grievances, and the perpetual search for a strong father figure who’ll hurt the “right” people.

This makes the personality cult people complicit in building what they claim to oppose. They’re not recognizing the authoritarian project because they’re helping construct it, while falsely painting themselves as the rebels.

What makes the “Hitler fought for his country” line so historically illiterate is that Hitler was Austrian, took over Germany through a combination of violence and institutional capture, and then destroyed Germany. He didn’t fight for Germany—he fought for a racist imperial vanity project that considered actual Germans expendable. Millions of Germans died because of his decisions. The country was partitioned for half a century. If “fighting for your country” means leaving it occupied, divided, and devastated, then the definition is meaningless.

The Arkansas Lost Cause infrastructure makes the stupidity possible because it’s already normalized this exact cognitive move: venerate leaders who destroyed their own society (the Confederacy lasted four years and left the South devastated), claim they were fighting for “their people” (they were fighting to preserve slavery), externalize the atrocities (slavery wasn’t that bad, or it would have ended anyway, or the North was worse), and react with rage when called out for supporting a violent racist genocidal platform.

It’s the same playbook: Arkansans romanticize the aesthetics, deny the ideology, and externalize all the consequences of their hate-based fantasy.

German public news (DW) recently profiled the expansive Nazi enclaves in Arkansas adorned with swastikas—a regional infrastructure normalizing extreme hate so much that praising Hitler in public offices and on podcasts becomes unremarkable rather than career-ending.