DeSantis and his Florida State Guard militia draw eerie similarities with the Nazi Party

The Florida State Guard ought to be outfitted in brown shirts.

Ditch the military-style camos and other trappings of a well-supervised, highly trained, federally-authorized professional army that helps keep order in the aftermath of hurricanes and other natural disasters.

The Florida State Guard is more like a cosplay group of Y’all Qaeda commandos taking full advantage of the Florida taxpayer-provided hand-to-hand combat lessons.

It’s a volunteer force of Floridians whose primary qualification is that they aren’t convicted felons. They’re a group that owes its ultimate allegiance not to the Constitution but to the one man who dreamed them up.

Florida State Guard is nothing more than Gov. Ron DeSantis’ personal goon squad, a group of 1,500 unpaid toy soldiers that add a little muscle to the Florida governor’s dictatorial leanings.

DeSantis isn’t the first power-hungry autocrat who came up with the idea of creating his own militia to further his political career.

During the early 1920s, they were called the Sturm Abteilung, also known as the SA storm troopers. They were a paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party founded by the party’s up-and-coming political leader, Adolf Hitler.

They wore distinctive brown shirts, and their initial stated role was the relatively harmless task of providing security at Nazi Party meetings. Their mission gradually expanded into violently intimidating the Nazi Party’s political enemies and potential rivals.

This eventually turned the scapegoating and rounding up of marginalized groups, especially Jews, which allowed the Nazi Party to consolidate its power through the spread of manufactured fear and misinformation.

I knew from the start that there was something fishy about the revival of the Florida State Guard, which, like the Nazi brown shirts, were created to serve a political need more than anything else.

There was a brief period during World War II when Florida had a state guard to fill in while the Florida National Guard fought overseas. But it had long been disbanded.

Then three years ago, out of the blue, DeSantis and the Republican-led state legislature said a small civilian force of 200 volunteers was needed to supplement the Florida National Guard.

“The Florida State Guard will act as a civilian volunteer force that will have the ability to assist the National Guard in state-specific emergencies,” DeSantis said in announcing the plan.

The Florida National Guard, a military force that includes the Florida Army National Guard and the Florida Air National Guard, is made up of 12,000 highly trained soldiers and airmen.

They weren’t clamoring for help from a bunch of civilians. And this had nothing to do with post-hurricane relief.

The telltale sign was DeSantis calling for volunteers for the Florida State Guard behind a podium that said “Leave Us Alone.”

That’s not a message that speaks to recruiting first responders to help in natural disasters.

It’s more in line with a grasping, over-reaching governor looking to pick a fight with the federal government over something – anything – and wanting a private militia to dispatch in that political effort.

“Leave us alone” is a political message of insurrection.

By the time the Florida State Guard was funded last spring, the initial call for a modest unit of 200 volunteers and a $3.5 million budget had swollen to a militia of 1,500 volunteers working with a budget of $100 million of public money.

With a stated purpose “to protect and defend the people of Florida from all threats to public safety,” this civilian force, which had been granted immunity from liability from whatever mayhem it creates, was given arrest powers and funding plans that included money to buy boats, planes and helicopters.

Some early volunteers to the Florida State Guard quit when they realized they were getting combat training, not disaster relief drills.

One of the disillusioned volunteers told the New York Times that the training was more like a “military fantasy camp” than practical instruction on disaster relief.

And it’s getting worse. The state legislature is busy this month changing the law that revived the Florida State Guard. The changes would soften training requirements and eliminate the phrase “exclusively within the state” when discussing the Guard’s potential  operations.

The updated language in the new bill  also empowers DeSantis to use the militia during a “period of civil unrest, or any other time deemed necessary and appropriate.”

In other words, whenever DeSantis wants to flex his strongman street cred, he can play the tough guy by deploying his very own storm troopers.

DeSantis announced that he will dispatch his civilian militia this month to Texas to help state officials there defy a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on the removal of razor wire along the border.

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Yes, roaming to other states to defy the Constitutional authority of the U.S. Supreme Court is now part of the mission of Florida’s civilian militia.

We’ve come a long way from hurricane response. Do you see what’s happening here?

If not, maybe it would be easier to comprehend if DeSantis’ militia of civilian storm troopers were dressed in brown shirts.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: DeSantis' mirrors the Nazi Party with his Florida civilian soldiers