In post-WWI Germany, angry veterans came home to a broken country. No jobs. No pensions. No future. They felt betrayed. The Nazi Party saw opportunity.

Adolf Hitler’s brownshirts—his street thugs in uniform—promised purpose, power, and someone to blame. By 1933, nearly two million men had joined. Most weren’t ideologues. They were broke, bitter, and armed with a grudge. Fascism gave them identity and a license to hate.

Sound familiar?

Post-9/11 America has its own disillusioned warriors. The VA failed them. The Great Recession wrecked their lives. Politicians used them, then left them behind. Along came MAGA.

Groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers didn’t recruit with policy. They recruited with belonging. With chants. Uniforms. Targets. Brotherhood for broken men.

Of the Proud Boys leaders convicted for the January 6 attack, four out of five were military veterans. Two-thirds of the Oath Keepers were, too. That’s not a coincidence—it’s a strategy. Same playbook. Different century.

We’ve been here before. In Germany, elites thought they could use the brownshirts to beat back the left. They ended up with a dictatorship.

Now U.S. elites play the same game—platforming fascists, downplaying the violence, and pretending it’s just “patriotism.” Meanwhile, the foot soldiers are getting in formation.

This isn’t about politics. It’s about power. And history doesn’t repeat—it recruits.

Stephen Hawking Takes on the Neo-Nazis

About This Title
The voice you’re hearing in the demo version of this piece was generated using open-source speech tools. It ended up sounding eerily close to Stephen Hawking’s iconic computer-generated voice — not by design, but by default.

So we ran with it.

There’s something fitting — poetic even — about a cold, logical voice standing up to the chaotic emotional rot of fascism. Stephen Hawking stood for science, reason, and survival against cosmic odds. The Proud Boys stand for none of that.

If Hawking were alive, he likely wouldn’t be silent about the rise of authoritarianism in America. And if his voice lives on in this remix of resistance? So be it. We’ll use whatever tools we have.