At 7:00 AM Eastern Time on Saturday, MSNBC officially rebranded to MS Now, and before lunchtime it had already hurled its first Nazi comparison. The offending party was Prof. Jason Stanley, who told Ali Velshi that local police departments need to thwart ICE just like a local policeman thwarted the SA, or Brownshirts, during Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.
Stanley huffed that, “ICE is lawless. And there does not seem to be any way of, as it were, policing ICE’s behavior. And that brings me to another point, which is that local police are really important here. And we learned about this from history as well. My grandmother talks about how on Kristallnacht in Germany, a local policeman helped a Jewish citizen escape from the SA.”
The absolute worst-case scenario is that ICE arrests someone who is a citizen and has to release them. That is regrettable, but it is not in the same universe as a massacre that saw nearly 100 people killed, 30,000 arrested for simply being Jewish, and 267 synagogues destroyed.
Stanley, however, continued, “The local police are there to protect the local residents. If somebody is doing something illegal to a local resident, whoever it is, the local police, it's their responsibility to intervene. So now that we've got this kind of lawless organization essentially invading American cities, these questions from history are now going to become much more salient in these lessons from history.”
Velshi responded by hyping what he considered some examples of what Stanley was talking about, “We've seen the examples, by the way, in Chicago and in Portland, of local police standing up to these federalized authorities. In fact, they—ICE is saying they're going into Charlotte, North Carolina, now. And last night, one of the first things that happened is the police department put out a statement to say, here's all the things we don't do as police, and we're not going to assist in these things. We are not here for federal law enforcement. It's not our remit, and we're not going to engage in it, and we're going to make sure that our officers are not involved in it. We're edging toward a confrontation between armed people in some cases.”
Stanley, being the one-trick pony that he is, hyped the idea that “to stave off authoritarianism, everyone just has to do their job. Police just have to protect their local residents. That's their patriotic duty. That's their job. Teachers just have to teach history. We've talked about this before, Ali. It's—we have a system, a rule of system of law. If everyone in this democracy does what they're supposed to do, teach history, if you're a teacher, protect residents, if you're a police, then we can get through this.”
He also urged viewers to see “extensions of patterns that we've already had. For instance, felon disenfranchisement was used to intimidate black voters in Florida recently from showing up, like arresting people saying, ‘Oh, you weren't legally allowed to vote. You didn't know that you had this felony ages ago.’ That was so—we're seeing that that's a similar tactic, and it's being directed against black and brown citizens to prevent them from engaging civically, to create a kind of dual citizenship, first and second class tier of citizenship. So we have to be aware of that as we move forward here.”
A map of the country where felons are allowed to vote and where they aren’t does not follow any obvious red state-blue state correlation, but that doesn’t matter to Stanley because the narrative that Republicans are all aspiring authoritarians cannot be subordinated to facts. MSNBC may have rebranded, but MS NOW is the same product with different window dressing.
Here is a transcript for the November 15 show:
MS NOW Velshi
11/15/2025
11:33 PM ET
JASON STANLEY: Because it's this—ICE is lawless, ICE is lawless. And there does not seem to be any way of, as it were, policing ICE’s behavior. And that brings me to another point, which is that local police are really important here. And we learned about this from history as well. My grandmother talks about how on Kristallnacht in Germany, a local policeman helped a Jewish citizen escape from the SA.
The local police are there to protect the local residents. If somebody is doing something illegal to a local resident, whoever it is, the local police, it's their responsibility to intervene. So now that we've got this kind of lawless organization essentially invading American cities, these questions from history are now going to become much more salient in these lessons from history.
ALI VELSHI: We've seen the examples, by the way, in Chicago and in Portland, of local police standing up to these federalized authorities. In fact, they—ICE is saying they're going into Charlotte, North Carolina, now. And last night, one of the first things that happened is the police department put out a statement to say, here's all the things we don't do as police, and we're not going to assist in these things. We are not here for federal law enforcement. It's not our remit, and we're not going to engage in it, and we're going to make sure that our officers are not involved in it. We're edging toward a confrontation between armed people in some cases.
STANLEY: Well, to stave off authoritarianism, everyone just has to do their job. Police just have to protect their local residents. That's their patriotic duty. That's their job. Teachers just have to teach history. We've talked about this before, Ali.
It's—we have a system, a rule of system of law. If everyone in this democracy does what they're supposed to do, teach history, if you're a teacher, protect residents, if you're a police, then we can get through this.
But we also are, let's face it, seeing extensions of patterns that we've already had. For instance, felon disenfranchisement was used to intimidate black voters in Florida recently from showing up, like arresting people saying, “Oh, you weren't legally allowed to vote. You didn't know that you had this felony ages ago.”
That was so—we're seeing that that's a similar tactic, and it's being directed against black and brown citizens to prevent them from engaging civically, to create a kind of dual citizenship, first and second class tier of citizenship. So we have to be aware of that as we move forward here.
