In May 2025, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz—the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee—stood before graduates at the University of Minnesota Law School and declared that “Donald Trump's modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets.” He described ICE agents in “unmarked vans, wearing masks,” shipping people “off to foreign torture dungeons,” [1].
Comparing ICE to the Gestapo is ahistorical and reckless—not because ICE or their tactics are beyond criticism, but because the comparison itself prevents any serious conversation about immigration enforcement or reform. It trivializes industrialized genocide for political points. When we use history as a hammer instead of a lens, we guarantee the very repetition we invoke history to prevent.
“Never again” is a commonly invoked, well-meaning phrase. Yet it is too often accompanied by permission structures—moral frameworks that authorize extreme action—for the very behaviors those who invoke it claim to oppose.
What we get instead is rhetorical inflation—where every policy disagreement becomes genocide, every law enforcement action becomes the Gestapo, and every opponent becomes a Nazi. This creates moral license for escalation: if they’re committing genocide, any response is justified. Meanwhile, actual problems—the ones that require nuanced policy debate—go unnoticed and unaddressed.
The ICE-Gestapo comparison is part of a broader pattern. Republicans are routinely labeled "Nazis” or “fascists,” Trump supporters characterized as brownshirts, and bipartisan cooperation is reframed as collaboration with evil, with the enemy. This rhetoric routinely appears across progressive politics, including from prominent elected officials like former Vice President Kamala Harris [2] and former President Joe Biden [3].
This kind of language creates permission structures that frame extreme responses as not just acceptable but morally imperative. When opponents aren't merely wrong but are fascists, normal democratic engagement and civil conversation becomes impossible.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University—just up the street from BYU—occurred within this climate of escalating rhetoric. The shooter, Tyler Robinson, engraved politically charged messages on his bullets, including "Hey fascist, CATCH" [4].
While we cannot draw direct lines from any specific politician's rhetoric to Robinson's actions, the tragedy illustrates the dangerous environment rhetorical inflation creates. When political discourse frames opponents as existential threats to democracy [5], it shapes a moral landscape where violence becomes more conceivable to those already inclined toward it.
This pattern isn't one-directional—President Trump routinely engages in escalatory rhetoric of his own. In his 2026 State of the Union address, President Trump called Democrats “crazy” and said they were “destroying our country,” [6]. Previously, President Trump has characterized Democrats as “communists” and “Marxists” and labeled both political opponents as “the enemy within” and the press as “the enemy of the people” [7, 8, 9]. In a social media post on Truth Social, President Trump went as far as saying Democrats were “traitors” engaging in "seditious behavior” that is “punishable by death,” even reposting comments that he should “hang them,” [10] though he later walked back parts of the rhetoric and clarified that he was not calling for their execution.
Each side points to the other's extremism as proof their warnings are justified. When progressives call Republicans Nazis, it validates conservative claims about left-wing hysteria. When Trump calls Democrats communists, it justifies progressive fears of authoritarian rhetoric. The comparisons don't describe threats—they manufacture them, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This dynamic pressures even moderate politicians into performative extremism. To maintain credibility within their coalition, they must adopt—or at least refuse to challenge—the inflated rhetoric, even when they recognize it as absurd. Compromise becomes betrayal. Nuance becomes weakness. The rhetorical inflation doesn't necessarily reflect genuine extremism so much as create the conditions where moderates must perform extremism to survive politically.
Those who refuse to play along pay a price. Former Senator Joe Manchin, who ultimately chose not to seek reelection after years of backlash from his own party, observed: “There used to be an old saying, “Guilt by association.” If someone was a bad actor and you were working with them, [people thought] you must support that. Now it’s guilt by conversation. You can’t even be seen having a conversation with someone who might not be on the same side. That is so ridiculous to me. The Democrats chastised me for working across the aisle,” [11].
As Joe Manchin exemplified, we should all be brave enough to have these difficult conversations, even if we face chastisement and ostracization. Contrary to what some might claim, words are not violence. Violence is violence. Communication and civil dialogue are the only remedy to extremism, polarization, and rhetorical inflation.
What history has really taught us is the danger of propagandistic certainty. History is messy and complicated and so are our modern-day challenges. Mapping historical events/characters onto current political events/politicians with complete certainty leads to incorrect conclusions, bad policy, performative and reflexively reactive political theater, and, in the extreme, political violence.
Let’s reject the temptation to incorrectly wield history as a rhetorical hammer to clobber our political opponents. Let's hold off on the rhetorical inflation. Let’s leave behind the performative political extremism that we are plagued by. Let’s actually learn from our history and from our predecessors’ mistakes. Let’s welcome in a new era of political discourse that is reflective instead of reflexive.