“Who killed Ashli Babbitt?”

Our top domestic terrorist keeps asking that. He posed the question at a rally last week, on his fake presidential stationery the other day, and on Fox News yesterday. He thinks it’s a real brain teaser. The obvious answer is that he killed Ashli Babbitt, by stoking her blood lust to the point where she and other credulous cultists violently stormed a citadel of democracy in order to effectuate his con d’etat. She put herself in harm’s way on his behalf, and paid the ultimate price.

He, of course, purports that she fell for the greater glory of him, victimized by a mystery shooter who we should all be breathless to unmask. From his Fox News babblefest: “Why are they keeping that secret? Who is the person that shot an innocent, wonderful, incredible woman?…Who shot Ashli Babbitt? People want to know and why…I will tell you they know who shot Ashli Babbitt. They’re protecting that person. I’ve heard also it was a head of security for a certain high official, a Democrat. And we’ll see, it’s gonna come out.”

None of this would be worth mentioning if not for its creepy fascist overtones. His canonization of Ashli Babbitt, his attempt to sanctify her as a movement martyr, is straight from the early Nazi playbook. And we all know how that turned out.

Babbitt has become a blutzeuge. That’s German for “blood witness.” The Nazis awarded that status to “fallen” comrades who sacrificed their lives for the cause. They got a lot of propaganda mileage from honoring their so-called martyrs – particularly the 16 who were killed by police in the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s failed attempt to overthrow the government. Some of his closest associates were shot dead that day; one took a fatal bullet two feet away from Hitler (darn it). Indeed, Mein Kampf is dedicated to those men: “I dedicate to them, for common memory, the first volume of this work. As its blood witnesses, may they shine forever, a glowing example to the followers of our movement.”

Trump is working the same territory, but he’s not even as eloquent as Hitler: “It’s a terrible thing, right? Shot. Boom. And it’s a terrible thing.”

Never kind the fact that Babbitt, a QAnon sap, died while trying to breach the smashed window of a barricaded door that led to the House chamber where members were hiding in fear for their lives; what we most need to remember is that fascists need martyrs the way babies need milk.

Hitler staged a huge annual march on the anniversary of the Putsch, retracing the route to where the fatal shots were fired. The fallen were memorialized in two “temples of honor.” But arguably their biggest gimmick was to take Horst Wessel, one of their dead thugs (killed in a street brawl in 1930), and conflate him into a national hero, complete with an unofficial Nazi anthem called the “Horst Wessel Song.” (No word yet on whether we’ll get an Ashli Babbitt song, but keep checking Spotify.)

What surreal times we live in. We have a President of the United States who’s laser-focused on meat-and-potatoes issues like crumbling infrastructure, a guy who’s determined to make capitalism work better for the average citizen (witness his new executive orders)…and meanwhile, down in the sewer, in an alternative universe, a deposed demagogue is working to recast a violent insurrection, an anti-democratic Beer Gut Putsch, as some kind of righteous patriotic uprising populated by fallen “heroes.” Former conservative radio host Charlie Sykes warns us, “This does not just revise the past; it send a clear signal to groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers about the future: Stand by to fight again – because there might be a next time.”

The grand conspiracy against Ashli Babbitt (“It’s gonna come out”) will surely be revealed around the same time that Trump’s detectives return from Hawaii with proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth. But in the meantime, let’s remind ourselves of a fundamental truth about our imperiled national experiment: Democracy succeeds on an honor system, with all sides acting in good faith and respecting fair play. Are we strong enough to defeat the forces of dishonor?