Hegseth Attacks Harvard Like a 1933 Nazi Would: How Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin Was Forced to Rename Humboldt

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Friday, in a move historians will easily recognize, that the Pentagon is severing all military training, fellowships, and certificate programs with a targeted university. His reasoning deserves to be read carefully:

…heads full of globalist and radical ideologies that do not improve our fighting ranks.

This particular brand of rhetorical fear-mongering carries a well-known slogan of Nazis.

Hegseth… holds Nazi-like views on Muslims. He makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma Gandhi. He should not be anywhere near power, even if every single one of the behavioral allegations against him was proven conclusively false. … It is fair to say that if Hegseth said any of the things about Judaism that he says about Islam, it would be transparently obvious that he held neo-Nazi beliefs that could easily justify genocide. But there is a double standard on the treatment of the two religions, so that one can get away with horrific comments about Muslims that would (rightly) be career-ruining if spoken about Jewish people. He specifically says that the very presence of Muslims in a society is harmful.

Well, here we are. Globalist means Jews. His sentence has a precise historical precedent, and it isn’t subtle.

And just to be clear, Hegseth is self-loathing in the worst possible way. While he was at Harvard he wrote papers and worked his political ties like this:

“Ensuring low-income and minority children have the same opportunities as more affluent majority students is an essential goal and worth pursuing with vigor and substantial investment,” Hegseth wrote, according to The Boston Globe. “Our country and state must strive for equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, class, geography, or gender.”

Hegseth also wrote that closing racial achievement gaps is a “laudable goal,” and advocated for cooperation with state lawmaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat who had been vocal on education, The Boston Globe reports.

Hortman and her husband were assassinated in their home three months ago. Their murders, which authorities called “politically motivated,” received little attention from the current administration.

Hegseth at Harvard wrote papers with Hortman advocating for minority opportunity. Then Hortman was assassinated by a man using a hit list of Democrats. Hegseth running militant machinery of state is targeting the institution where that collaboration happened, using language that labels the values they shared as contamination.

That’s the convert pattern known as a Nazi Heidegger move. The person inside who uses the institution’s value to destroy it anyway is more useful to Nazis than someone who never valued it at all.

Also, “received little attention” framing totally undersells what actually happened. Trump didn’t ignore the assassination of a lawmaker that Hegseth drew attention to, he reposted conspiracy theories calling it a false flag trying to implicate their political foe Governor Walz. That’s not inattention, it’s active disinformation for exploitation. The administration weaponized a political assassination into a false narrative advantage. That’s far, far worse than neglect.

That’s information warfare.

Trump Playbook

In 1933, the Nazi regime began its “anti-woke” equivalent of Gleichschaltung — the “coordination” of institutions under state ideological control. Universities were important targets. The mechanism wasn’t violent because it could be administrative: funding cuts, loyalty requirements, the dismissal of faculty deemed ideologically unreliable, and the replacement of independent education with regime-aligned formation.

The regime never framed their imposition as imposing their ideology. Like with Hegseth today, all of it was framed as removing ideology, purging “globalists” (Jewish physics) and “radical” (cosmopolitan) influence. It called Germans “un-German” in order to claim institutions suddenly had been “captured.” The regime radically shifted the political narrative in order to falsely announce itself, on the extreme right, as a neutral position. Independent thought, let alone anything except the most extreme loyalty to the dictator, was branded contamination.

Read Hegseth’s statement again. Harvard is “radical.” As if renaming the War Department is not. Officers return “globalist” as if contaminated by Jews. Hegseth treats non-white, non-Christian, members of society as the source of unapproved thoughts. The rhetorical structure is identical between Nazi Germany and Trump America.

The Loading Sequence

The Nazi coordination of universities followed a specific order:

Nazi Gleichschaltung	Trump/Hegseth vs Harvard
Ideological demands framed as correcting institutional bias	Demands framed as correcting antisemitism
Financial leverage applied to force compliance	Billions in federal funding cut
Escalating penalties for defiance	Financial penalties doubled to $1 billion for noncompliance
Severing state personnel from independent educational institutions	Military education severed
Threats extended to peer institutions	“Similar programs at other Ivy League universities will be evaluated in coming weeks”

That’s not a rough parallel. It’s the precise playbook in the same order.

