By Bishop Anthony Taylor, drawing on personal family losses in the Holocaust, is warning against parallels to Nazi Germany in U.S. society.
Little Rock, Arkansas, Bishop Anthony Taylor issued a statement comparing the “moral decline of our country” to the events that gave rise to Nazi Germany.
Taylor said in the statement that “the moral decline of our country is real” and stressed that “we are doomed to repeat failures of the past if we are not willing to remember and learn from them.” While the U.S. is not Nazi Germany and President Donald Trump is not Hitler, Taylor said, troubling parallels are emerging.
“Polarization and partisanship are poisoning the social fabric of our country,” he said. “In this there are many obvious parallels with [the] 1930s, and that should give us pause.”
The Arkansas bishop’s statement came two days before the internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Political parallels
“My grandfather lost 20 first cousins in the Holocaust, and so I admittedly tend to view troubling things in today’s world through the lens of 1930s Germany,” Taylor said. “Lest anyone dismiss the remainder of my statement as hyperbolic, I want to be clear that the current times are not identical, and Trump is no Hitler.”
“In Hitler, Germany had an eloquent speaker who was able to tap into the understandable fears and anger of people in the wake of their country’s catastrophic losses in World War I and the financial meltdown at the end of the 1920s,” Taylor continued. “These people longed for their beloved homeland to be great once again, and many disaffected people resonated with Hitler’s talk of ‘real’ Germans, the Aryan race, and his mockery and demonization of those who were different racially or religiously or didn’t share his views.”
Germany’s democracy in the 1930s “was still young” and lacked proper checks and balances, Taylor said. Politicians were “too quick to go along with whatever direction the leadership pushed for,” he said, and those who attempted to oppose Hitler were first silenced by “intimidation and threats,” then later shipped off to concentration camps.
“In that decade, German society moved away from respect for human dignity, peace, and moral restraint,” he said. “I fear that the same dynamics are now happening in our country with the decline of civil discourse.”
Migration
Immigration was “a big issue in the 1930s,” Taylor said, noting that while Germany “was glad for minorities to leave,” due to the Great Depression and rising global tensions, many countries refused to take refugees.
“For instance, the German ocean liner MS St. Louis carrying 937 Jewish refugees was famously denied entry by Cuba, the United States, and Canada and had to return to Europe,” he said. “Some European countries accepted some of those refugees, but about a quarter of them perished later in the Holocaust — a painful reminder of the real human cost of closing borders to legitimate refugees and of inhumane immigration policies.”
The Arkansas bishop recalled how this dynamic impacted his own family, noting that his grandfather’s cousins had attempted to flee Poland in 1939 but were turned away at the border and forced to return to their village in Galicia. “This sealed their fate,” he said. “In July of 1943, they were all caught up in a mass deportation and shipped to the extermination camp at Belzec where they were gassed and cremated.”
The bishop noted that “today our borders remain largely closed for those who are in greatest danger and must flee persecution or poverty” and that U.S. foreign aid has been largely discontinued. Taylor, who recently finished two terms on the board of directors of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) said: “I have a clear understanding of the negative impact” of the funding freeze.
“This is a pro-life issue,” he said. “And it will remain a pro-life issue so long as millions of people continue to live lives trapped in desperate circumstances, where countries with means refuse to help.”
Global policy
After dismantling and weaponizing Germany’s legal system and assuming dictatorial powers, Taylor said, Hitler was able to grow in power until “the now-silenced opposition was powerless to stop him.” The bishop noted how Hitler attacked and invaded other countries “until with Russia he bit off more than he could chew.”
Hitler’s global policy “Germany Over All” (“Deutschland Über Alles”), the bishop said, “had no respect for the sovereignty of other nations, no respect for their established borders, and no respect for the will of the people who lived in those countries.” Rather, the German dictator justified his actions with false reasons, that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s problems, and that Poland had invaded Germany first.
Taylor encouraged Catholics to read Pope Leo XIV’s Jan. 9 address to the Diplomatic Corps in which the pontiff reflects on political themes within St. Augustine’s “City of God,” warning of “the grave dangers to political lie arising from false representations of history, excessive nationalism, and the distortion of the ideal political leader.”
“My hope and prayer is that, along with Pope Leo, we might strive towards peace as a good in itself. And if we think we are powerless to do anything to change the minds of our leaders, well, that’s exactly what many told themselves in Hitler’s time,” Taylor said. “But aside from our political situation, I pray that we will begin to look at the immigrants and refugees in our midst not as enemies or as ‘other.’ Not as different in color or in accent. Not as dangers or risks. But as created in the image and likeness of the same true God — as the stranger in our midst — as Jesus (Mt 25:35).”
