Co-Chair of Measure 1 Committee Compares Dominant North Dakota Republicans to Nazis

Dina Butcher is a co-chair of North Dakotans for Public Integrity, the local front group for Hollywood activists looking to create an ethics commission and limits on political speech in North Dakota’s constitution. She’s the token Republican for the group, which claims to be bipartisan, but she sure doesn’t seem to like Republicans all that much.

In a recent Storycorps interview for Prairie Public Radio, which she recorded with two members of her family, Butcher says she sees elements of Nazi Germany in the North Dakota Republican Party’s dominance of elected office in our state.

[mks_pullquote align=”right” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]…it seems Butcher’s motivations in backing this supposedly bipartisan measure is defeating Republicans who she kind of thinks are maybe Nazis.[/mks_pullquote]

“I am concerned that we are getting to be a one-sided democracy where there is no balance,” she says in the interview, which you can listen to in full here.

“I began to worry about this a few years ago in the whole issue of our state Legislature being so predominantly Republican as I have been my whole life,” she continues. “When you have just one party in charge of everything there is a tendency to get overly aggressive on singular issues.”

Agree with it or not, that’s probably not unreasonable criticism. Power can be corrupting. Concentrate too much power with a certain faction of people and you can get problems.

But then Butcher, who notes that her father was a Jew who fled Germany in 1939, compares North Dakota’s Republican-dominated state government to Nazi Germany.

“The Nazis had confiscated his property and taken away his rights,” Butcher says.

“That’s the crux of the story is that I am very conscious when one party is too much in charge,” she continued.

“That does hit really close to home when you talk about all the things that are happening here,” one of Butcher’s family members says in response to the comparison.

In summary, it seems Butcher is motivated by a desire to defeat Republicans who she kind of thinks are maybe Nazis.

Or, at the very least, potential Nazis.

An odd motivation for someone who claims to be part of a bipartisan initiated measure campaign.