Part 3: The Authoritarian Playbook - How History Repeats Itself
- Ash A Milton
- 12 minutes ago
- 29 min read
Part 3: The Authoritarian Playbook - How History Repeats Itself
A Four-Part Investigation into Immigration Enforcement, Authoritarian Tactics, and the Targeting of Women's Voices
This is Part 3 of a four-part series examining patterns of force against U.S. citizen women by federal immigration agents, the demographics and culture of rapidly expanded enforcement agencies, historical parallels to authoritarian suppression of women's political participation, and the synthesis of these concerning trends.
Author's Note:
I am an Army veteran with a PhD in Organizational Leadership from Regent University. I am an Independent voter and advocate for ending the two-party system. I support legal immigration and the rule of law. The rule of law includes the constitutional rights to free speech, peaceful assembly, and protest—rights that apply equally to all U.S. citizens regardless of the current policies they support or oppose. This investigation examines documented patterns of force against U.S. citizen women engaged in constitutionally protected activities, based on extensive reporting from multiple independent sources, court records, and official statements. My professional experience informs my analysis while my commitment to constitutional principles motivates this investigation.
I am an Army of one and do my best to fact check, grammar, and spell check but I am only human.
Part One was written prior the increased violence in since Renee Nicole Good's shooting.
Introduction: Pattern Recognition
Parts 1 and 2 documented what is happening and who is doing it. Part 3 examines why it matters historically—because we've seen this before. Not exactly, but close enough that the parallels demand attention.
Authoritarian regimes throughout history have followed a predictable playbook when consolidating power: they systematically silence women who witness, document, organize, and resist. The methods evolve. The rhetoric adapts. But the underlying pattern—male-dominated state forces eliminating oversight, targeting women who resist, operating with impunity, serving authoritarian consolidation—remains consistent across time and place.
The women in Part 1 weren't just individual victims. They were targets of a systematic approach to silencing political participation. Understanding this requires examining three historical contexts: Nazi Germany's systematic exclusion of women from 1933-1945, America's own suffragette struggle where women were beaten, force-fed, imprisoned, and killed for demanding political voice, and the 2025 policy environment that echoes both.
Nazi Germany: The Template for Silencing Women (1933-1945)
The Speed of Transformation
When the Nazis assumed power in January 1933, Germany had been a democracy where women voted, held professional positions, and participated in political life. Within months, that changed.
By April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service barred women from civil service. Within a year, 19,000 women lost their jobs. There had been 100,000 female teachers and 3,000 female doctors working in Germany; most were eventually sacked, forced to resign, or pushed into marriage and motherhood. From 1936 onward, women were prohibited from working as judges, lawyers, principals, and in numerous other professions.
The ideology was explicit. As Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1934: "The National Socialist movement is the only party that keeps women out of daily politics... We do not see the woman as inferior, but rather as having a different mission, a different value, than that of the man." This "different mission" meant Kinder, Küche, Kirche—children, kitchen, church.
University and college places for women were restricted to a firm quota of 10 percent. School curricula changed: five years of Latin and three years of science were replaced with German language courses and domestic skills training. The message was clear—women's education existed to prepare them for motherhood, not professional or political participation.
The Propaganda of Motherhood
The regime didn't just restrict; it incentivized compliance. Marriage loans offered 1,000 Reichmarks (substantial money) with debt forgiven for each child born—one quarter after the first child, fully discharged after four. Between 1933 and 1936, nearly 695,000 married couples received these loans.
The Ehrenzeichen der Deutschen Mutter (Cross of Honour of the German Mother) awarded medallions: bronze for four children, silver for six, gold for eight. Propaganda praised Kindersegen—women blessed with children—as national heroines. Pregnancy and motherhood were celebrated as civic duty. Adolf Hitler himself stated repeatedly: "The triumphant task of women is to bear and tend babies."
The philosophy was straightforward: women's value derived from biological reproduction and domestic labor, not from political voice, professional achievement, or public participation. Women who excelled at motherhood served the state. Women who pursued other paths undermined it.
Women Who Resisted: The Price of Political Voice
Not all German women accepted this. Some resisted—and paid extraordinary prices.
Sophie Scholl provides the clearest example. Born in 1921, she initially joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), the female branch of Hitler Youth, enthusiastically embracing Nazi ideology as a teenager. But exposure to philosophy, theology, and the reality of Nazi policies transformed her.
By 1942, at age 21, Sophie had joined the White Rose resistance group at the University of Munich alongside her brother Hans and other students. They wrote and distributed leaflets calling for opposition to the Nazi state, citing ethical and philosophical arguments against its policies. The leaflets denounced Nazi crimes, including the mass murder of Jews, and called for Germans to resist.
On February 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans were caught distributing leaflets at the university. A janitor—a staunch Nazi supporter—saw Sophie push a stack of leaflets off a railing onto the central hall below and immediately reported them to the Gestapo.
They were arrested, interrogated for three days, and brought before Roland Freisler's People's Court in a show trial. On February 22, 1943—just four days after their arrest—Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of high treason and executed by guillotine that same afternoon.
Sophie was 21 years old.
During interrogation, she defended her actions: "I still believe that I did the best thing that I could do for my people just now. I do not therefore regret my actions." Her final words before execution reportedly included: "Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?"
The Nazi response to Sophie Scholl reveals the authoritarian pattern: women who engage in political resistance—who document crimes, who organize opposition, who refuse to remain silent—represent existential threats requiring immediate, violent elimination.
Public Humiliation as Control
The regime also understood that public humiliation of women served as broader control mechanism. Women found guilty of sexual relations with prisoners of war or foreign workers had their heads shaved and were paraded through towns carrying signs.
