After Charlie Kirk was assassinated there was some nice-sounding talk about toning down the inflammatory political rhetoric, but some on the left didn’t get the memo. After Kirk’s memorial service, some internet-dwelling lefties compared Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s speech to that of future Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s 1932 speech about Horst Wessel. Snopes’s Nur Ibrahim set about fact-checking this claim on Thursday, but couldn’t bring herself to give it a false label. Instead, she just observed how there are “rhetorical similarities.”
The problem was clear right away, as the first part of Miller’s speech Ibrahim chose to compare was when he said, “The day that Charlie died the angels wept. But those tears had been turned into fire in our hearts. And that fire burns with a righteous fury that our enemies cannot comprehend or understand.”
That was supposedly comparable to Goebbels’s, “So our dead comrade Horst Wessel wrote, and we are fulfilling his prophecy. The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us — their political days are numbered.”
The supposed parallels got even more tortured from there. Nur noted how Goebbel’s speech was called “The Storm is Coming” and then quoted Miller, “When I see [Kirk's widow] Erika and her strength and her courage, I'm reminded of a famous expression: ‘The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot withstand my strength, and the warrior whispers back, I am the storm.’ Erika is the storm. We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion.” 
That is a famous line of unknown origin. For instance, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt uses it as a password in Mission Impossible: Fallout. There is nothing Nazi-like about it. Additionally, given Miller’s is calling Erika the storm, it is impossible to listen to her speech about the Christian duty to forgive your enemies and come to the conclusion that she would endorse a Nazi-style takeover of America.
Nur, whose response to reports of Hamas beheading babies was to warn about Islamophobia, next quoted Goebbels as saying, “You are the witnesses, the builders, the will-bearers of our idea and our worldview.”
Miller as saying, “Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities… We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create.”
That is basic Western Civilization and American exceptionalism rhetoric. Nur somehow missed the absence of “Berlin” or “Munich” or anything that could be affiliated with Nazism in Miller’s remarks.
For her final comparison, Nur cites Goebbels as saying, “Well, we the people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, 15 million people have joined in an army of revenge.”
As for Miller, he said, “They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.”
As if all the other comparisons weren’t incredibly forced in order to give this accusation credibility, what Nazis and conservatives consider good, virtuous, and noble is not the same.
That, however, did not stop Nur from claiming, “Whether Miller directly drew from Goebbels' speech is pure speculation, though both relied on propaganda's rhetorical tools that political figures have used throughout history. Criticism of Miller over his alleged history of promoting white nationalist and neo-Nazi views, as well as his restrictive immigration policies, is necessary context.”
It was only then that Nur informed readers Miller is Jewish, “We have previously covered Miller's background as the descendant of asylum seekers who escaped anti-Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe.”
It is hard to imagine an article about surface-level comparisons to Goebbels being written about a Democrat. It is not enough to say Goebbels and Miller both used the idea of building things. You need to look at what it was they say was being built.
