Alan Zendell, October 3, 2025

In Nazi Germany, the Gestapo, (the State Secret Police,) was a force that varied in size over time, but averaged about 16,000 officers to police a population of roughly 66 million people. But it relied heavily on a system of snitches. Private citizens were encouraged, rewarded, and often coerced into spying and reporting on their neighbors and co-workers.

The Malicious Practices Act of 1933 made it illegal to criticize either the German government or any of its leaders, Adolf Hitler in particular. The law effectively made opposition political parties illegal and by 1934 both opposition parties and the free press no longer existed. After the Reichstag, the German Parliament building, burned to the ground, the Reichstag Fire Decree authorized the arrest and detention of all political opponents without specifying charges and with no guarantee of due process. The decree silenced all public opposition to Hitler and the Nazis.

I am amazed, daily, that the vast majority of Americans cannot see that the Trump administration is grooming ICE, the Government’s Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement agency, to evolve into a Gestapo-like secret police force that serves at the beck and call of Donald Trump. If this were Germany in 1934 I would likely be arrested and spend the rest of my life in a concentration camp just for writing this.

In 2025 America I would likely lose my livelihood and my ability to support my family. If I happened to look Hispanic, under recent guidance from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, there’s a fair possibility that I could be swept up in an ICE raid, regardless of having been an American citizen all my life. As we have all witnessed since Trump’s inauguration, they could label me a drug dealer, a sex trafficker, or a cartel murderer and ship me off to El Salvador, and unless I had a powerful legal network and skilled media influencers behind me, my family might never see me again.

To be honest, if I were still employed by the government or any contracting entity dependent on government funding, and I was still raising children, I might be one of those who caved and stopped writing. Would you? But at my age, the only one I’m placing at risk is myself, and indirectly, my wife. In other words, I would have no excuse besides laziness and cowardice if I quit calling attention to and fighting against the loss of our republic to autocracy. As Trump’s crimes against our republic grow in number and seriousness with no organized, effective opposition and a Supreme Court that as yet has shown no inclination to rein him in, where would we be if everyone like me simply gave up?

There are dozens of examples of how Russell Vought and Project 2025 are pulling out all the stops in Vought’s admitted intention to destroy our federal  government, but let’s get back to ICE. There are currently about 20,000 ICE officers on the job, but with Trump’s Big Ugly Bill authorizing $10 billion to hire and train more agents, that number could approach 100,000 without serious opposition. 16,000 Gestapo officers terrorized and controlled a population of 66 million in Germany. Nearly 100,000 ICE officers to police 350 million American just happens to be about the same ratio of secret police goons to population that controlled Germany until 1945.

But the Gestapo had help from all those snitches, from people who genuinely believed they were reporting national security threats, to those who simply wanted to screw someone they wanted to hurt, like a violent spouse or an employer they disliked. As Sinclair Lewis reminded us in 1935, if you think that can’t happen here, you’d better wake up and smell the roses, that is, unless Trump declares roses verboten.

As part of Trump’s extortion plots against American universities, the coerced agreements encourage exactly the same kind of snitching the Gestapo used. Similarly, whistleblowers who report that their employers or co-workers are insufficiently loyal to King Donald. If you were a military officer who was uncomfortable with Trump’s disregard of laws that lay out how our military can be used, would you have the courage to speak out, today?

Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth harangued our senior military officers in Quantico this week, saying clearly, if you can’t support the president’s agenda you should do the honorable thing and resign. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen actually supported that notion, but he was wrong. If you’re a four-star general, you have an equal responsibility to refuse illegal orders. If you spent your entire career defending America and leading thousands of others who put their lives on the line to defend it, isn’t your primary responsibility to the Constitution and our Republic?

In the Spring it was university presidents and law firms. In the Summer it was our free press and media being threatened, and now, it’s our military leaders. Why can Americans not see clearly where this is headed? This is how great nations fail – through indolence, cowardice, and indifference.