Seeing that “The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students,” I am reminded that the Nazis had their own Project 2025, by which I mean that they had prepared a lot of radical legislation so they could hit the road running if they ever took power. When Adolf Hitler was made chancellor on January 30, 1933, a flood of new laws followed.

As pertains to higher education, two major laws were enacted in April. The first, passed on April 7, was the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” which effectively fired almost all Jewish professors. The second, which passed on April 25, was the “Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Institutions of Higher Education.” This latter law’s name was changed from the “Law against the Foreign Infiltration of German Universities” to make it less plain to the outside world that it was intended primarily to target Jewish students, most of whom weren’t foreign at all. It’s a reminder of how widespread the view was in Germany at the time that German Jews were not a natural part of the domestic population.

The overcrowding law immediately resulted in a large reduction of Jewish enrollment in universities. But the Nazis had a broader agenda than anti-Semitism. They wanted to ensure that all German institutions operated according to Nazi principles, and that Nazi ideology was the only ideology taught to the German people. This effort took many forms, beginning with making party loyalty a higher priority for faculty hiring and student acceptance than academic achievement. The Nazis infiltrated and took control of the student fraternity system, and they introduced physical training and indoctrinating lectures and events at the expense of traditional classwork.

One of the reasons the Nazis felt these efforts were necessary is that the academic world in Germany prior to their ascension to power was largely unsympathetic to their cause. By this I do not mean that academia was free of anti-Semitism. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, just as American academia recoils from the MAGA movement’s disdain for science and truthfulness, German academia saw the Nazis as hostile to their values. Academia had to be brought to heel.

Antagonism between intellectuals and conservatives isn’t new. President Richard Nixon once said to Henry Kissinger, “Never forget the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times.” J.D. Vance later approvingly quoted that line from Nixon about professors in a 2021 keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference entitled, ‘The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Hitler himself helped define this antagonism in Mein Kampf: “The function of propaganda is . . . not to weigh and ponder the rights of different people, but exclusively to emphasize the one right which it has set out to argue for. Its task is not to make an objective study of the truth, in so far as it favors the enemy, and then set it before the masses with academic fairness; its task is to serve our own right, always and unflinchingly.”

His point wasn’t just that “academic fairness” and “objective study of the truth” are ineffective in convincing the masses, but also that those practices are naturally opposed to propaganda and efforts to unfairly violate people’s rights. Monarchial or strictly financial conservatism sides with the favored few over the many. Cultural or religious conservatism favors the majority over vulnerable minorities. In either case, conservatism is reliant on propaganda and unconcerned with fairness. Just because Hitler was confident that his propaganda would trump education, that doesn’t mean he would tolerate the competition.

It must be whip-sawing for many American Jews to see Trump attack universities with the same tactics that Hitler used but this time ostensibly in the name of combating anti-Semitism rather than making it the official policy of the state. But the commonality between Trump banning foreign students from Harvard and Hitler’s “Law against the Foreign Infiltration of German Universities” is that both aimed to control freedom of thought and put natural political opponents under their control. The idea was made explicit in Vance’s 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference: “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do … We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.”

Consider, as the Guardian recently reported, that “Donald Trump characterizes colleges as ‘dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics’, and student protesters as ‘radicals’, ‘savages’ and ‘jihadists’ who have been indoctrinated by faculty ‘communists and terrorists,” and compare it to this 1942 quote from Hitler:

“When I recall my teachers at school, I realize that half of them were abnormal. . . . We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics!”

For Hitler, Marxism was a Jewish Plot, and ridding universities of Jews was essential to fighting Marxism. But everything about National Socialism was pseudoscience and pseudo-solutions for petty bourgeois and working class resentment. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s war on vaccines is no more scientific than Reich Minister for Food & Agriculture Richard Walther Darré’s Blut und Boden racial theories. Trump’s promises to the left-behind and forgotten were replaced by tax cuts for the rich just as quickly as Hitler’s promises to the immiserated were replaced with half-rations of food assistance.

Facts and statistics tell a story Trump can’t control, but he can prevent the story from being told. What is needed is party loyalty, not experts and not science. That’s what the ban on international students is actually about. It’s the same now as it was in 1933, and pretending it is about fighting anti-Semitism just adds insult to the injury.