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Maybe the bishop should start with trying to figure out how to keep his clergy out of the pants of adolescent males. When he has that figured out, then he can move forward with his expertise in global politics.
Another shallow and ignorant “analysis” by a completely irrelevant Catholic bishop. I cannot even remember the last time I heard anything intelligent or authentically Christian from an American bishop.
The interesting things about these effete bureaucrats is how much they think their echo chamber chorus, is compelling and mellifluous when to serious observant Catholics, when it has all the appeal of fingernails on a chalkboard.
Oh surprise, surprise another Latin Mass enemy. and of course he’s mentioned in “More Bishops Publicly Out Themselves As Pro-LGBT” May 20, 2021 from LifeSite News by Pete Baklinski”.
Honestly, the thing we need is a good bleaching of the episcopacy from its scarlet color and lavender odor. I’d like to start a fund that would hire PI’s to open a few closets. It just needs a good name.
Clowns should never run the circus, but they always do.
The bishop makes some good points, the Trump Administration’s policy has been too un-nuanced in not distinguishing between those who are truly threats and those who are harmless even if they didn’t follow every detail of immigration law. How many of us go through life in perfect conformity with the law?
However, nowhere in any discussion of immigration and the reasons for it have I ever seen any bishop recognize that, just as the ultimate solution to the rise of Hitler was the defeat and overthrow of Hitler by the Allies, the best and ultimate solution to the dire problems many, but not all, of the immigrants flee from is the overthrow of their home governments and the establishment of a better order in their home countries. The solution to all the world’s problems of poverty and tyranny cannot be “let’s all go the USA”.
Instead, some of these very same bishops will criticize any US effort to help bring about regime change in those home countries. Instead we get concern about poor little Greenland being bullied, and whether the nuances of international law are followed when we go after drug gangsters who destabilize both other countries and ours. Its only the faults of the Trump administration, which are real, that are criticized, and the only regime change some seem to care about is here.
There’s a lot of citizens who are “harmless” and arrested. Would you support ignoring tax evaders? Why should a citizen be subject to arrest, prosecution, ruinous fines and incarceration for violating Title 26 (intentionally or not), with all of its vague complexities, but an alien gets to be allowed to remain unmolested for ignoring Title 8. What if I decide to counterfeit currency?
Somehow, the left has put an earwig in weak minds, like Khan did to Chekov in the Star Trek movie that violating our borders isn’t really a crime because [INSERT EXCUSE HERE] when every mitigating circumstance that can be applied to illegal entry can be applied to tax law violations. Well newsflash. Twenty five years ago Mohammed Atta would have been deemed “harmless”. What crystal ball do you think is out there to make that determination? As a practical matter violating our sovereignty proves ipso facto you are not “harmless”-you are stilling rights and benefits that belong to citizens.
Invasion has always been a act of war. Only recently has it been employed by governments against their own citizens. If aliens can violate Title 8 and benefit from my taxes, because there’s a whole parasitic industry that’s developed to flood the country with foreigners, tell why the hell I should give a murine posterior about my 1040, which I now have to buy expensive software to complete because of the informational demands placed on me because I’ve managed to save a modest portfolio in anticipation of the days when I can no longer work for my money and my money must work for me?
Or am I just a slave whose job is to ask no questions, pay and obey until I take the eternal dirt nap??
Woa. My brain hurts after reading this article. Our closed borders are resulting in a holocaust?
The rise of antisemitism is said to be the canary in the coalmine for a society in decline but I think the good bishop got this wrong.
Whether one likes Donald Trump or not, he is a true friend of Israel & the American Jewish community.
I know people who hate Pres. Trump for that very reason.
Immigration enforcement & border security got completely out of hand under Biden & walking that back may look out of hand at times, too. That doesn’t mean we’re turning into Nazi Germany. But Bishop Taylor is correct about the division & polarization. And I think demonization in some instances. None of that is good for a nation.
Please read this book. The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon Hardcover – January 20, 2026
by Peter Schweizer (Author)
Mass migration has morphed into the most powerful political weapon ever aimed at the United States—one engineered by elites at home and aided by adversaries abroad
Please see how mass migration is a conquering weapon. For example, did you know that over a million Chinese anchor babies will be able to vote in 2030 after they return from being educated in China? Or that Mexican authorities are actively involved in a reconquest of US territory that once belonged to Mexico, by using the millions of Mexican migrants already in many US states and promoting the migration and organization of millions more? This book has the facts and the numbers.