The Targeting

The Nazis targeted Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, for example. It was Germany’s most prestigious institution, the intellectual crown jewel. It was attacked early and visibly. Not because it was an offender at all but because forcing capitulation would signal to every lesser institution what was expected. Berlin’s compliance meant resistance elsewhere was pointless.

Harvard serves exactly the same Nazi targeting function. Every university president in America is watching what happens to an institution that says no. The bully lesson is being taught in public: Constitutional principles mean death, obey Trump or die because if you’re dead you didn’t obey.

Germany Failed Because of This

The self-inflicted damage from Nazi purges is the most thoroughly documented case of ideological stupidity producing strategic catastrophe in modern history. Even more than Stalin. Even more than Mao. Hegseth is getting into a long line of dictator purge idiocy.

The physicists driven from German universities such as Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, James Franck, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann went directly to the Manhattan Project and built the atomic bomb for the Allies.

Ernst Boris Chain, a Jewish biochemist who fled Berlin in 1933, co-developed penicillin at Oxford. Countless German soldiers died of the infections that Allied soldiers survived because of the U.S. Army “globalist” strategy.

Germany collapsed rapidly from the world’s leading scientific nation to forever second-tier. In a single generation the Nazis wrecked the nation permanently. The countries that absorbed its expelled talent rose rapidly. America abruptly jumped to the dominant superpower for the next century, thanks to the enemies of Hegseth.

When the Nazi Education Minister asked mathematician David Hilbert whether the University of Göttingen had suffered from the departure of Jewish colleagues, Hilbert replied:

Suffered? It hasn’t suffered. It simply no longer exists.

Does American defense strategy even exist anymore? Rebranding of “war” and statements about war crimes and resource extraction being execution of Trump’s demands, suggests… nope.

“The War Department” was officially retired in 1947 when it became the Department of Defense. a deliberate signal that America’s military served a strategic purpose instead of just starting wars. Hitler was famous for reversion. The Nazi flag used colors of past empire, with a Swastika symbolizing its past racism. Reversion was the entire message.

Hegseth’s reversion is a tell. He’s not interested in the institutional framework that won World War Two and then the Cold War. He’s interested in a military that defines itself by the kind of ideological obedience that lost by 1942 and then spun up the worst of the Holocaust while losing more and more. Soldiers will be educated exclusively in institutions the executive controls to expedite losing, like the rush to kill hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps in the last days before their liberation.

Officers who went to Harvard and started “looking too much like Harvard” are officers who might think and act with intelligence. That’s the actual fear of Trump.

Return to Sender

Hegseth earned his master’s degree from Harvard. In 2022, performing for Fox News cameras, he wrote “Return to Sender” on his diploma with a marker and symbolically returned it. His office resurfaced the clip this week.

It’s a theme commonly used by Nazis. Go back. You don’t belong. Return to where you are “from”. Raus, raus!

The Nazis had a term for intellectuals who turned against the institutions that formed them and used state power to destroy them. They were considered the most valuable converts, as proof that even the enemy’s best products recognized the regime’s superiority.

Friedrich Wilhelm University was eventually renamed Humboldt University, because the institution that existed under that name had been so thoroughly compromised by Nazis that postwar Germany needed to signal a break from what it had become. More precisely, Nazis said the professors of Friedrich Wilhelm University were “geistiges Leibregiment der Hohenzollern” (intellectual bodyguard regiment of monarchs and dictators), exactly what Hegseth wants to build. This is not coincidence.

The Humboldt name was chosen specifically because Wilhelm von Humboldt stood for Freiheit der Wissenschaft (freedom of science) and the postwar consensus was that a university serving Hegseth-like concepts of an intellectual arm of state power had to be symbolically destroyed to protect democracy.

Hegseth is writing “Return to Sender” on American higher education with the full weight of the Nazi Gleichschaltung behind the marker.

The question is whether the American understands what’s being returned, and what is lost when it’s gone.

