Fox Business contributor Charles Payne argued that a businessman “may be a couple of years ahead of the curve” after he drew parallels between the treatment of the wealthy in America and “fascist Nazi Germany.”

On January 24, The Wall Street Journal published a letter to the editor comparing the alleged “demonization of the rich” to the boiling over of European anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. The letter, written by billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins, questions whether a “Progressive Kristallnacht” looms on the horizon:

Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?

Regarding your editorial “Censors on Campus” (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Tom Perkins

San Francisco

Mr. Perkins is a founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

In response to media criticism, Perkins defended his remarks during a January 27 interview with Bloomberg. Perkins admitted that Kristallnacht was a “terrible word to have chosen,” but reiterated that he neither regrets nor retracts his core argument that the rich are being demonized and persecuted in the United States.

The sentiment that America's ultra-wealthy are being singled out for persecution is shared by some voices in the right-wing media. On the January 28 edition of Fox Business' Varney & Co., contributor Charles Payne glossed over Perkins' demeaning allusion to the horrific, racially-motivated violence that defined Nazi Germany at the onset of the Holocaust. Rather than criticizing the paranoia of Perkins' comments, Payne argued that the wealthy have “justified rage” and Perkins “may be a couple of years ahead of the curve”:

Fox News has a history of facile and offensive comparisons of progressive economic or social policies with Nazi Germany. This is not even the first time a Fox employee has used Kristallnacht as the impetus for their faux outrage. In response to his recent indictment for violating campaign finance regulations, Fox darling Dinesh D'Souza wasted no time in parroting the "this is like Nazi Germany" line.

The fact remains, the United States in no way resembles Nazi Germany and there is no legitimate defense of Tom Perkins, or any other person, comparing Kristallnacht and other Nazi atrocities to protestors advocating in favor of better wages, affordable housing, and reasonable income tax rates for high earners. Perkins, a yacht-enthusiast who owns high-end property around the world as well as his own personal submarine, is not witnessing the sort of persecution faced by European Jews in the 1930s. The real Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938) saw intense racial violence in which 267 synagogues were destroyed, at least 91 innocent Jewish citizens of Germany were killed in the streets, and tens of thousands more were rounded up and placed in concentration camps. Most of them would die before Europe was liberated from Nazi oppression.