Fellow Christians, let us learn the true lessons of history from a really brilliant Christian thinker: Solzhenitsyn’s The Red Wheel and comments by a scholar who knows very well the subject: WHY LENIN WON:
“Why [was] the Provisional Government so helpless? After all, it inherited the tsarist state, which was anything but powerless. Yes, but those were the bad old days before tyranny had been eliminated. Reasoning that free people don’t require force, the Provisional Government, believe it or not, abolished the police! It also released criminals on condition that they promise to behave, and so initiated a wave of murders and robberies. “Some ask: How do you govern the country?, You don’t even have any police,” Minister of Justice Aleksandr Kerensky paraphrases the obvious question. “But, comrades, we have no need of police, because the people are with us!”
With no means of enforcement, the Provisional Government had to implore people to pay their taxes. Nobody did. Solzhenitsyn quoted one appeal after another—soldiers, don’t desert! sailors, refrain from killing your officers! peasants, please do not seize land!—but the utter failure of rule by uplifting speeches and empty reports only leads to more speeches and more reports. “We have decided to take the most stringent measures,” one minister explains. “I shall appoint a committee of inquiry.”
When the patriotic general Lavr Kornilov at last offers to put his loyal soldiers at the government’s disposal, it reacts with horror. Even while a mob was besieging the unprotected ministers, one of them proudly declares: “No! Even if armed men were to find their way into this room, we should not apply military force to defend ourselves!” Another finds still finer words: “We’d rather sacrifice our own lives than spill a single drop of others’ blood!”
Most pathetic of all is the kindly Prime Minister, Prince Georgi Lvov, who attributes the prevailing chaos “to a single cause. The impossibility of meeting everyone personally, meeting their eyes with a kindly smile.” Using “the quietest of voices … and with one of his most bewitching smiles,” he asks: “Why the drama? Why make relations worse? … Everything will come right in the end.” When it becomes apparent that Lenin’s followers, who have already shot unarmed soldiers, plan to seize power by force, Lvov explains in “dulcet tones” to Minister of Defense Aleksandr Guchkov: “Where Lenin was concerned, the government should not precipitate events, for that might give rise to conflict.”
The Soviet Executive Committee, as Solzhenitsyn portrays it, is little better. Eager to hamstring the Provisional Government, its leaders refuse to assume power themselves because Marxist theory, in their view, holds that socialism can succeed only after an epoch of bourgeois liberal governance. Even though the Bolsheviks plan to use force against them as well as against the government, they will not resist, in part because they regard Leninists as fellow revolutionaries, but mostly because they differ from the government ministers only in the violence of their rhetoric. They, too, reject force against Lenin as “completely inadmissible. He must not be crushed or arrested. … We can combat ideas without using force, just argumentation.” Is it any wonder that Lenin and his tiny band of followers succeeded?”
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/why-lenin-won/
Mexico can’t control the cartels much less “reconquer ” lost territory. And their fertility rates resemble ours today and continue to fall.
What would be the problem with Christian Latin American immigrants? Of course they should come here legally and safely. Hopefully we’ll figure that out.
Obama gave a speech on illegal immigration that has now resurfaced.
“A painful reminder of the real human cost of closing borders to legitimate refugees and of inhumane immigration policies” (Bishop Taylor). Unfortunately Little Rock’s bishop has a tainted view of history based on his ideological perception of the United States.
Open border policy is destroying Christianity in Europe and was designed in the U.S. to provide a population base to create a permanent socialist voting block. The threat to our nation may be a number of far right extremists, although it doesn’t appear Donald Trump is in that category, as Bishop Taylor makes allusion in his comment on Nazism. Democrats have made that a talking point.
A positive indication of the President’s leaning toward center right policy is his admittance that events were poorly handled in Minneapolis, his command decision to shake up ICE sending in Tom Homan.
What does this bishop think he is accomplishing with his shallow and one-sided comment?
His good standing in the far left, or buying another subscription to a concealment service.
A leftist bishop calling people Nazis. How predictably juvenile. Since 70% of deported illegals have serious criminal records with multiple violations, seeing them as “enemies” and “others” is both necessary and appropriate. Are they created in God’s image, yes, of course. Does that mean they should get a pass? Absolutely not.
What an insightful article. I have shared many of these thoughts myself–my father fought in Europe in WWII and so I’ve studied that area a lot. I can’t help but see how the German people were much as our society today. And completely blind to it as Americans are. That is terrifying. Our moral compass is bent.
(I don’t understand the hurtful comments that started this thread. They certainly aren’t deserved by this author and I wish they would be removed as inflammatory.)