Related: Military commanders are forcing troops to watch “Melania” as a loyalty test.

The commander in question allegedly wore red MAGA hats and “made it very clear” his position regarding those who do not support the administration. He reportedly designated the documentary screening as one of three mandatory monthly unit activity events designed to strengthen military unit cohesion.

James Byron, president and CEO of the Richard Nixon Foundation, is now performing the functions of Archivist of the United States.

Let that sink in.

Byron was injected when Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s 300-day tenure as acting archivist silently expired on February 4, 2026 under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Byron’s previous organization was a disinformation spigot that spent decades attacking archives, fighting against accurate portrayal of Watergate. The Nixon Foundation used its radical activist money to prevent a Nixon Library exhibit that depicted the scandal as it happened. Byron sums up Nixon like this:

…inspirational — he never gave up… anything that increases interest in President Nixon is a good thing.

Anything?

People serving the “foundation” side of presidential libraries are not involved with archival content for a reason. That reason is NARA’s mandate to preserve and protect historical records. Byron is thus the opposite mandate, to destroy records.

He is not Senate-confirmed. He was not nominated. There is no nominee. By design. It has been a year and the enemy of American archives is in control of them.

Byron has no graduate degree, no archival training, no scholarly publications, and no experience working with primary sources in a professional capacity. His only authored work is a lightweight gift shop souvenir guide with a foreword by Nixon’s daughters and a blurb from Newt Gingrich.

His formative professional experience was in marketing and fundraising for an organization whose explicit purpose was rehabilitating a disgraced president’s reputation, a job he began at 14 and never left. His mentor, Hugh Hewitt, is a radical right-wing talk radio host.

One of Byron’s first personnel decisions was firing the respected historian whom NARA had installed as the Nixon Library’s first federal director specifically to impose professional standards on an institution that had operated as a family-controlled shrine. Byron couldn’t handle the truth and pushed out Dr. Timothy Naftali.

In October 2025, Byron unveiled a permanent National Archives exhibit called “The American Story” featuring what NARA described as AI document slop, the curatorial equivalent of letting algorithms hallucinate the historical record.

This is not a person who has been trained to evaluate evidence, assess provenance, or understand the ethical obligations of institutional stewardship. This is a marketing intern who has been trained by radical activists to shape fundraising narratives for audiences. He now shapes which national records survive.

How Trump Dictated It

In February 2025, Trump fired Archivist Colleen Shogan. Federal law required Deputy Archivist William Bosanko, a career civil servant, to assume the role. Byron, newly installed as “Senior Advisor to the Acting Archivist,” gave Bosanko a choice: resign or be fired. Bosanko resigned. The legal succession was overridden by a political appointee with no statutory authority to do it.

Trump then named Rubio, already destroying State Department and USAID, as acting archivist. The appointment was never officially announced. Rubio’s portrait appeared on NARA’s website two weeks later. Staff were not informed because they didn’t matter and many would be fired.

On February 4, 2026, Rubio’s Vacancies Act clock expired. Trump designated Byron to perform the duties of archivist. Staff were again not informed, because they matter even less and many will be fired. The portraits came down silently. A NARA spokesperson confirmed the change to Federal News Network only when asked.

The Rubio Devastation

The acting head of the National Archives, as the person responsible for enforcing federal records preservation, was simultaneously a participant in the Signal thread organized by National Security Advisor Michael Waltz to discuss Yemen airstrikes.

Waltz enabled auto-deletion of messages. The person who reasonably should know that officials were destroying federal records was one of the officials destroying federal records.

During Rubio’s tenure, House Democrats documented the “rushed disposal” of USAID records, violating law. Rubio was also acting head of USAID. He oversaw the destruction of records at one agency while he was serving as the head of the agency responsible for preventing the destruction of records.

This is the men of Nixon trying to do what Nixon wanted.

American Oversight sued Rubio and other officials for violating federal records laws through Signal use. The lawsuit is ongoing.

