The Fascism We Exported and the Fascism We Deny | by William Spivey | Feb, 2026

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The Fascism We Exported and the Fascism We Deny

Tracing the through‑line from Jim Crow to modern authoritarian movements

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Many historians have gone to great lengths to deny that Nazi Germany copied American racist policies inflicted on Native Americans and Black people. In Mein Kampf, written almost a decade before he became German Chancellor in 1933, Hitler praised the United States as the world leader in racist policies and laws and in establishing a racist social order. Hitler admired restrictive US immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans and mostly excluded other nationalities, ethnicities, and races. Hitler would be proud of what Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are doing with immigration in America today.

Hitler appreciated American criminal laws forbidding miscegenation, particularly the mixed marriages or sexual relations between white and Black citizens. He admired Jim Crow segregation laws and other white supremacist provisions that effectively robbed African Americans of civil rights and made them second-class citizens. He especially admired American eugenics that prized white supremacy, and led to laws that encouraged the sterilization of the “feebleminded,” and others found somehow defective. Hitler admired the mass extermination of Native Americans by “Nordic” settlers in the nineteenth century and the subsequent…