In March 1941, a married woman who had an affair with a French prisoner of war was marched through Bramberg in Lower Franconia carrying a sign: "I have sullied the honour of the German woman." In September 1940, Dora von Calbitz, found guilty of relations with a Pole, was placed in the pillory in Oschatz near Leipzig with a sign proclaiming: "I have been a dishonourable German woman in that I sought and had relations with Poles. By doing that I excluded myself from the community of the people."
These public spectacles served multiple purposes: they punished individual women, terrified other women into compliance, and reinforced that women's bodies and choices were state property subject to public enforcement. The parallel to Sue Tincher having her wedding ring cut off by ICE agents—symbolic violence against her identity as a married woman with community ties—is not coincidental.
The Women Who Complied
Not all German women resisted. Approximately 40 million German women lived in the Third Reich, and 13 million were actively involved in Nazi Party organizations. The NS-Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women's League) had 2 million members by 1938, representing 40% of total party membership.
These women furthered the regime's goals through welfare work, teaching, secretarial positions, nursing, and service as auxiliaries in armed forces and police. By 1945, as many as 500,000 women worked in various roles for the German armed forces—including as concentration camp guards.
Their participation demonstrates a critical point: authoritarian systems don't silence all women—they co-opt some while eliminating others. Women who embrace traditional roles, who support the regime's ideology, who don't question authority find place and even prestige within the system. Women who resist, who organize, who demand political voice face violence.
The Nazi regime succeeded because it didn't need to repress every woman—just the ones who threatened it.
What Makes Women Dangerous
Why did the Nazis invest such effort in excluding women from political life? Because women's political participation posed specific threats to authoritarian consolidation.
Women organize communities. Women build networks. Women bear witness. Women document. Women testify. Women mobilize. These activities—observation, documentation, organization, testimony—are precisely what authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate because they create accountability.
Sophie Scholl didn't carry weapons. She carried leaflets. She wrote words. She organized students. She documented crimes. And for this, she was executed within four days.
The speed tells you everything about the threat level: women with pens, paper, and political voice are more dangerous to authoritarians than armies.
America's Suffragettes: Violence Against Women Demanding Voice
Emily Wilding Davison: Martyrdom for the Vote
Americans often believe democratic rights emerged peacefully through reasoned debate. The suffragette movement reveals otherwise.
Emily Wilding Davison, born in 1872, studied at Royal Holloway College and St. Hugh's College, Oxford, achieving first-class honors in English—but could not graduate because Oxford didn't award degrees to women. She worked as teacher and governess before joining the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1906.
Over the next seven years, Davison was arrested nine times, went on hunger strike seven times, and was force-fed 49 times. Her tactics included breaking windows, throwing stones, setting fire to postboxes, planting bombs, and on three occasions, hiding overnight in the Palace of Westminster. On one occasion during a hunger strike, prison guards flooded her cell with cold water while she held on "like grim death" to avoid drowning.
On June 4, 1913, Davison attended the Epsom Derby carrying two suffragette flags. During the race, she stepped onto the track and was struck by King George V's horse Anmer at full gallop. She suffered a fractured skull and never regained consciousness. She died four days later, on June 8, 1913, at age 40.
While in hospital, she received hate mail. One letter read: "I am glad to hear that you are in hospital. I hope you suffer torture until you die. You idiot" signed "an Englishman."
Whether Davison intended to die remains debated—she carried a return train ticket, suggesting she expected to survive. But evidence indicates she attempted to attach a suffragette flag to the horse's bridle, a dangerous protest requiring her to grab the bridle while the horse galloped. New imaging technology revealed she was attempting this action, not simply committing suicide.
Her funeral procession on June 14, 1913, drew 5,000 suffragettes dressed in white with black armbands—"the last of the great suffragette spectacles." Emmeline Pankhurst planned to attend but was arrested that morning under the "Cat and Mouse Act" which allowed authorities to release hunger strikers temporarily then re-arrest them.
Davison's gravestone bears the WSPU slogan: "Deeds not words."
Force-Feeding: State-Sanctioned Torture
The British government's response to suffragette hunger strikes was systematic torture. When suffragettes refused food to protest their treatment as common criminals rather than political prisoners, authorities force-fed them.
The procedure involved holding women down—often requiring multiple guards—inserting tubes through their noses or throats, and pouring liquid food into their stomachs. Women described excruciating pain, bleeding, vomiting, and psychological trauma. Davison endured this 49 times.
The parallels to modern state violence against women are stark. Force-feeding violates bodily autonomy in service of state control. It inflicts pain to compel submission. It treats women's bodies as state property to be managed through force. The method differs from ICE agents shooting, dragging, or detaining women, but the principle—state force deployed against women's bodies to suppress political participation—remains identical.
Emma Goldman: Deportation for Birth Control Advocacy
While British suffragettes fought for voting rights, American women faced violence for advocating reproductive freedom.
Emma Goldman, born in Lithuania in 1869, immigrated to the United States in 1885. She became a leading anarchist, public speaker, and crusader for free speech, birth control, women's equality, and workers' rights. In 1906, she founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth, which operated until 1917 when it was suppressed under the Espionage Act.
Goldman was arrested repeatedly for political speech. In 1893, she spent a year in prison for "inciting to riot" after urging unemployed workers to demand bread. In 1916, she was arrested twice and imprisoned once for lecturing and distributing material about birth control—illegal under the Comstock Act of 1873, which classified contraceptive information as "obscene matter."
In 1917, Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested for conspiring to obstruct the draft after founding the No-Conscription League. They were sentenced to two years in federal prison and fined $10,000. After their release in 1919, J. Edgar Hoover—then director of the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division—orchestrated Goldman's deportation under the 1918 Alien Act.