What Has Happened to NARA

The FY2026 budget request cuts NARA by nearly $60 million, a 10% reduction, and eliminates 136 positions. The Electronic Records Initiative, NARA’s system for managing digital federal records, takes a specific funding cut so it can’t keep records. The Office of Innovation, which ran NARA’s online catalog and digital access programs, receives zero funding. Its 50 staff are eliminated.

NARA already had approximately 150 employees pushed out since January 2025 to reduce its ability to function. Senior legal staff with records management expertise have left or retired. According to a current employee, the impact has been “horrendous,” with “bare bones” processing, reference, and records management teams.

Experienced legal staff of the Archives have left or retired, leading to little oversight of federal records management requirements.

By design. By the men of Nixon.

NARA’s budget has been essentially flat in real dollars for thirty years. At current funding, it would take over 600 years to fulfill pending declassification requests at just two of fifteen presidential libraries. A single FOIA request at the George W. Bush Library takes twelve years. The new budget cuts target the infrastructure for electronic records specifically, because it’s the format in which evidence of current government activity exists.

Trump’s Destructive Pattern

Rubio’s toxic role at NARA is not isolated, it’s one of many examples.

OMB Director Russ Vought also serves as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency the administration is trying to shut down. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is acting IRS commissioner. Frank Bisignano, head of the Social Security Administration, holds an invented “chief executive officer” role at the IRS overseeing daily operations. Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling heads the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a small agency the administration tried to eliminate before courts blocked its closure.

Federal News Network reported officials “holding several top jobs.”

This is the systematic placement of loyalists atop agencies to be neutralized or shut down, by using the Vacancies Act as the legal vehicle.

Holding multiple jobs is the Trump signal that none of them matter anymore, all of them are being devalued and collapsed.

What Next

The permanent archivist position is becoming a joke. The names floated include people who hate the archives the most. Hugh Hewitt, the radio host who told Trump on air that his “problems in Florida at Mar-a-Lago started because the Archivist complained to the DOJ” and suggested appointing someone to ensure “we don’t have to do this again” is top of the list. Also mentioned: John Solomon, a far-right reporter who advanced baseless conspiracy theories about former Presidents.

Jason Baron, former director of litigation at NARA, has stated the obvious: a confirmed archivist is imperative to ensure White House records are properly transferred into NARA custody at the end of this term, “and the sooner the better.”

There is no indication that such a nomination is possible when the men of Nixon are back in power.

Nixon’s presidency ended because he couldn’t destroy the tapes. The 18½-minute gap required physically erasing a recording in a building full of people who knew it existed. The modern version is ensuring the records never get created, never get preserved, or never get funded for retrieval. Worse, it’s ensuring propaganda replaces reality.

The man from the organization that spent fifty years trying to corrupt what just the Nixon archive said now controls all of them.

The foxes already ate the chickens and it may be too late to save the eggs.

Jason Zengerle’s new Tucker Carlson biography is titled Hated by All the Right People. The book treats a “struggle” to be hated as Carlson’s personal brand—a story of grievance and ambition. It’s actually the operating manual for authoritarian consolidation, and Zengerle apparently never recognizes he’s describing Mein Kampf for 2026.

The Numbers

Trump’s approval sits at 39-42%, net approval around -13 to -19. Among independents: 29%. Majorities disapprove of nearly every major policy.

Hitler’s numbers during consolidation were remarkably similar. July 1932—the last genuinely competitive election—the Nazi party got 37.3%. Even March 1933, with 50,000 brownshirts “monitoring” the vote, produced only 43.9%.

Neither man consolidated power with majority support. Both did it anyway. Being unpopular fueled their destruction of the state.

A contemporaneous State Department analysis noted that Hitler maintained control through “mass propaganda, backed by the energetic activity of the ‘Brown Shirts’, and with the tacit acquiescence of the Reichswehr.” Not popularity. Force plus institutional capitulation. Just like Truth Social and ICE today. Not a coincidence.

The Mein Kampf Return

Zengerle frames Carlson’s trajectory as psychology: Stewart destroyed him on Crossfire, Tucker felt betrayed, and “bitterness” explains his later radicalism.

