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In recent weeks, another Republican challenger, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, has been surging in Republican primary polls. In the most recent Iowa polls, he has even taken the lead from business mogul, Donald Trump. Despite his lack of political experience or any real credentials as a serious candidate, Carson has not had difficulty in finding media organizations who are willing to listen to his thoughts, and those thoughts are quite interesting.

Carson seems to have a preoccupation with the rise of Nazism in Germany, and has declared that he thinks the rise of a Nazi-like fascist movement in the United States is an imminent possibility. “If you go back and look at the history of the world, tyranny and despotism and how it starts, it has a lot to do with control of thought and control of speech.” Carson here is referring to what he sees as the excesses of political correctness in Washington, for which he blames President Obama. Carson has said that if voters want to better understand Obama, they should read Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf. He also thinks there is a real chance that President Obama will declare martial law and cancel the 2016 election.

Ironically, Carson himself is aligned much more closely with the fascist camp than Obama (or any mainstream American politician) is. Even in his concern for freedom of speech, the political correctness he worries about is driven by individual Americans. Meanwhile, he has declared that the United States government should be monitoring university campuses for liberal ideas. On Glenn Beck’s radio program this month, he advocated for censorship, saying that the Department of Education should “monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.” He later clarified that he would “put in very strict guidelines” to ensure that no conservatives had their rights limited in this way.

And Carson isn’t the only Republican candidate with fascist leanings. It becomes clear that we may have a problem on our hands when as mainstream and milquetoast a publication as Newsweek publishes an article titled “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” In the Newsweek editorial, Jeffrey A. Tucker writes, “This is how strongmen take over countries. They say some true things, boldly, and conjure up visions of national greatness under their leadership. They’ve got the flags, the music, the hype, the hysteria, the resources, and they work to extract that thing in many people that seeks heroes and momentous struggles in which they can prove their greatness.”

This is what Hitler and Mussolini did in the 1930s, and this is what men like Donald Trump and Ben Carson are doing today in the United States. They describe themselves as “anti-establishment” figures who have the strength to “make America great again.” They find a scapegoat to blame the nation’s problems on (for Hitler, it was European Jews, while for Trump it is Latin American immigrants). They appeal to nationalism, and offer to fix the wrongs inflicted on the nation by the scapegoated group. And finally, they claim they will defend the nation from the evils of socialism, and paint their political opponents as traitors who want to destroy the fabric of the country.

This is the direction the Republican Party has been heading in for years, and Trump and Carson are only the logical conclusion of a candidacy process that has rewarded the most extreme and populist candidates. Trump and Carson are currently both enjoying enormous popularity, but Hitler and Mussolini were both highly popular in their countries at the beginning – it is only in hindsight that the majority of the population realized what monsters they were. We can’t allow fascism to gain a foothold in our country. We need to reject Trump, Carson, and anybody else like them. We need a president who values our nation’s ideals of freedom and equality. I urge you to reject these men, and cast your write-in vote for Art Drew for President of the United States.