On December 21, 1919, Goldman and 248 other "radical aliens" were deported to the Soviet Union on the S.S. Buford. She was 50 years old and had lived in America for 34 years.
Goldman's crime wasn't violence—it was speech. She spoke about birth control, workers' rights, free love, and women's equality. She published writings challenging state authority. She organized people to resist the draft. For this, she was imprisoned, surveilled, and ultimately expelled from the country.
Roger Baldwin, who heard Goldman speak on free speech in 1908, went on to found the American Civil Liberties Union. Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist who coined the term "birth control" in 1914, looked to Goldman as her mentor. Goldman's influence shaped American civil rights activism for decades—but the state viewed her advocacy for women's autonomy as intolerable threat requiring elimination.
The Pattern Across Borders and Decades
Emily Davison died in 1913. Sophie Scholl was executed in 1943. Emma Goldman was deported in 1919. Thirty years separate these women, and they lived in different countries under different political systems.
Yet the pattern is identical:
Women who publicly resist state authority become targets
The state responds with force designed to inflict maximum pain and visibility
Other women witness this violence and understand the message
Some women are silenced; some are inspired to continue resistance
The state treats women's bodies as property to be controlled through force
Documentation, organization, and testimony are treated as dangerous as violence
The authoritarian playbook transcends borders and eras because it addresses a fundamental threat: women's political participation creates networks of resistance that undermine concentrated power.
2025: The Contemporary Playbook
Devaluing Women's Degrees: The Economic Dimension
The 2025 policy environment doesn't replicate Nazi Germany's explicit quotas on women's university admission, but it achieves similar ends through different mechanisms.
The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025—and its successor Project 2026—explicitly target higher education with policies that disproportionately impact women. The blueprint calls for eliminating college degree requirements for federal jobs "unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it," effectively devaluing the educational credentials that women disproportionately hold.
Women now earn more bachelor's degrees than men (approximately 58% to 42%), more master's degrees (approximately 60% to 40%), and equal or greater numbers of doctoral degrees in many fields. By removing degree requirements while maintaining physical standards that favor men (as ICE has done), federal employment increasingly advantages male applicants.
Project 2025 also calls for eliminating the Department of Education entirely, ending Title IX enforcement that protects women from sex discrimination in education, and "reclaiming higher education from the radical Left"—language that targets protections for survivors of sexual assault and women's studies programs.
The Heritage Foundation's 2026 priorities go further, with Director Scott Yenor arguing explicitly for ending coeducation, lamenting that "modern America went wrong when it abandoned distinct sex roles," and complaining about women not having enough children, accessing no-fault divorce, and "the entire idea of anti-discrimination."
This represents systematic attack on women's educational and professional advancement—not through explicit bans as in Nazi Germany, but through policy changes that make women's education economically worthless while eliminating legal protections against discrimination.
Reproductive Control: Abortion Restrictions and Surveillance
Project 2025 and 2026 extensively detail plans to restrict abortion access nationwide using federal power:
Banning abortion pills nationwide
Weaponizing the 1873 Comstock Act to criminalize medication by mail
Embedding "fetal personhood" across federal agencies
Eliminating all federal safeguards for reproductive freedom
Requiring HHS to adopt the position that "every child conceived deserves to be born to a married mother and father" (only biological terms are recognized per EO 14168)
The Women's March analysis states bluntly: this blueprint is "designed to rebuild a country where women, queer people, trans people, and anyone outside their 'ideal family' have fewer rights."
Senate Committee hearings in 2025 focused on "Protecting Women from Chemical Abortions," framing abortion medication as harm to women rather than healthcare they choose. The hearings featured testimony claiming abortion pills are dangerous—contradicted by decades of FDA data showing medication abortion is safer than Tylenol, pregnancy, and colonoscopies.
The parallel to Emma Goldman's imprisonment for distributing birth control information is exact: in 1916, contraception information was classified as obscene; in 2025, abortion medication is classified as dangerous. Both classifications serve the same purpose—state control over women's reproductive autonomy.
The "Domestic Terrorism" Frame
When Sue Tincher stood on a sidewalk observing ICE operations, she was arrested, thrown to the ground, and had her wedding ring cut off. When local officials called the federal claims false, state investigators were excluded from oversight. No accountability followed.
The framing matters: the Trump administration has labeled immigration resistance as "domestic terrorism." This is the rhetorical strategy that enables violence against women who observe, document, or question federal operations.
Sophie Scholl was executed for "high treason." Emma Goldman was deported as a "dangerous alien." Sue Tincher was arrested for "obstructing" despite standing on public property. The specific charges change across decades and countries, but the function remains constant: political resistance by women is criminalized through language that justifies state violence.
The Elimination of Oversight
On March 21, 2025, DHS closed the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the USCIS Ombudsman. These offices received and investigated complaints, implemented protective policies, and ensured enforcement of laws like the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Their elimination was characterized as "removing bureaucratic hurdles" that "obstructed enforcement." This is authoritarian language: accountability mechanisms are reframed as obstacles rather than protections.
The 308 documented sexual assault complaints between 2015-2021 in ICE facilities—with more than half naming staff as perpetrators—occurred with oversight offices operating. Without them, reporting becomes impossible and abuse becomes invisible.
The Heritage Foundation's Vision: "Biblically Based" Families
Project 2025 calls for HHS to adopt an official stance that families consist of "a married father, mother and children" and to redirect federal funds to support this "biblically based" definition. It protects adoption and foster care services that refuse to work with LGBTQ+ couples.
This mirrors Nazi Germany's Kinder, Küche, Kirche ideology exactly. Women's value derives from their relationship to men (married) and their biological reproduction (mother and children). Women outside this framework—single women, lesbian women, women who choose not to have children—are excluded from state support and legitimacy.
