BUREAUCRATIC DEMONS: Lessons from the Third Reich
In the United States, we are not just voting for a president, we are voting against the banality of evil, as we learn in this brief lesson from the Third Reich and how it applies to Project 2025
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I spent the weekend investigating Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the final solution. After being forced to resign from the German Navy in 1931 for conduct unbecoming an officer, he joined the National Socialist Party and began seeking his revenge. Heydrich, whose wife was an ardent Nazi, was chief of the Reich Security Main Office — the SS and police agency credited with implementing the Nazi plan to murder Jewish people of Europe during World War II. He was put in charge of counterintelligence, where he drew up lists of dissidents, anti-Nazi journalists, politicians, and scholars, and ordered their arrests.
He was ambushed at the age of 38 by members of the Czech resistance, and died from his wounds on June 4, 1942.
Hitler nicknamed him “the man with the iron heart,” and according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, Heydrich presented plans, authorized by Adolf Hitler himself, to coordinate a European-wide “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”
The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) organized the killing of Heydrich in Prague, where he was serving as the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
In a top-secret operation code-named “Operation Anthropoid,” the SOE trained a group of Czech resistance members to assassinate him. Heydrich’s death after the assassination attempt led to reprisals against the Czech population, including the destruction of the town of Lidice and village of Ležáky.
During his career, Heydrich performed as a bureaucratic demon. When he was appointed chief of the political department of the Munich police force, he brought political police forces throughout Germany under Heinrich Himmler’s control. Heydrich rose throughout the Nazi ranks, willing to plant false information in order to bring down political enemies.
As head of the Gestapo, Heydrich imprisoned those he believed to be a threat to the Nazi party. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, Heydrich ordered the arrest of thousands of Jewish people by the Gestapo and the SS and their imprisonment in concentration camps. In 1939 Heydrich became head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Central Office”), which was in charge of all security and secret police in the Third Reich.
According to Britannica, “Heydrich masterminded the fake ‘Polish’ attack on the Gleiwitz radio transmitter that provided Hitler with a pretext for invading Poland on September 1, 1939. Soon afterward Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann began organizing the first deportations of Jews from Germany and Austria to ghettos in occupied Poland. Heydrich also organized the Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”), mobile killing squads that murdered almost one million Soviet and Polish Jews in German-occupied territories. To increase German control of the ghettos, he ordered the establishment of Judenräte (‘Jewish Councils’) to implement German directives in the Jewish ghettos of German-occupied Poland.”
I began probing Heydrich, because as I read Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands one paragraph at a time, I stop and investigate the people who populate that book — I see parallels between those who committed evil in history and those who are committing evil today.
When I wrote my in-depth report last year of Project 2025 — A MAGA Hat and A Gun — it was all about the banality of evil.
Step by step, bureaucratic demons created a recipe to destroy democracy, just as Heydrich created the steps to destroy millions of lives.
In that report I wrote:
On 25 March 2023, on the 30th anniversary of the Waco Siege, Donald Trump held his first campaign rally for the 2024 election.
The 1993 siege in Waco, Texas, occurred when federal agents raided a compound where a cult called the Branch Davidians had been compiling explosives and where children were routinely sexually abused. A 51-day siege at the Branch Davidians compound ended with a fiery inferno that killed 82 cult members and four ATF agents.
The siege inspired the modern militia movement, and Trump — being an experienced propagandist — walked onto the stage to the singing of the J6 Choir — prisoners arrested for their assault on the Capitol — while violent footage of that day played on a video screen.
An ABC reporter said he was so shocked, he called former Trump advisor Steve Bannon for comment and Bannon said, “We are the Trump Davidians.”
In other words, when people tell you who they really are, believe them.
“Since the Fascist years, authoritarians have used propaganda and their personality cults to change the perception of violence among their followers,” said scholar of Italian fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. “Trump’s brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence. Trump's 2024 campaign is making that call to violence far more explicit.”
From the moment Trump came down the escalator, the brand was violent — he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue”, he said. In recent days, his words are more openly fascist — Trump said America’s outgoing top General Mark Milley “deserves execution”; he used the Nazi propaganda word “vermin” to reference his political opponents; and he declared on national television that he would be a dictator on “day one”. All this after leading a violent coup three years ago that many people seem to have forgotten about but for which he still has not been held to account. Despite 91 indictments, Trump remains free to parasitize his plans for 2025.
And it is prophesied in full color in Project 2025, a scorched earth hit-list of democratic institutions. Project 25 is a blueprint for Trump’s plans to finish the job he started when he began the attack on the US government from within.
Virgin’s Richard Branson once referred to Trump as the “revenge president”. Project 2025 is a revenge fantasy and the victim is democracy.
It reads like a Soviet-era how-to manual on the total annihilation of the US government and any critics of the regime.
