I have worked for a Holocaust museum for nearly a decade, but I have been extremely hesitant to invoke my professional experience when talking politics. I’ve never wanted to make a bad analogy and thus trivialize the experience of the victims or survivors, as so many politicians frequently do. But what I see in American politics right now demands the strongest possible condemnation, so I'll risk it. The Donald Trump Movement follows the pattern of Nazism and Hitler’s rise to power. Let us denounce it from the highest mountaintops.

Trump is not a joke, and his speech is not political speech to which he is entitled. It is hate speech which has inspired acts of violence even at his campaign rallies, and it will go on to inspire acts of terrorism and murder. No amount of rationalization can justify any single person’s support for Trump at this point. He has no part in our American political process, and his supporters need to be rescued. They are lost in a sea of fear. Trump’s dehumanization tactics have taken their toll not on Muslims or any of his other targets, but on the consciousness of his supporters.

Indeed, the main problem with the Trump Movement’s hateful stance toward Muslims, immigrants, refugees, African-Americans, women, and people with disabilities is not that it diminishes the humanity of these people. What’s diminished is the humanity of those who are doing the hating. By espousing this rhetoric, Trump and his supporters have become dehumanized to the point where they can no longer recognize humanity in the faces of the men, women, and children they are hating. (You can substitute “fear” wherever you see the word “hate.”) This is how ordinary people are moved to kill.

Trump has called for registering all people from one particular religion into a database and surveilling their places of worship. He has called for rounding up 11 million people living and working in this country. He has suggested that protesters ought to be met with violence at his rallies, and he has forcefully prevented journalists from doing their jobs. He has now called for banning all people of a certain religion from our country.

This is a predictable trajectory. If we let him go on, he will call for the ghettoization of Muslims, and finally murderous violence against them. He is following a formula, and though it took us awhile to catch on, we now know none of this is beyond him. The victim complex, the scapegoating of minorities, the nationalistic fervor, and the whole economic strongman bit are the hallmarks of a fascist movement, not a credible movement for the American presidency.

(Just to clarify: Wahhabist Muslims certainly present a legitimate threat to the security of the United States. About 0.5% of the world’s population of Muslims are Wahhabi, and an even smaller percentage are the ones who perpetrate violence. Almost all of them live in the Arabian Peninsula, and the greatest exporter of Wahhabism is Saudi Arabia, our second-closest ally in the Middle East. But Trump’s movement isn’t about sorting through that murky territory to keep us safe. It’s about pinning America’s problems on “the aliens among us” and carrying that wave of white supremacist anger into the highest positions of power.)

I’ve spent some time considering whether Trump really believes what he’s saying or if he’s just in it for the power and happens to have a great instinct for fascism. What convinced me of the former is a 1990 Vanity Fair profile of Trump. Here are the lowlights:

Trump used to keep a copy of Hitler’s My New Order by his bedside. When questioned about it, he maintained it was actually Mein Kampf, as if that makes it better. His justification: It was given to him by a Jewish friend. Turns out the guy isn’t Jewish, but that still wouldn’t have justified keeping a book by Hitler for some light bedtime reading.
One of his attorneys said Trump is a believer in the “big-lie theory” (direct quote), which is the idea that if you tell a lie big enough and often enough, people will believe you. It’s a propaganda technique coined by Hitler in Mein Kampf.
Trump’s cousin said when he worked for Trump he would greet him by clicking his heels and saying, “Heil Hitler!”

It’s one thing for teenage boys to dabble in this sort of idiocy. It’s quite another for the leading Republican presidential candidate to do it. I take this stuff seriously, and I think it means something. Can you imagine the reaction if Barack Obama admitted in a 1990 Vanity Fair piece that he kept a copy of The Management of Savagery by his bedside? (That’s the playbook followed by Al-Qaeda and ISIS.) Why are we willing to disregard this when it comes to Trump?

Further, Trump is by far the most popular candidate on Stormfront, the white supremacist website whose registered users have been responsible for nearly 100 murders. When you find yourself at the same rally as violent white supremacists, you might have made a few wrong choices in life.

And that’s the major point: It’s ultimately not so surprising that an unscrupulous narcissist would come along and break every taboo in a bid for power. What is more surprising and disturbing is the support Trump has garnered. This movement has exposed the weakened civic understanding and political illiteracy of Americans.

For all the talk about our beloved Constitution and the spirited defense of its Second Amendment, Trump and his supporters have shown precious little knowledge of and regard for that sacred document. That Trump has gotten past square one in his presidential campaign is an indictment of the dismantling of our public education system and the critical thinking skills it should produce.

Trump’s campaign has also shown us how quickly our humanity can be stripped away when we are goaded to fear a certain group of people. The progress we have made over generations toward a just and equal society is extremely tenuous. Rather than marking a new era of harmony and inclusion, the election of a black president and the effects of globalization have inspired a broad backlash of anger and resentment among mostly white Christian men who feel “their” country is being taken from them. This backlash is dangerous, and it will continue to be the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the U.S. in the coming decades.

America is not immune to the worst forms of violence. We need to immediately ground ourselves so we are no longer vulnerable to Trump’s dehumanizing, fearful rhetoric. At the same time, we need to enhance civic education for young people so this doesn’t happen again. We need to be more literate in the realms of politics and media.

It may be too late to talk rationally with Trump’s supporters. We need to focus on preventing middle-of-the-road folks from being radicalized. To do that, we need to challenge this dehumanizing rhetoric whenever and wherever we hear it. The way to challenge it is with a balance of courage and compassion. We need to stand up for all Americans, especially Muslims, immigrants, African-Americans, refugees, and other targeted groups, and we need to avoid dehumanizing language at all costs. That means we also need to avoid dehumanizing Republicans, police, politicians - everyone. We can be critical without dehumanizing. The way out of this is to be more human.