What would you do if you saw Hitler, or Stalin, or some other murderous despot with his spouse in a restaurant during the height of their power without their security detail?

If you’re like most people — myself included, though I’m not proud to admit it — you would do absolutely nothing. You’d stay as quiet and inconspicuous as humanly possible, lest said tyrant’s ire redirects itself towards your family, your friends, or your neighbors. Just because you don’t see the security detail doesn’t mean they aren’t there. The East German Stasi, the now-defunct communist country’s domestic secret police, employed hundreds of thousands of East Germans as informal collaborators, informants and spies. If it was just your life on the line, maybe you’d chance an irritated glance — but what about the lives of your spouse? Your children? Your parents? Your siblings? Your friends? Your coworkers? Best to play it safe.

Perhaps, however, you’re more the heroic type. Or perhaps you’re just more confident in your ability to kill a human being when given a chance. Either way, you might decide to try to assassinate our hungry despotic diner since, as the old saying goes, the best time to kill Hitler is when he’s a baby — the second-best time is whenever you get the chance. The odds, of course, of you surviving the attempt are zero, or near enough where you shouldn’t plan on getting your hopes up, but if you succeed, you could single-handedly stop the deaths and suffering of millions.

Then again, if history is any guide, the odds of you succeeding aren’t much better than your chances for survival. Several assassination attempts were made against both Hitler and Stalin, including Operation Valkyrie — an attempted bombing by disgruntled Nazi leadership of a high-level meeting Hitler attended in 1944 . Ironically, the only person who proved capable of assassinating Hitler turned out to be, well, Hitler — he committed suicide while Soviet troops invaded Berlin at the end of World War Two. As for Stalin, he died of a stroke.

What you would never do, if you found yourself face-to-face with an actual murderous tyrant in a Summerlin restaurant, is film yourself threatening to lynch him and his wife. You surround and/or threaten someone when you want to bully and intimidate them, not when you’re being bullied and intimidated by them.

I bring all of this up to highlight two points:

First, contrary to what the Nye County sheriff might have told you, Gov. Steve Sisolak, for all his faults, is no Hitler. 

Second, his most rabidly fervent detractors are well aware of that.

Demonstrating both points for me last week was a former MMA fighter-turned-”digital creator,” who announced his run for some Republican primary somewhere (I jest, I hope, but we’ll see who’s laughing after the candidate filing deadline in a couple of weeks) by filming himself and his friends yelling death threats and racial slurs at Sisolak and Nevada-born first lady Kathy Sisolak. If you ask him why he and his friends did it, I’m sure he’d tell you it was to “fight tyranny” or “fight for freedom,” which would be believable if he actually acted like someone whose freedom was meaningfully and violently infringed. Instead, he and his friends acted like bullies who believed, probably correctly, that they would get away with their behavior.

Similarly, when the usual suspects from the Republican gubernatorial pool responded by endorsing our latest candidate for public office — or at least his behavior — they also did so twisting the language of freedom. Michele Fiore said Sisolak was “lucky it was just words,” and, “if you look at the history of dictators, pitchforks will be next.” Joey Gilbert didn’t even bother applying that much of a rhetorical fig leaf — instead, he spuriously accused Sisolak of mass murder and declared the “time is upon us where these fraudulently elected leaders of ours will not be able to walk the streets alone.”

Again — Fiore and Gilbert didn’t say what they said because they earnestly believe they’re fighting tyranny. If they actually believed they were fighting tyranny, they wouldn’t believe they’d get away with saying anything like that in public, nor would they base their future political careers around the hope that they’ll get rewarded for it.

Tyrants, abusers,and bullies more generally love explaining to the credulous why their victims deserved what they got. When Putin was asked why he’s invading Ukraine, he claimed it was to “denazify” the country — a country which he doesn’t believe should exist in the first place. In 1939, Hitler claimed his invasion of Poland was Verteidigungskrieg — a defensive war — while he simultaneously negotiated with Stalin to split the country in half between the two of them. A few months later, Stalin used the shelling of a Soviet village on the Soviet-Finnish border — a shelling conducted by his own secret police — to justify his invasion of Finland. 

The point of these explanations is never to actually convince anyone of anything. On the contrary, the thinner and more ridiculous the explanation, the more power they demonstrate they have when their partisans faithfully echo them. Instead, the goal is to flood the zone with crap — have so many partisans spouting obvious nonsense that the rest of us assume that maybe there’s something to the lies since so many people are echoing them.

Nevada’s latest main character, and the two Republican gubernatorial candidates sucking up to his potential fan base, have much more in common with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and even Putin than they do George Washington. They don’t actually care about COVID-19 treatment protocols or the first lady’s ancestry. If those issues weren’t in play, they’d invent something else.

Instead, they sent a message — they already have the power to run a sitting governor and first lady out of a restaurant. If they’re both capable and willing of doing that to Nevada’s first family, just imagine what they’ll do to anyone who gets in their way once they have actual political and police power.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].