This is biography as evasion. The pattern is structural:

Hitler: Failed putsch, then prison, then a lunatic manifesto reframing defeat as persecution, then return as more radical… takes over democracy and destroys it.

Trump: Lost 2020 and whined endlessly of a “Stolen election” mythology, then January 6th and returns more radical… takes over democracy and destroys it.

Carlson: Destroyed by Stewart and fired from CNN, he returns via Fox and then his own network, openly admiring Orbán and Putin. Now he “operates as a political actor, maybe even more than a media actor”

The pattern: Legitimate defeat doesn’t teach adjustment. It teaches that legitimate competition is rigged, which justifies abandoning it entirely.

“Hated by All the Right People” isn’t a brand. It’s the rationalization that transforms every fair loss into proof the system must be captured and destroyed, punishing everyone.

The Selection Mechanism

Being hated isn’t as much about personal grievance as it’s treated as qualification for authoritarian power. If you’re willing to do things decent people reject, you’ve proven your loyalty. The hatred is a token, a credential.

Current polling shows 57% disapprove of ICE enforcement. 51% say it makes cities less safe. The enforcement continues, stair-stepping in escalation. That’s the point.

Unpopular enforcement is the filter that builds the apparatus. Everyone who participates despite knowing better is identified for advancement. Everyone who objects is identified for removal.

If the enforcement mechanism were popular, it wouldn’t generate fear. The point of visibly unpopular violence is demonstrating that popular opinion no longer constrains state action.

The “Autocratic Backfire” Fantasy

The same weekend Zengerle’s book dropped, Ruth Ben-Ghiat published a NYT essay arguing Trump’s overreach “may backfire.” Her thesis: autocrats believe their own propaganda, make disastrous decisions, and fall.

Her examples prove the opposite.

On Mussolini and Hitler: “it took being bombed by the Allies in World War Two to start the disintegration of the personality cults.” It took being bombed by the Allies. Not unpopularity. A world war.

Mobutu ruled 32 years until foreign-backed rebellion. Amin ruled 8 years until Tanzania invaded. Erdogan—her “recent example”—is still in power after 22 years. Putin—whom she called a “classic example of autocratic backfire”—is still in power.

She opens with a Chaplin quote from April 1939 about dictators throwing themselves into holes. Six months before Hitler invaded Poland. The “hole” didn’t stop anything. It took 60 million dead.

That’s the timeline “backfire” operates on. Not midterms. Decades of consolidation ended only by catastrophic external intervention.

Waiting for backfire is waiting for someone else to stop it.

I’ll say it again, because it’s such a spectacular misfire: her examples disprove her theory.

What This Means

Hitler was very, very unpopular. It’s how he amassed power. Trump also is very, very unpopular. And it’s working for him too.

Stop waiting for approval ratings to matter to people who want to be hated. They already don’t.

The question isn’t whether Trump’s silver-spoon elitist policies are popular, because they never are. The question is whether anyone with power will stop them. Courts that defer. Legislators that comply. Media that normalizes. Each capitulation teaches the lesson the SA taught in 1933: your disapproval juices the crackdown.

The apparatus is being built by people who understand this—who learned that losing means the game is rigged, that hatred from decent people is a credential, that popular opposition is irrelevant if institutions capitulate.

Zengerle’s book describes the selection mechanism in its title and never recognizes what it’s describing. That’s the liberal problem in miniature: dutifully cataloging symptoms while unable to authoritatively stop the disease.

The unpopularity isn’t a problem for Trump, it’s proof the operation is working.

The Freedom Forum published a tepid First Amendment analysis of armed protest after Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. It’s barely competent, an example of what’s wrong.

It correctly identifies time, place, and manner restrictions, content neutrality requirements, narrow tailoring doctrine. It asks a constitutional question:

When can the government restrict someone’s right to protest because they’re lawfully armed?

It’s also useless. The question isn’t what the law says. It’s who the law protects. The answer to when has historically been that the government restrictions are based on who: race.

