I Compared Todd Blanche to Hitler’s Personal Lawyer. LinkedIn Called It Hate Speech

LinkedIn, the world’s largest online professional network, owned by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), removed my post this week for violating its policies against “hateful speech,” after I posted a comparison of U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to Nazi lawyer Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer.

In my now-removed post, I wrote: “Todd Blanche is Trump’s Hans Frank,” and included a link to History Today’s 2024 book review of Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Penguin Random House) by Richard Evans. 

The History Today book review said the author “asks what manner of men made themselves the Führer’s ‘paladins’.” In my LinkedIn post, I quoted from the book review: “Hans Frank, the Nazi lawyer who saw Hitler as a gift from God for the German people.” 

The comparison between U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was previously Trump’s personal lawyer, and Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer who eventually became lawyer for the Nazi party, is not a new idea.

Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has compared Blanche to Frank in her article on Substack Todd Blanche, the Latest Tool: How Autocrats Use Personal Lawyers. Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. Her New York Times bestseller Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, examines how authoritarian leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century. Ben-Ghiat wrote in an article:

“This essay places Blanche’s appointment in comparative perspective, looking at the fates and roles of other personal lawyers of autocrats,” Ben-Ghiat wrote. “Hitler’s Personal Lawyer: Hans Frank, an architect of the Leader Principle, served as Hitler’s personal lawyer starting in the Weimar Republic. Frank participated in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch as a stormtrooper, and attended the 1924 trial. He passed the bar in 1926 and started working for Hitler in 1927, representing the future Führer and other prominent Nazis in hundreds of trials. In 1931 he also became the Nazi Party’s legal advisor, a job he retained for over a decade.”

CNBC reported this week: “Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s Senate election if Republican incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan narrowly loses,” and the lawsuit “has raised concerns that the Trump administration may be meddling in the midterm elections.”

In August, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, issued a statement after Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis received a statement from Acting Attorney General Blanche regarding the Trump Administration’s so-called “anti-weaponization fund” and sweeping immunity deal for President Trump, his family, and their businesses, in order to clear the way for Blanche’s confirmation as Trump’s Attorney General. Rep. Raskin wrote:

“And Blanche has made clear that he is using his office as the country’s chief law enforcement officer to create structural ‘roadblocks’ to prevent the Trump family and their businesses from ever being held accountable for any of their corruption or lawlessness, including a torrent of suspiciously-timed stock trades, shady no-bid government contracts handed to companies the Trump family is invested in, or even allegations of sexual assault by Trump revealed in the Epstein Files.”

In a 2024 opinion piece for the Washington Post, “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler,” Mike Godwin wrote:

“But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”

Why does the comparison of Blanche to Frank matter? The description of Hitler’s People from the book’s publisher, Penguin Random House says: 

“Nearly a century after Hitler’s rise, the leading nations of the west are once again being torn apart by an untamed will to power. By telling the stories of these infamous individuals as human lives, Evans asks us to grapple with the compli­cated nature of agency and complicity, showing us that the distinctions between individual and collective responsibility—and even between pathological evil and rational choice—are never easily drawn.”

When claims of “hateful speech” become censorship

Ben-Ghiat has written about the dangers of authoritarianism and censorship:

“Authoritarianism is institutionalized bullying, and so it has always been. In the conclusion to Strongmen, I quote from the 1931 book Techniques of the Coup d’Etat by the writer and journalist Curzio Malaparte. He was a Fascist who liked to push the boundaries of the regime’s censorship, and he tried to warn Germans about Hitler based on Italy’s experiences with Mussolini.”

Nathan Wendland, a 13-year Army and National Guard veteran, commented on LinkedIn in response to the platform removing my Blanche-Frank post. Wendland wrote:

“It got pulled? That’s straight-up censorship. The truth when comparing people in charge of our government to historical figures cannot be defined as hate speech by any subjective standard. What you said is true. Blanch[e] is a corrupted person, Trump’s consigliere.”

As for the frequently bandied argument saying LinkedIn is a professional business site that should not include political posts, it is dangerously myopic to filter the political from the economic. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin wrote in an oped for the New York Times last week:

“Yet many Americans continue to underestimate one particular potential threat to our economic future: President Trump’s clearly expressed desire to interfere with and even usurp the midterm elections. Nov. 3 could be a defining test for the rule of law in this country, and both our democracy and our prosperity are on the line.”

I was unable to submit an appeal to LinkedIn to review my removed post, as I found the “Submit an appeal” button nonfunctional. I reached out via direct message and email to LinkedIn’s communications and trust and safety leaders, questioning my post’s removal. 

I did not receive a response from anyone at LinkedIn to my questions – What, specifically, in my posts did LinkedIn characterize as hate speech? What are Linkedin’s concerns about censorship? – but I quickly received this automated message from LinkedIn: 

“Initially, your post was removed for going against our policies. As part of our review, we now find that your post doesn’t go against our policies and apologize for the mistake. Your post is back on LinkedIn.”

However, only my commentary post about LinkedIn’s censorship of my post has been restored. My initial post, saying “Todd Blanche is Trump’s Hans Frank,” with a link to the History Today book review of Hitler’s People, remains removed.

The History Today book review of Hitler’s People said of its author, “Evans has stated that he wishes to come back to a question that has eluded him in his earlier writing on the Hitler years: how did this cohort, largely of men, come to support and work for a criminal regime led by a dangerous narcissist?”

It’s an important question, and with midterm elections a week away, one that all Americans should be asking, as Todd Blanche has emerged as Trump’s Hans Frank.

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