The Heritage blueprint doesn't use Nazi rhetoric, but it achieves Nazi goals: restricting women's legitimate life paths to domestic roles, eliminating state recognition of alternative family structures, and using government power to enforce rigid gender roles.
President Trump has proposed creating a federal award to recognize and celebrate motherhood—echoing Nazi Germany's Ehrenzeichen der Deutschen Mutter (Cross of Honour of the German Mother) which awarded bronze, silver, and gold medallions based on number of children. The parallel is exact: state recognition of women's value measured through biological reproduction rather than professional achievement, political participation, or individual accomplishment.
The indoctrination of young women follows similar patterns. Nazi Germany operated the Bund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls), which girls joined at age 10 to be trained in domestic skills and motherhood preparation. In 2025 America, Turning Point USA operates on High School and College campuses nationwide promoting conservative ideology to young people.
Charlie Kirk, TPUSA's founder, told a teenage girl at a public event that young women should only attend college to earn an "MRS degree"—meaning to find a husband, not to gain education or professional credentials.
The message is identical across 90 years: women's education exists not for their own advancement but to prepare them for marriage and motherhood. When young women hear this from influential conservative figures with massive platforms and institutional backing, they're receiving the same indoctrination the Bund Deutscher Mädel provided—just without the uniforms.
Military Transformation: Targeting Women Service Members
Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the military has moved rapidly to implement Project 2025 objectives focused on "reducing health care access for women and LGBTQ+ service members."
This includes:
Eliminating all DEI offices
Firing high-ranking women and people of color
Ending recognition of commemoration months
Removing thousands of images promoting diversity
Banning race and sex considerations from promotions
Restricting reproductive healthcare for service members
Women now constitute approximately 17% of active duty military personnel. Project 2025's military reforms target their healthcare access, promotion opportunities, and professional recognition—making military service increasingly hostile to women who choose this path.
The 2025 Categorization: Acceptable Women vs. Dangerous Women
The 2025 administration doesn't explicitly ban women from political life as Nazi Germany did, but it establishes clear categories of acceptable and unacceptable women—rewarding compliance while punishing resistance.
The Acceptable Women: Ornamental and Silent
The acceptable women are visible at Mar-a-Lago galas and administration events—young, conventionally attractive, impeccably styled, and silent about policy. They serve ornamental functions: the pretty face at the podium, the elegant accessory at state dinners, the beautiful backdrop to power.
Attorney General Pam Bondi exemplifies this category. Former Florida Attorney General, she's known for her appearance on Fox News, her loyalty to Trump, and her willingness to use her office for political purposes. During her 2024 confirmation hearings, questions focused less on her legal qualifications than on her past investigations into Trump University—which mysteriously concluded after Trump's foundation donated $25,000 to her reelection campaign. She's competent enough to execute the administration's agenda but not so independently powerful as to threaten it.
Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, fits the pattern. Governor of South Dakota known more for her appearance and political loyalty than policy innovation, she infamously wrote in her memoir about shooting her 14-month-old puppy because it was "untrainable." The story revealed a worldview where things that don't perform as expected should be eliminated—a philosophy that extends to her management of DHS, where oversight offices were eliminated within weeks of her confirmation.
Karoline Leavitt serves as White House Press Secretary—young, attractive, and reliably on-message. Her role is performance: deliver administration talking points with a smile, deflect difficult questions, present the regime's preferred narrative. She's the mouthpiece, not the mind.
Trump stated, "She has a beautiful face... And she has machine-gun lips"
These women share characteristics: they're young or youthful-appearing, conventionally attractive by narrow standards, carefully styled, politically loyal, and non-threatening to male power. They hold titles and positions but exercise limited independent authority. They're rewarded with proximity to power, media attention, and financial benefits—as long as they remain ornamental and compliant.
The administration's events reinforce this categorization visually. Women at Mar-a-Lago galas appear in evening gowns as decoration to power rather than as power themselves. They're photographed, admired, displayed—but rarely heard speaking about policy, challenging decisions, or exercising independent judgment.
The Dangerous Women: Activists and Resisters
The unacceptable women are vilified with gendered slurs designed to delegitimize their political participation.
JD Vance, the Vice President, famously described Democratic women politicians and supporters as "childless cat ladies" with no stake in America's future. The phrase isn't casual insult—it's categorization. Women without children (by choice or circumstance) are framed as defective, self-interested, and unqualified for political voice because they haven't fulfilled their biological purpose.
Women activists are dismissed as "organized wine moms"—trivializing their political organizing as frivolous social activity. The implication: women's political engagement isn't serious organizing but rather idle pastime for bored suburban housewives. This delegitimizes women's grassroots mobilization, making it easier to ignore or suppress.
In private communications revealed through leaked messages and testimony, administration officials and supporters refer to women resisters as "fucking bitches"—language that appears repeatedly in texts, emails, and recorded conversations. This isn't aberration; it's pattern. Women who organize, protest, document, or resist are categorized through profane gendered language that frames their political participation as personal pathology rather than legitimate civic engagement.
The slurs serve functional purposes beyond insult:
"Childless cat ladies" establishes that women's political legitimacy derives from biological reproduction
"Organized wine moms" trivializes women's political organizing as hobby rather than serious activity
"Fucking bitches" frames resistance as personality defect rather than principled objection
Each term delegitimizes a different aspect of women's political participation: their biological choices, their organizing methods, their opposition itself.
The Immigrant Wives Paradox
The categorization reveals contradictions that expose the system's real priorities. Multiple men in the administration who promote "traditional American values" and harsh immigration enforcement are married to immigrant women.
Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, enforces immigration law while his own life story might involve immigrant family connections. JD Vance, who campaigns on strict immigration enforcement and traditional American family values, is married to Usha Vance, daughter of Indian immigrants. The pattern appears throughout the administration: men who build careers on immigration enforcement and "America First" rhetoric choose immigrant women as wives.
This isn't hypocrisy—it's hierarchy. Immigrant women who marry American men and adopt ornamental roles are acceptable because they submit to male authority and don't challenge the system. They're categorized as "good" immigrants: beautiful, compliant, status-enhancing for their husbands. The issue isn't immigration per se—it's whether women (immigrant or citizen) challenge male power or submit to it.
Usha Vance, a Yale Law graduate and accomplished attorney, is publicly presented primarily as her husband's attractive wife, not as independent professional. Her educational credentials and career achievements are subordinated to her role as supportive spouse. The message: educated immigrant women are acceptable if they use their credentials to enhance their husbands' status while remaining politically silent.
The Functional Purpose of Categorization
This categorization system serves authoritarian consolidation:
First, it establishes visible rewards for compliance. Young women watching see Bondi, Noem, and Leavett rewarded with high-profile positions, media attention, and proximity to power. The path to success is clear: be attractive, be loyal, be silent on policy, and you can achieve visibility and position.
Second, it creates visible penalties for resistance. Women watching see activists labeled "childless cat ladies" and "fucking bitches," see protestors arrested, see organizers demeaned. The cost of resistance is social isolation, professional marginalization, and potential violence.
Third, it fragments women's solidarity. "Good" women—the young, attractive, compliant ones—are separated from "bad" women—the organizing, resisting, documenting ones. This prevents cross-category alliance that might threaten the system.
Fourth, it normalizes male violence against "bad" women. Once women are categorized as "fucking bitches" who are "childless cat ladies" engaging in frivolous "wine mom" activism, violence against them becomes more acceptable. They're not legitimate political actors deserving protection—they're troublemakers deserving suppression.
The Message to All Women
The categorization communicates clearly to all women: you can be ornamental or you can be dangerous, but you cannot be both powerful and political. Beautiful women can have visibility if they remain silent. Activist women can organize but will be vilified and marginalized. Professional women can succeed if they subordinate their careers to their husbands' advancement.
Women cannot be independently powerful while maintaining political voice that challenges male authority. That combination—the Sophie Scholls, the Emily Davisons, the Emma Goldmans, the Sue Tinchers—represents existential threat requiring elimination.
The 2025 categorization is sophisticated evolution of authoritarian tactics. Nazi Germany explicitly banned women from professions and political participation. The 2025 approach is subtler: women can participate, but only in acceptable categories and acceptable ways. Step outside those categories—become too political, too activist, too resistant—and you become dangerous. And dangerous women face consequences designed to terrify others into compliance.
The Synthesis: Pattern Recognition Across History
What Authoritarian Regimes Understand About Women
Across Nazi Germany, British suffragettes, American civil rights struggles, and 2025 America, authoritarians understand something fundamental about women's political participation: women's networks create accountability that threatens consolidated power.
Women organize communities. Sophie Scholl organized students at the University of Munich. Emily Davison organized with the WSPU. Emma Goldman organized anarchist groups and published Mother Earth. Sue Tincher simply stood on a sidewalk, but her presence—witnessing, observing—represented potential documentation and testimony.
Women bear witness. They document. They testify. They publicize. They mobilize others through their testimony. This creates what authoritarians cannot tolerate: narrative that contradicts state propaganda and evidence that enables accountability.
The authoritarian response is consistent: eliminate women who engage in political participation through imprisonment, execution, deportation, or violence. Make the elimination visible to terrify other women into silence. Frame the resistance as criminal—treason, domestic terrorism, obstruction, obscenity—to justify the violence.
The Speed of Transformation Matters
Nazi Germany transformed from democracy to totalitarian state in months, not years. Women who had professional positions in January 1933 were unemployed by year's end. University quotas restricting women to 10% enrollment were implemented rapidly. The machinery of oppression moved quickly once it began.
In 2025 America, 12,000 ICE agents were hired in four months—the fastest federal law enforcement expansion in history. Training dropped from six months to six weeks. Oversight offices were eliminated in a single day (March 21, 2025). Educational policy changes are being implemented through executive orders rather than legislation.
The speed serves a purpose: move faster than opposition can organize. Implement changes before public consciousness fully grasps what's happening. Create accomplished facts that become difficult to reverse.
When Americans ask "how did Germans let this happen?" the answer includes speed. By the time people realized the full scope, the machinery was operational.
The Economic Dimension
Both Nazi Germany and 2025 America understand that women's economic independence enables political participation. If women can support themselves professionally, they can afford to resist. If women depend on husbands for financial security, they become more compliant.
Nazi Germany eliminated women from professions, restricted university access, and promoted marriage loans with debt forgiveness for childbearing. The message was clear: economic security comes through marriage and motherhood, not professional achievement.
Project 2025's elimination of degree requirements for federal jobs, attacks on Title IX, proposals to dismantle the Department of Education, and emphasis on "biblical" family structures serve the same function: making women's professional advancement economically worthless while promoting economic dependence on husbands.
Violence Serves Multiple Functions
When Emily Davison was trampled by the King's horse, when Sophie Scholl was executed by guillotine, when Sue Tincher had her wedding ring cut off—the violence served purposes beyond punishing individuals.
First, it creates visible spectacle. Davison's death was filmed and shown worldwide. Scholl's execution was announced publicly. Tincher's arrest was witnessed by community members. The visibility terrorizes other women: this could happen to you.
Second, it establishes boundaries. Women can exist in designated spaces—kitchen, church, domestic life—but venturing into political space triggers violence. The boundaries aren't always explicit; they're enforced through example.