The Pattern

Case	Legal Status	Circumstances	NRA Response
Black Panthers (1967)	LEGAL open carry	Monitoring police, protesting at California Capitol	Helped draft the Mulford Act ban, supported passage to deny gun rights
Philando Castile (2016)	LEGAL Licensed, permit holder	Informed officer he was armed, reached for wallet, shot dead	Silence. Then blamed him, based only on a police claim they found marijuana. Refused to defend gun rights
Kyle Rittenhouse (2020)	ILLEGAL—Couldn’t legally acquire rifle	Killed 2 people at BLM protest	Awarded him $50k and AR-15 assault rifle to execute more protestors, promoting “warrior for gun rights”
Amir Locke (2022)	LEGAL Licensed, concealed carry permit	Asleep on couch, woken by no-knock raid, grabbed gun, shot dead in 3 seconds	No support, “not commenting”
Alex Pretti (2026)	LEGAL Licensed, VA nurse, no criminal record	Filming immigration enforcement, disarmed, publicly executed, shot in back while face-down	Attacked gun rights leaders

The Only Illegal One

Every person on that list except Rittenhouse was exercising legal gun rights. The Panthers were carrying legally under California law. Castile was licensed. Locke had a concealed carry permit. Pretti was a permitted VA nurse in the ICU serving the military with no record.

Rittenhouse didn’t stumble into a felony. He got his sister’s boyfriend Dominick Black to break gun laws for him. Kenosha police already knew Black from “numerous interactions” yet Wisconsin courts rapidly reduced his two felonies to a small fine under a no contest plea. Then Black was arrested multiple times again for fleeing police, and for armed robbery—with a rifle. Gun crime pays, if you are a young white boy named Black in Wisconsin.

Rittenhouse couldn’t legally acquire the rifle. He did anyway and then crossed state lines for the sole purpose of pointing a hunting rifle at innocent people. He panicked, while hunting humans, and killed two. ICE agents with handguns panicked and executed two.

It was this that the NRA looked at and decided to flagrantly mock the courts and their felony charges by dispensing huge gifts to Rittenhouse: $50,000 and a trophy AR-15.

The only person using a gun to deny other Americans their constitutional rights, is the one the NRA gives rewards. The only person breaking gun laws is the one that the NRA has openly and repeatedly celebrated.

Armed Protesters in State Capitols

I’ve read so many articles about American gun-toting protesters entering state capitol buildings, that I’ve lost track of the number:

• Protesters storm Michigan capitol
• Protesters, some armed, enter Michigan capitol building
• Fully armed rally-goers enter Kentucky capitol building with zero resistance
• Gunmen swarm Kentucky capitol—umbrellas and sticks are banned but not guns

However, only very rarely have I seen anyone reference that the NRA’s firm position on this issue was to ban guns. Guess why.

The Mulford Act

In 1967, the Black Panther Party was legally monitoring police in Oakland—armed patrols using California’s open carry laws to document police brutality. On May 2, several armed Panthers entered the California State Capitol to protest a proposed gun control bill. Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford drafted the Mulford Act to ban public carry of loaded firearms. The NRA helped write it and supported its passage:

The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions.

Reagan’s Lies

Not so long ago we had a President named Ronald Reagan who was known for being a horribly racist exaggerator. Here’s the Snopes perspective on his justification for banning guns:

“The Black Panthers had invaded the legislative chambers in the Capitol with loaded shotguns and held these gentlemen under the muzzles of those guns for a couple of hours. Immediately after they left, Don Mulford introduced a bill to make it unlawful to bring a loaded gun into the Capitol Building. That’s the bill I signed. It was hardly restrictive gun control.”

This wasn’t true.

The Panthers were disarmed by capitol police soon after entering the building and, according to contemporaneous accounts including the Associated Press, were escorted out 30 minutes later. No one was held at gunpoint for hours.

Reagan’s crooked mythology required to justify the gun ban had to be inflated because the reality—Black men legally carrying, reading a statement, leaving peacefully—wasn’t scary enough to strip their rights. They needed the story to be an armed invasion.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the NRA we know today remains very much the same organization with these same values that it suddenly became in the 1970s.

Building the Base

The pattern the NRA follows extends beyond selective defense. It actively recruits children into the political identity. Business Insider reported on essay contests for kindergarteners asking how the constitutional right to bear arms affects them personally.

