This hysteria and fearmongering is nothing new. Since the end of World War II, every few decades, self-proclaimed “watchdogs” decide that America has a Nazi problem. In the 1950s and early ’60s, the ADL’s Arnold Forster and Benjamin Epstein made a cottage industry out of writing books warning about creeping Nazism on the American right. 1952’s The Troublemakers (“Intolerance is one of the most serious menaces in our country today!”), 1956’s Cross-Currents (“Anti-Semitism did not die with Hitler!”), and 1964’s Danger on the Right (“It has been estimated that some 20% of the American electorate can be grouped as Extremists on the Right Wing!”) are among Forster & Epstein’s greatest hits. In 1963’s The Extremists, New York Post editor Mark Sherwin claimed there was no difference between William F. Buckley and George Lincoln Rockwell (something tells me Sherwin’s nickname was not Señor Subtlety).
