Candace Owens compared the Capitol insurrection to the Reichstag fire. Here’s why that’s absurd.

Owens concluded: “What happened on January 6th was, to me, the Reichstag fire happening all over again in America. Democrats use it to consolidate power and to trample over the civil rights of half of the country, because they want to make sure that they have no political adversaries going forward.”

“Amazing,” Carlson replied.

Before analyzing this statement, let’s examine the history of the Reichstag fire.

On the night of Feb. 27, 1933, the Reichstag building in Berlin, where the Weimar Republic’s parliament met, was largely destroyed in an arson attack.

German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party compatriots blamed the fire on Communists and used that to persuade German President Paul von Hindenburg to suspend a large number of constitutional protections the next day. This is commonly called the Reichstag Fire Decree.

The Nazis also used this to indefinitely jail Communist members of parliament, thus leaving those seats empty and giving the Nazis a majority. With power consolidated, Hitler and the Nazis took control of Germany and terrorized the world until 1945, when they were defeated in World War II.

Letters found in an attic reveal eerie similarities between Adolf Hitler and his father

There are two strong similarities between the 1933 fire and the 2021 insurrection: The Reichstag and the U.S. Capitol are buildings that house legislative bodies, and both were physically attacked.

That’s … kinda it.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum maintains a terrific Holocaust Encyclopedia online. It lists three key facts about the Reichstag Fire Decree and how it was used by Hitler to consolidate power. Let us compare these with our current political situation.

1) “Implemented one day after the fire, the decree suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other constitutional protections, including all restraints on police investigations.”

Freedom of assembly, speech and the press were not suspended by Donald Trump, who was president at the time of the insurrection, nor have they been by President Biden. (Note: Being suspended from Twitter or Facebook — private companies that can create their own terms of service — is not the same thing as the government restricting your speech.) Restraints on police investigations have also not been suspended.

2) “The decree permitted the regime to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without specific charge, to dissolve political organizations, and to confiscate private property.”

About 400 people who allegedly participated in the Capitol insurrection have been arrested since Jan. 6, and some have been jailed. However, they have been charged with crimes that already existed in the legal code, for example: violent entry, disorderly conduct, assaulting a police officer and obstruction of an official proceeding. As for dissolving political organizations, the Democratic and Republican parties still exist, as do the far-right groups alleged to have planned and participated in the insurrection, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. These groups may be effectively disabled as their members are charged with actual crimes and face prison terms. Thus far, no members of Congress have been arrested or jailed, and no property has been confiscated beyond what already sometimes occurs in law enforcement investigations.

3) “The decree also gave the regime the authority to overrule state and local laws and overthrow state and local governments.”

Neither the Trump administration in its waning days nor the current administration has overruled or overthrown state and local laws or governments, though in Trump’s case, it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Over the years, the Reichstag fire has been invoked by a number of American political figures on both sides of the aisle, including Keith Ellison, a Democratic former congressman who is now Minnesota’s attorney general, and onetime Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, as well as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank.

Owens, who has no professional or academic qualifications in history, is no stranger to misguided Hitler comparisons. At an event in 2019, she said:

“I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism.’ I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. He was a national socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German.”

She later walked back her comments, acknowledging that part of Hitler’s domestic agenda to “make Germany great” was torturing and murdering German citizens who were Jewish, gay, left-leaning or Jehovah’s Witnesses. (This is not an exhaustive list).

There is one other key difference between the Reichstag fire and the Capitol insurrection. Despite decades of investigation and scholarship, no one knows who is actually responsible for the Reichstag fire. One man, a 24-year-old laborer from the Netherlands, confessed and was guillotined for it, but whether he was acting on behalf of German Communists or tricked by Nazis is unclear. Many historians believe he could not have started a fire that destructive alone, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

In contrast, we know who participated in the Capitol insurrection by the mountains of evidence they left behind. It wasn’t communists.

Read more Retropolis:

Letters found in an attic reveal eerie similarities between Adolf Hitler and his father

‘The Führer’s child’: How Hitler came to embrace a girl with Jewish roots

Fact-checking ‘The Crown’: Did the Duke of Windsor plot with Hitler to betray Britain?