Leaving aside the oddness of asking the youngest of grade schoolers how the constitutional right to bear arms affects them personally, the contest raises alarms for gun-control advocates. Gun violence was the No. 1 cause of death for US children in 2021… “They’re selling a lie, and it’s a very dangerous lie,” Brown [the president of the gun-safety group Brady] added. “They are selling it to your kids, and they don’t care if it’s killing them.”

Imagine tobacco companies sponsoring contests for children to write about cancer-causing smoking as a Constitutional freedom:

By the time they are capable of making a mature judgment, their health may be harmed irrevocably and their decisional capacity impaired by the product’s addictive qualities.

That analysis misstates it. By the time they are capable of making a mature judgment, these targeted kids—and those around them—are already dead.

I say this as someone who grew up in the heart of rural American gun culture. By 12 years old I had been shot and wounded, requiring hospitalization.

The number of children and teens killed by gunfire in the United States increased 50% between 2019 and 2021…

As a historian familiar with Nazi Germany, I have to point out their children were motivated towards mass violence by rapid dissemination of highly targeted authoritarian disinformation. The NRA runs the exact same playbook (not by coincidence)—capture children ideologically before they can evaluate the claims, normalize the violence that identity produces. An inverse effect also helps illuminate the cruelty. British soldiers in WWII reported a strategy of offering God and Chocolate to melt a Nazi child’s cold coal heart full of false fears and nightmares.

The 180-Degree Flip

The NRA has an origin story that is the exact opposite of its current incarnation.

In 1871, Union generals under President Grant founded the NRA to train Black freemen—emancipated slaves—to defend themselves against white supremacist militias like the KKK. The organization was “a roster of Union commanders” who had just defeated the Confederacy. Training emancipated Americans with marksmanship was seen as logical: help citizens protect the federal government from regression and rebellion.

Then came 1977.

The NRA developed a splinter extreme right-wing Institute for Legislative Action lobby group that suddenly seized complete control of the organization in what’s called the “Cincinnati Revolt.” The timing matters: the United Nations Security Council Resolution 418 of 1977 had unanimously adopted a mandatory global arms embargo against apartheid South Africa.

Post-1977, the NRA represented primarily the interests of gun manufacturers—and arguably became a channel for running guns to white nationalist regimes despite international embargo.

Founded to arm American Blacks against white supremacist gang violence. Pivoted to pass a ban on gun rights for American Blacks. Captured entirely after international embargo of South Africa, in order to arm whites-only-rule. Now celebrates an illegal gun used to kill innocent people at a racial justice protest. Silent when police murder Black men with legal permits. Silent when ICE publicly executes Americans. Not drift. Inversion.

The Legal Architecture

The NRA isn’t the only institution built for one purpose and captured for the opposite.

Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to prosecute the Klan. The Supreme Court gutted them within a decade. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) established that the Fourteenth Amendment only restricts state action—the federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence.

Southern states declined to prosecute Klan. The Klan’s members often were state actors—sheriffs, deputies, judges—who refused to prosecute themselves. The doctrine gave them an obvious loophole: put on a hood, become a “private” actor. The same men who wore a badge by day wore a sheet by night.

It’s why ICE wears masks today.

Now watch what happens when you reverse the polarity:

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.

Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241—the fragment of Grant’s law that survived—activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.

The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence. Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.

Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror. Decades of saying gun registration would be the end of freedom, then forcing registration. Decades of open carry as a sacred right, then wearing a holstered gun in public becomes a crime punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.

What “Shall Not Be Infringed” Actually Means

The NRA is no longer a gun rights organization. They’re a white nationalist political organization that uses gun rights selectively. The Second Amendment applies to people they consider legitimate political actors, and doesn’t apply to people they don’t, based on race.

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus—not the NRA—defended Castile, Locke, and Pretti. Principled gun rights advocacy is possible. The NRA chooses not to practice it.

They promote illegal gun use for political purposes and work to ban guns when the wrong people carry them legally. That’s the NRA today, opposite of why it was created.