Third, it tests resistance. When the state uses violence against women and faces minimal opposition, it learns that escalation is possible. When Sophie Scholl was executed and German society didn't rise up, the Nazis understood they could continue. When Sue Tincher was arrested and federal authorities faced no accountability, ICE understood it could continue.
The Renee Good Effect: Using Killing to Threaten Compliance
The shooting of Renee Nicole Good on January 7, 2026, demonstrates this pattern with shocking clarity. Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and U.S. citizen, was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis. Within days, both federal agents and civilian supporters began explicitly invoking her killing to threaten others into compliance.
According to The Intercept, federal agents repeatedly invoked Good's death to threaten observers and demonstrators in multiple confrontations in the Minneapolis area. In one video posted to Reddit, a masked ICE agent screamed at a driver: "Stop fucking following us. Go home to your kids." The phrasing "learning your lesson" appeared repeatedly in agent interactions with civilians—widely interpreted as threats referencing the use of deadly force against Good.
Luis Argueta, spokesperson for Unidos Minnesota, told The Intercept: "That's a veiled threat, 1,000 percent. They can't exactly say it, but the way they reference Renee Good—they're using that to strike fear."
Even more brazenly, on January 8, 2026—one day after Good's killing—Jayden Scott, then-CEO of Harmony Investment Group in Bay City, Michigan, appeared at Minneapolis protests with a megaphone. According to ClickOnDetroit, video captured Scott shouting at anti-ICE protesters: "We executed one of you yesterday. We executed one of you yesterday, you understand that? We executed one of you yesterday. Don't get hurt. Don't get hurt. Don't get hurt. You guys keep playing stupid games, you're going to keep getting stupid prizes."
Scott called protesters "fucking terrorists" and urged "Patriots get out here. We need the backup." Two days later, on January 10, Scott resigned as CEO, posting on LinkedIn: "With recent developments in America, the board and I have decided, we have different views of the future of America."
The pattern is explicit: kill one woman, then invoke her death to threaten compliance from others. The agents using "didn't you learn your lesson" language understand what they're communicating—that resistance results in death.
The CEO shouting "we executed one of you yesterday" demonstrates how quickly civilian supporters integrate state violence into their own threatening rhetoric.
This is the third function of violence: it becomes usable threat against future resistance. Good's killing wasn't just punishment for her individual actions (video evidence shows her vehicle moving away from Ross, not toward him, when he shot her). Her killing became demonstration of what happens to women who resist, observe, or question federal operations—and that demonstration is now weaponized against others.
When Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, alongside Minneapolis and Saint Paul, filed an 80-page lawsuit against federal agents detailing "a litany of abuses," the complaint stated: "Defendants' agents' reckless tactics endanger the public safety, health, and welfare of all Minnesotans. Additionally, Defendants' agents' inflammatory and unlawful policing tactics provoke the protests the federal government seeks to suppress."
The violence creates fear. The fear creates protests. The protests justify more violence. The cycle serves authoritarian consolidation by demonstrating that resistance—particularly by women—costs lives.
Tear Gas: Gendered Violence Through "Crowd Control"
The weapons deployed against women protesters cause specific harms to female biology that function as additional deterrent to political participation.
Tear gas, widely used at U.S. demonstrations in 2020 and continuing into 2025, has documented reproductive impacts that disproportionately affect women. Reports from conflict zones including Bahrain, occupied Palestinian territories, and Chile documented increased miscarriages after tear gas exposure. Chile temporarily banned tear gas in 2011 after a university study suggested it caused miscarriages—though the ban was later lifted under pressure.
A 2021 study examining individuals exposed to tear gas during Portland, Oregon protests found nearly 900 people reported abnormal menstrual changes after exposure: intense cramping, bleeding that persisted for days, delayed cycles. Researchers suggest chemicals in tear gas may act as endocrine disruptors, interfering with hormonal function and potentially impacting pregnancy.
The National Teratology Information Service notes that while acute single exposure may not increase birth defect risk over the 3-5% background rate, this assessment relies on limited data—methodical epidemiological studies are difficult in uncontrolled, high-conflict situations where tear gas is deployed.
The use of tear gas against women protesters creates specific risks: pregnant women risk miscarriage, women of childbearing age risk menstrual disruption and potential fertility impacts, and all women understand that political participation may cost them reproductive health. This functions as gendered deterrent—the biological consequences of resistance fall disproportionately on women's bodies.
When federal forces deploy tear gas knowing these risks, they're weaponizing women's biology against their political participation. The tactic is sophisticated: it doesn't explicitly ban women from protest, but it makes protest biologically costly in ways specific to female bodies. Women must weigh not just arrest or injury—risks men face equally—but also reproductive health consequences men never confront.
The Role of "Good" Women
Not all women resist. This is critical to understanding how authoritarian systems succeed.
In Nazi Germany, 13 million women actively participated in Nazi organizations. They believed in Kinder, Küche, Kirche. They supported the regime. They benefited from it—receiving marriage loans, earning Mother's Crosses, gaining status through childbearing.
In 2025 America, many women support policies that restrict other women's rights. They believe in "traditional" family structures. They oppose abortion. They view Title IX protections as unnecessary. They support eliminating DEI programs. Some of these women work for ICE, Border Patrol, and other enforcement agencies.
Authoritarian systems don't need to repress all women—just the ones who threaten them. The women who comply, who embrace traditional roles, who don't organize or resist become allies in suppressing the women who do.
This is why gender alone doesn't predict political alignment. Women can and do participate in oppressing other women when they believe the system serves their interests.
