PA State Rep. Compares Governor Wolf to the Nazis During Committee Hearing on COVID-Related Restritions
Pennsylvania State Rep. Cris Dush (R) compared Governor Tom Wolf’s (D) administration to the Nazis during a House State Government Committee hearing. Objecting to the Governor’s administration’s practices, he said: “more and more I go back to the Democratic National Socialist Party, the Nazi Party; I go to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR. This is a socialist playbook.”
Multiple state legislators immediately objected to this comparison, with Rep. Kevin Boyle (D) interjecting, “Stop it with the Nazi references. It is offensive and wrong, stop this.” Rep. Jared Solomon (D), who is Jewish and was present at the committee hearing, later described his reaction in the moment: “Here I am looking across at a guy I know, and something, my religion, my culture of being Jewish, which is so important to me, did not give him pause.” Solomon also explains why Dush’s comments are deeply offensive: “[It] undercuts the atrocities that the Nazi regime committed against six million Jews across the globe.”
Antisemitic comparisons between temporary COVID-related restrictions have been rampant at anti-lockdown protests organized by far-right extremists, and are now making their way from signs waved by white nationalists and into the mouths of Republican lawmakers.
The emphasis on the word “socialist” in the official name of Nazi Party (the National Socialist German Workers‘ Party, not, as Dush describes it, the “Democratic National Socialist Party) is part of a broader — once-fringe and increasingly mainstream — effort from the Republican Party to describe socialists as the “real” Nazis and use this falsification to compare Democrats to Nazis. Not only is this re-writing of history wildly inaccurate; it also erases the fact that, in addition to committing a genocide against six million Jews and murdering Roma people and gay and lesbian people, the Nazis also targeted German socialists. Indeed, “socialist” remains an antisemitic dog-whistle — one used frequently by right-wing figures in Red Scares, during which Jews were seen as linked to communism and socialism.