Conceived by dark money think tanks led by the extremist think tank, the Heritage Foundation, the plan is nearly 1,000 pages and proposes a ‘unitary executive theory’ — neutering Congressional oversight and granting the executive branch almighty power.
Among the plan’s targets and objectives:
Dismantling the DOJ, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and eliminating the Departments of Education and Commerce,
Giving the president complete authority over the Federal Communications Commission — the agency that governs radio, television, satellite, and cable in all 50 states, DC, and US territories (countries that do this are dictatorships)
Install “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices, while eliminating dissident bureaucrats
About 50,000 federal workers would be fired
Social media surveillance for hires
Eliminate three US Department of Energy offices
Shrink and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Outlaw “pornography”
Register teachers and librarians as sex offenders if they provide any sex education or non-approved material to children
Exclude critical race theory from all public schools
Exclude “gender ideology” from all public schools
Rule any affirmation of a trans child’s gender to be child abuse
Remove trans people from military
Destroy public sector unions
Demand loyalty to president by “flooding the zone with conservative hires”, according to Project 2025 director Paul Dans
And on and on it goes, a wishlist for the destruction of all things that make America, America. We were the country that fought for freedom from kings, we fought to end slavery, we fought the Nazis in World War II.
Silicon Valley technologist and co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast Joshua C. Fidel told Byline Supplement: “Project 2025 is nothing less than Trump’s Mein Kampf Volume 2. In it, he details his plan for the destruction of America. This is not rhetoric, this is not hyperbole. It is Trump’s step-by-step instruction manual for the murder of our country, its form of government, and its history. Understand this: Evil men will tell you what horrors they have planned, straight to your face, and normal people will disbelieve it, because they can’t fathom the audacity of monsters. It’s time America woke up to the threat on their doorstep.”
Atlantic reporter Tom Nichols wrote that if Trump emerges as president in 2024, “he will attempt to turn the men and women of the United States armed forces into praetorians loyal not to the Constitution, but only to him. This project will likely be among his administration’s highest priorities.”
He said he “learned from the last time around, Trump’s efforts to pack the Defense Department with cranks and flunkies came too late to bring the military under his full political control. The President and his advisers were slow-footed and disorganized, and lacked familiarity with Washington politics.”
Investigative reporter John Mattes, who broke the Iran-Contra scandal as a young public defender in Miami, said the reason our democracy held on January 6 is because of the civil servants who took an oath to uphold the Constitution.
“When Reagan ran illegal operations, at least he hid them in the White House basement,” said Mattes, who is the subject of the new podcast Lawyers, Guns, and Money. “Trump wants to do the same, but will run them from the Oval office in plain sight.”
Despite the fear and loathing Trump is striking in the hearts of his critics and all who cherish democracy in America, Ukraine-based reporter Paul Niland encourages people to ask who is benefiting the most from Trump’s destructive plans.
“The fact that he is openly talking about taking revenge on his perceived enemies is in itself shocking… but quite apart from his domestic policy (if we can call it that) is the fact that Putin is rooting for his return to the White House, thinking that will help him to get away with what he has done to and in Ukraine. If Putin wants Trump for America, and Putin wants the destruction of America, the math isn't hard to do.”
Academic Brent Allpress, an open source intelligence researcher whose work on the impact of data mining of military personnel and churchgoers was featured in the documentary film People You May Know, and who gave testimony to the January 6 Committee, conducted an analysis of the leadership connections between Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation and the Council for National Policy (CNP). The CNP is a shadowy conservative organisation with multiple links to the Trump administration, fossil fuel interests, and anti-rights movements.
“Project 2025 is a CNP project,” Allpress told Byline Supplement. “A campaign is initiated at secret CNP meetings and one of the affiliated organisations is nominated to be the vehicle for the operation.”
Allpress said the CNP used the same tactics for the state level decertification operation in 2020, which was initiated at a CNP Action Inc session led by CNP Action Directors Ginni Thomas through Frontliners for Liberty, and Adam Brandon through his organisation Freedomworks. Executive members of the CNP signed a Conservative Action Project memo in December 2020 calling for states to appoint a fraudulent slate of electors.
“I uncovered an ominous CNP Action Meeting Session from November 2020 titled: Restoring Law & Order and Uniting the Country,” said Allpress, who is pushing to have the CNP forensically investigated for its role in J6. “We know from Washington Post reporting that Project 2025 includes a plan to invoke the Insurrection Act and effectively declare Martial Law. This is a seditious conspiracy to better plan and execute another coup attempt after decertification and the January 6 insurrection failed. Why? To put in place an authoritarian regime that will protect the long term interests of the extractive industries, obstruct climate action and maintain the oil, gas and coal carbon economy by force.”