The Warnings We're Seeing
The Convergence
What makes 2025 concerning isn't any single policy—it's the convergence:
Rapidly expanded male-dominated enforcement agencies with minimal training
Elimination of oversight mechanisms that provided accountability
Targeting of women who observe, document, or question federal operations
Systematic devaluation of women's educational and professional credentials
Restrictions on reproductive autonomy framed as protecting women
Rhetoric labeling resistance as "domestic terrorism"
Policies promoting "traditional" family structures through federal power
Economic policies making women's professional advancement less valuable
Each element alone might be explained as isolated policy change. Combined, they constitute a systematic approach to reducing women's political, economic, and reproductive autonomy.
The Historical Precedents
We've seen this before:
Nazi Germany restricted women's professional and educational opportunities while promoting childbearing as civic duty
British authorities force-fed, imprisoned, and used violence against suffragettes demanding political voice
American authorities deported Emma Goldman for advocating birth control and women's equality
In each case, the initial changes seemed modest. Professional quotas. Arrests for obstruction. Deportation of radicals. By the time the full pattern became clear, the machinery was operational.
The Question of Intent
Do 2025 policymakers consciously follow the Nazi playbook? This is the wrong question.
Intent matters less than impact. Whether current policies deliberately mirror authoritarian precedents or arrive at similar outcomes through independent reasoning, the result for women facing violence, losing professional opportunities, or having reproductive autonomy restricted remains identical.
The more relevant question: Do these policies create conditions where women's political participation becomes more dangerous, economically costly, and legally precarious? The answer, documented across Parts 1, 2, and 3, is yes.
What History Teaches
History provides warning, not destiny. The Nazi transformation wasn't inevitable—it required specific choices by specific people at specific moments. The suffragette victories weren't guaranteed—they required decades of organizing, sacrifice, and women willing to face violence.
What history teaches is recognition: these patterns are known. The playbook is documented. The outcomes are predictable. When male-dominated state forces eliminate oversight, target women who resist, operate with impunity, and serve power consolidation, authoritarianism is advancing.
The question isn't whether to recognize the pattern. The pattern is clear. The question is what Americans do with that recognition.
Conclusion: Pattern Recognition as Resistance
Sophie Scholl's last words were "Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?"
She understood that authoritarian success depends on isolating resisters—making each woman who stands up believe she stands alone. When Sophie and Hans dropped leaflets from the balcony, they were demonstrating that resistance was possible, that not everyone accepted the regime, that community existed even under oppression.
Emily Davison's gravestone reads "Deeds not words." She understood that sometimes resistance requires visible action that demonstrates commitment—even at tremendous personal cost. Her death galvanized the suffragette movement precisely because it demonstrated how far the state would go to suppress women's political participation.
Emma Goldman spent decades organizing, speaking, writing, and building networks even as she was repeatedly arrested and ultimately expelled. She understood that authoritarian regimes want resisters to self-censor, to give up, to conclude that continued resistance is futile. Her persistence—continuing to advocate for women's rights and workers' rights even in exile—demonstrated that resistance survives attempts to eliminate it.
The women in Part 1—Renee Good, Marimar Martinez, Dayanne Figueroa, Sue Tincher, Berenice Garcia-Hernandez, and others—may not have intended to become part of a historical pattern. They were shot for driving, dragged for fleeing, arrested for standing, detained for photographing. But their experiences, documented and shared, enable pattern recognition.
Pattern recognition is the first step of collective resistance. When one woman is shot, it's an individual tragedy. When multiple women are shot, dragged, arrested, and detained for constitutionally protected activities while male-dominated forces eliminate oversight and operate with impunity—that's a pattern. And patterns can be disrupted.
History teaches that authoritarian regimes are most vulnerable early, when the machinery isn't yet fully operational, when oversight mechanisms still exist, when public consciousness can still be raised. Nazi Germany succeeded partly because Germans didn't recognize the pattern until too late. The British suffragettes eventually won because enough people recognized state violence against women demanding voice as unacceptable.
Part 4 will synthesize these findings and examine paths forward—how pattern recognition translates to collective action, how historical precedents inform contemporary resistance, and how Americans can choose to disrupt authoritarian patterns rather than repeat them.
Because the most important lesson from history isn't that authoritarian takeovers are inevitable. It's that they can be stopped—if enough people recognize the pattern early enough and act accordingly.
Sources
This investigation draws on extensive historical research, contemporary reporting, and documented evidence from multiple independent sources:
Nazi Germany Historical Sources:
Wikipedia, "Women in Nazi Germany"
Grokipedia, "Women in Nazi Germany"
Alpha History, "Women in Nazi Germany"
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Women in the Third Reich"
Western Oregon University, "Women in Nazi Propaganda" by Jonathan Moch
University of Edinburgh thesis, "Women in German Society, 1930-1940"
Facing History & Ourselves, "Women in the Weimar Republic"
The Holocaust Explained (schools educational resource)
Nazi Social Policies research, Explaining History Podcast
Sophie Scholl and White Rose Resistance:
Wikipedia, "Sophie Scholl" and "White Rose"
National WWII Museum, "Sophie Scholl and the White Rose"
Women's History Network, "Sophie Scholl: Female Resistance in Nazi Germany"
A Mighty Girl educational resources
Smithsonian Magazine, "What Was the White Rose? | Who Were Hans and Sophie Scholl?"
Museum of Jewish Heritage NYC, "Remembering Resistance: Sophie Scholl and the White Rose"
Federal Foreign Office (Germany), "Sophie Scholl and the White Rose"
Zinn Education Project, "White Rose Members Executed"
Deutschland.de, "Sophie Scholl: Resistance fighter against the Nazi regime"
U.S. Suffragettes - Emily Wilding Davison:
Wikipedia, "Emily Davison"
Britannica, "Emily Davison"
London Museum, "Who was the Suffragette Emily Davison?"
