📘Where the Hell Am I? Pre-Nazi Germany, 1933?

ICYMI

By Kimberly Twain

In case you missed it the first time (or were doomscrolling too fast to notice), this essay asks a simple question:

If it walks like fascism, talks like fascism, and deploys the National Guard like fascism... where the hell am I?

If you're new to Twain’s Gazette, this is a good place to start.

"To everything (turn, turn, turn), there is a season (turn, turn, turn), and a time to every purpose under heaven."
—Pete Seeger, "Turn! Turn! Turn!" (adapted from Ecclesiastes 3:1–8)

I was at a bar talking politics with my friend Michael — something you're not supposed to do, but I never follow that rule. Politics belongs exactly where people are most honest: halfway through a second shot of Jack.

Kimberly: I’m getting paranoid. Everything’s going off the rails. People are mean. We need to do something.
Michael: What can we do?
Kimberly: Hit them where it hurts — the wallet. Like when people stopped buying Elon Musk’s crap and he pulled out of DOGE. That was effective.
Michael: You disagree with what he’s doing?
Kimberly: Not the ideas, necessarily. Some are sound. It’s the execution. It’s brutal. You can’t fire a whole factory workforce and call it progress.

Michael works at C&H Sugar. Imagine someone walking in and saying, “You’re fired. You’ve got 90 days’ severance. Your job is inefficient.” That’s what this era feels like — cold decisions masquerading as innovation.

Sure, there’s wasteful government spending. Conservatives love to yell about $2 million going to sex-change operations in Guatemala. Maybe true, maybe not. Sources vary. But when people scream about waste, they're usually pointing at "the other" — immigrants, trans people, anyone not in power. Not the bombs. Not the subsidies for billionaires.

It reminds me of how it started in Nazi Germany.

🧱 1933 → 2025: A Pattern Emerges

1933: Hitler becomes Chancellor —> 2025: Trump becomes President

1933: Hitler commissions the SS —> Trump allies promote military purges, privatization, “reforms”

1933: Laws to enable Kristallnacht —> Propaganda attacks DEI, immigration, civil liberties

1933: Jews labeled “other” —> DEI = code for Black, queer, immigrant, liberal

The SS didn’t start by dragging people to camps. First, they normalized cruelty. Same with Kristallnacht — German civilians were encouraged to loot, destroy, and attack. So were the rioters who burned Black Wall Street in Tulsa. The fire department did nothing. The police stood down.

You think it can’t happen again?

The military is already under review for “wokeness.” The Pentagon’s DOGE team (yes, that’s real) is scrutinizing every cent of DEI funding:

• $1.9M for diversity training

• $6M to "bridge divides" in democracy

• $1.6M to study climate vulnerability in Africa

To critics, this is waste. To the rest of us, it’s survival.

“It starts with the military. When the military is against us, we’re fucked.”

🕯️ Echoes of History

People ask: How could the Germans let it happen? They saw the trains. They smelled the burning. They watched the neighbors disappear. And they said nothing.

In the U.S., we had our own Kristallnacht: Tulsa, 1921. Our own Nuremberg Laws: Jim Crow. We taught the Nazis how to do it.

White guilt never atoned — it evolved. Into cancel culture. Into DEI. And now it’s under attack.

You don’t need a swastika to have fascism. You need silence. You need bureaucracy. You need fear.

🧠 Sidebar: Hitler Was Confused

Let’s be real. Hitler called his people the “Aryan race,” when actual Aryans were Indo-Iranian — brown, not blond. Hitler wasn’t even blond. Some believe he was part Jewish. He might’ve created Nazism the way L. Ron Hubbard created Scientology: in a haze of resentment and ego.

The SS wore skulls on their hats. They were goth before goth. They also believed Asian people were “honorary Aryans.” Like I said — confused.

🪞 We Know Better. So Now What?

This is the time to stop it. Speak. Disrupt. Vote. Organize. Call it out.

If you want a blueprint, read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. In Chapter 8, she describes how the ashes from Sachsenhausen’s crematorium drifted onto townspeople’s gardens, pools, and laundry. They knew. Everyone knew. And they did nothing.

“It had grown too big for one person to stop... and now it was raining down onto their gingerbread cottages and their lives of pristine conformity.”
— Isabel Wilkerson, Caste

Delusion is powerful. So is silence.

One minute, you're spinning purity myths—Make America Great Again.
The next, you're deploying troops on civilians.
Oh wait. We’re already there.