Canadian academic and geopolitical analyst Dr Michael MacKay told Byline Supplement:
“Trump and the MAGA cult intend to end democracy and the American Republic as decisively as Hitler and the Brownshirts finished off democracy and the Weimar Republic.
“Backed by Russian active measures, Trump and his followers attempted a ‘burning of the Reichstag’ moment when they attacked the Capitol in the January 6 2021 insurrection. They were not as successful as Hitler and his followers were on 27 February 1933. But because the seditionists were never punished, anti-democracy and anti-rule-of-law forces have a strong chance of seizing power in the United States again. If that happens, it will be the end of the American Dream. The Spirit of '76 will be extinguished.”
In my recent Leonard Leo report, I show what happens when bureaucratic demons are allowed to do their evil unchecked in a free society.
In that report, I quote veteran reporter Tom Carter, who spent more than a decade trying to get the New York Times and other prominent outlets to warn about Leo’s influence on our highest court.
Q & A
HSC: As you have observed Leo’s machinations over the years, why did you become so alarmed that you wrote:
“Coming up on November 2024 and a possible Leonard Leo Christofascist takeover of the United States, as detailed in his 900-page Project 2025, it looks like 1930s Germany to me”.
TC: What it boils down to is the old story of the frog in the frying pan. When it's 65 degrees, it doesn't do anything — when you turn it up one degree at a time until eventually it is boiled, that's what's happening. That's what happened in Germany. A democracy elected Hitler. I mean, it was not like he came in and stormed the Capitol or something.Leonard Leo got six Supreme Court judges installed. If you want to create a fascist society, you get the judges.
HSC: You pointed out the classic fascist blunder is those who help elect the leaders to do their bidding think they can control them.
TC: A lot of people who thought Hitler was a bad guy, they thought they could handle him. They turned out to be seriously, seriously wrong.
HSC: You wrote about one reporter in particular, who demurred coverage of Leo due to a family tie to the family, which prompted you to write an eviscerating analogy about cocktail parties in Nazi Germany. According to one April 4 correspondence with the reporter, rather than apologize you wrote:
“You… betrayed journalism, your readers and this country. This is sad for me. I don’t feel righteous…
“You… were covering for Nazis. Nice Nazis, but Nazis, nevertheless. I get it. You couldn’t betray your friendships. God bless. I stand by choices and my moral obligations. All anyone had to do was write a story. Instead, in six months, we might all be wishing we had some powerful Nazi friends.”
That’s pretty much a mic drop.
TC: It always goes back to this Nazi analogy. The US Army did polling in post-war occupied Germany from 1945 to 1950. And they found that about 35% — it varies a bit here and there, depending on the question being asked — but they found that after Germany had been bombed to oblivion, after the Nuremberg trials, when everything was exposed, 35%, approximately, of the German population still thought Hitler had done a good job, and the Jews got what they deserved.
HSC: That is chilling, but it would explain a lot of what we are documenting. Based on your studies of how Leo has remapped America in an ultra-conservative image, what do you think is going to happen in November?
TC: I’m gonna be a glass half empty guy, here. We either vote or look for a house in Portugal.
We either vote, or look for a house in Portugal.
Sadly, I am speaking with more and more allies, who are talking about where we will go if in November, Americans choose fascism — if they choose to vote for bureaucratic demons obscured by the clown driving the car.
As I write this, I am one of 122,000 concerned citizens listening to Women for Harris National Organizing Call.
As Shannon Watts just said of women:
“When we show up, we get shit done.”
I am showing up, as I know many of you are, and will spend the next 99 days working toward a more perfect union.
But it’s important that we see what we are up against, which is the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt once wrote and as embodied in the recent film Zone of Interest. This evil is obscured by bread and circus, shock events, a game show host who wants to be a dictator, promising no more free and fair elections and proudly bragging about enshrining the taking away of women’s health care rights.
To achieve these goals, he needs Heydrichs and he has them. You’ll find them in my Monster series, and in my 2016 Election Attack series.
Sometimes the most vile of all are the ones we can’t see, their rise to prominence mundane.
Heydrich’s rise was mundane, and yet he embodied an unspeakable evil.
I write a lot about empathy and kindness on these pages.
In order to ensure a bright and equitable future for all, we have to do everything we can to defeat evil.
I like living in the United States of America.
Let’s keep our democracy.
Let’s cherish that which is sacred.
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I've never been to Butler County, Pennsylvania, but I've been to where JFK was killed in Dallas by a former sharpshooting Marine who, in 1959, had been sent by a KGB "mole" to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned-to-fail mole hunt for said mole (check out my Substack articles on the general subject "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI") and to where "pure Aryan" Reinhard Heydrich was fatally wounded on a Prague hairpin turn by Czech and Slovak Resistance fighters in late May, 1942.