Four Times Ted Nugent Compared Political Opponents To Nazis

Special Programs Guns & Public Safety

Written by Timothy Johnson

Published

National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent lashed out at media who covered controversy surrounding his campaign appearances with Texas Republican governor candidate Greg Abbott by comparing members of the media to Joseph Goebbels, who served as Hitler's Minister of Propaganda.

Controversy has been swirling in the Texas governor's race following Abbott's decision to include Nugent at campaign events, in spite of Nugent's recent characterization of President Obama as a “subhuman mongrel” and his lengthy history of vile attacks on women.

Nugent has responded by calling videos of his offensive commentary “lies” and “inaccurate” and also sent a series of tweets on February 19 comparing CNN and other unnamed members of the media to Goebbels:

CNN has run numerous segments on the Abbott-Nugent controversy, with CNN host Jake Tapper calling out “insane and racist talk” from Nugent and Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer noting that the term “subhuman mongrel” is similar to language used by the Nazis “to justify the genocide of the Jewish community.” Nugent mentioned Blitzer in a separate tweet, writing, "@WolfBlitzer is a journalist & Im a gay pirate from Cuba." PunditFact rated Blitzer's claim about Nugent's language to be true.

Here are four examples of Nugent comparing his political opponents to Nazis:

  • While representing the Outdoor Channel as a spokesman at a gun industry trade show in January 2014, Nugent compared Jewish film executive Harvey Weinstein to Goebbels. Nugent also called Weinstein a “subhuman punk,” a “brain-dead idiot,” “a descendant of the ultimate putz,” and added, “I don't know if Harvey Weinstein has had a lifetime of drug and substance abuse, but he certainly sounds like it. You have to be brain-dead to believe that the gun-free zones of Chicago and Nuremberg [Germany] in 1938 are a desirable condition.”
  • In March 2013, Nugent compared Obama to “a German in 1938 pretending to respect the Jews and then going home and putting on his brown shirt and forcing his neighbors onto a train to be burned to death.”
  • During a July 28, 2013 concert in Nashville, Tennessee, Nugent told the crowd that his song Stranglehold “will be the soundtrack to taking back America from that lying racist in the White House, from the Attorney General that runs guns to Mexican drug gangs, to those criminal pieces of shit in the IRS, to the jack boot Nazi motherfuckers in the Department of Justice.”
  • In August 2013, after facing widespread criticism for his racially charged commentary about Trayvon Martin and the African-American community, Nugent stated, “I'm like a black Jew in Nuremberg 1938 and the Brownshirts can't stand me. So I'll just keep derailing their trains, shall we say.”