The Intel deal in the news isn’t just about getting taxpayer returns. Let’s be honest, it’s about the Nazi playbook of state control over critical infrastructure and strategic industries.

Looking at this through the lens of what’s already happening:

• Control Pattern: Just as Trump is systematically undermining the autonomy of Democratic cities and centralizing control, taking a government stake in Intel represents state control over the semiconductor industry, which arguably is the most strategically critical technology sector.
• Strategic Sectors: Fascist regimes historically didn’t fully nationalize industries but rather maintained private ownership while exercising state control through stakes, regulations, and political pressure. The government gets influence without the responsibility of full ownership.
• Economic Leverage: With a 10% stake in Intel, the government gains board representation and veto power over major decisions. Combined with the administration’s new requirements for federal review of transportation projects “to ensure compliance with current Administration priorities,” this creates a pattern of using economic levers to enforce political compliance. How very Sieg Heil.
• Infrastructure Control: Semiconductors are as foundational to modern economy as transportation networks. Controlling both gives unprecedented leverage over businesses, states, and cities that depend on these systems.

The telling part is how this fits the broader authoritarian playbook: maintain private ownership to avoid appearing “socialist,” but exercise state control through strategic stakes, regulatory capture, and political pressure.

It’s not worth asking whether traditional socialism or capitalism is here, because we’re witnessing the economic structure that typically defines Nazism, meaning authoritarian consolidation.

Combined with military deployments and targeting of opposition areas based on race alone, the mechanisms are being put in place for a new Reich.

The historical parallel is about whether democratic institutions can resist systematic capture by an increasingly dictatorial movement that’s following Hitler’s well-documented playbook of dismantling democracy from within.

What’s especially concerning is how toxic moves are cynically packaged as reasonable policy responses – “taxpayer returns,” “crime fighting,” “national security” – when the actual effect is systematic institutional capture by white supremacists. This is exactly how democratic backsliding works: each individual action seems defensible in isolation, while together they form a coherent strategy of loss of power. The window for resistance is closing rapidly.

Once state control over critical infrastructure has been consolidated and military deployment to suppress Black leaders becomes normalized, the mechanisms for democratic resistance become scarce. The pattern from Nazi Germany is clear and the trajectory today is accelerating into a known disaster.