University of North Carolina historical project, "Emily Wilding Davison (1872-1913)"
Exploring Surrey's Past, "Emily Wilding Davison"
LSE Democratic Audit blog, "The 1913 death of Emily Davison"
Biography.com, "Emily Davison - Suffragette, Quotes & Death"
McKay Library Special Collections, BYU-Idaho
Epsom & Ewell History Explorer
Taylor & Francis Online, "Remembering Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913)"
Emma Goldman:
Wikipedia, "Emma Goldman"
First Amendment Encyclopedia, "Emma Goldman"
Jewish Women's Archive, "Emma Goldman" and "Deportation of Emma Goldman"
Library of Congress, "Today in History - February 11" (Emma Goldman)
Archives of Women's Political Communication, Iowa State University
Embryo Project Encyclopedia, Arizona State University
Women & the American Story (New York Historical Society)
American Jewish Archives, "Emma Goldman, the 'Rebel Woman'"
First Wave Feminisms educational project
Project 2025/2026 and Contemporary Policies:
National Education Association, "Project 2025 and Higher Education"
Ms. Magazine, "Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025's Plans to Gut Women's Rights" and "Project 2026 Declares Open War on Women's Rights"
Insight Into Academia, "Project 2025: What Does It Mean for Education?"
The New Republic, "The Right-Wing Campaign to Bring Back Gender Segregation in Schools"
The 19th News, "Trump Project 2025 plan" and "How much of Project 2025 has actually been accomplished this year?"
National Women's Law Center, "Project 2025: What It Means for Women, Families, and Gender Justice"
PBS NewsHour, "Tracking how much of Project 2025 the Trump administration achieved this year"
Charlie Kirk and TPUSA:
Mediaite, "Charlie Kirk to 14-Year-Old Girl: College Is for MRS Degree" (June 18, 2025)
TikTok/@independent video documentation
Salon, "'You will find a husband': Charlie Kirk tells 14-year-old girl to get an 'MRS degree'" (June 19, 2025)
HuffPost, "Charlie Kirk Tells Girls To Go To College For A Really Retrograde Reason" (June 19, 2025)
Yahoo News, "This Is So Weird: People Cannot Believe What This MAGA Influencer Said" (June 23, 2025)
Freethought Now, "Charlie Kirk glorifies a life of subordination for women and girls" (July 17, 2025)
Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch, "TPUSA's Young Women's Leadership Summit vision for women" (July 9, 2025)
Spring Hope Enterprise, "In college for the MRS" (July 6, 2025)
Insider NJ, "On Charlie Kirk" (September 12, 2025)
Trump Administration Motherhood Policies:
Fortune, "The Trump administration wants women to have more babies" (April 23, 2025)
ABC News, "Trump administration looking at $5,000 'baby bonus'" (April 23, 2025)
iHeart, "Trump Considering Hitler-Like Incentives To Encourage Women To Have Babies" (April 23, 2025)
Raw Story, "New 'Motherhood medal' pitched to Trump once 'picked up steam' due to Hitler" (April 22, 2025)
The Telegraph/Yahoo, "Women could be paid $5,000 to have babies under Trump" (April 22, 2025)
Common Dreams, "Pushing to Eviscerate Head Start and SNAP, Trump Wants to Give Parents Medals" (April 24, 2025)
National Organization for Women, "The Trump Administration Thinks Women Are Only Good for Having Babies" (April 24, 2025)
Ms. Magazine and National Women's Law Center, "Trump's Pronatalist Agenda Weaponizes Motherhood" (August 26, 2025)
Democracy Now!, "Trump Administration Mulls 'Perks' to Boost Birth Rate" (April 22, 2025)
Tear Gas and Reproductive Health:
2021 Portland, Oregon study on tear gas exposure and menstrual changes (nearly 900 participants reporting abnormal menstrual changes)
National Teratology Information Service guidance on tear gas exposure during pregnancy
Reports from Bahrain, occupied Palestinian territories, and Chile on increased miscarriages after tear gas exposure
Chile university study leading to temporary 2011 ban on tear gas use
Research on endocrine disrupting properties of tear gas chemicals
Renee Nicole Good Killing and Aftermath:
The Intercept, "Federal Agents Keep Invoking Killing of Renee Good to Threaten Protesters in Minnesota" (January 14, 2026)
ClickOnDetroit, "'We executed one of you': Viral video shows Michigan CEO shouting at protestors" (January 13, 2026)
Wikipedia, "Killing of Renee Good"
Star Tribune (Minneapolis), "Renee Nicole Good identified as woman shot, killed by ICE in Minneapolis" (January 2026)
CNN, multiple reports including "New documents shed light on Renee Good's ties to ICE monitoring efforts," live updates from January 7-8, 2026, and "Anti-ICE protests held across US"
Al Jazeera, "'Abolish ICE': Tens of thousands in Minneapolis, across US, protest killing" (January 10, 2026)
NPR, "Nationwide anti-ICE protests call for accountability after Renee Good's death" (January 11, 2026)
Newsweek, "Minneapolis Urges Calm After ICE Shoots Man During Traffic Stop: Live Updates" (January 14, 2026)
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison 80-page complaint filed in Minnesota District Court
Parts 1 and 2 Sources (Referenced):
All sources documented in previous parts of this investigation, including CNN, PBS, ProPublica, Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Government Executive, and others
Note on Sourcing: This investigation prioritizes original reporting from established news organizations, academic research, museum and educational institution documentation, and official government records. Where controversial claims are made, multiple independent sources are cited. Historical parallels draw on scholarly consensus documented in peer-reviewed research and educational materials from institutions including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, major universities, and established historical societies.
Comments