Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot and member of Roslyn High School’s Class of 1953, compared recent populist initiatives by the Democratic Party, Tea Party and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday to the rise of Nazi Germany.
Langone was one of dozens of the nation’s wealthy elite interviewed by the national news website Politico for a story in which “the 1 percent fights back hard and the effectiveness of the populist approach comes into question.”
“I hope it’s not working,” said Langone, a Sands Point resident and longtime GOP donor. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
The piece began by describing the Democrats’ interests in reducing income inequality, the Tea Party’s bashing of big banks and de Blasio’s pledge to increase taxes on the rich.
But according to the story, Langone was echoing remarks made by venture capitalist Tom Perkins in a letter to the Wall Street Journal in January in which he compared the Occupy Movement to the Kirstallnacht attacks on Jews in 1938.
“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,’” Perkins wrote.
“This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking,” he continued. “Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”
