Former Vice President Al Gore rebuked the Trump administration in remarks at a climate crisis conference Monday night, comparing its "ongoing attacks on liberty" to Nazi Germany.
In his comments at the San Francisco Climate Week conference, Gore argued that the Trump administration's "scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented."
"With that in mind, I want to note that before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement — it was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it, but there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil," Gore said.
The former vice president, who has devoted his post-White House life to shining a light on climate change, said that immediately after World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped the Nazi Reich returned to Germany where they "performed a kind of moral autopsy" on the former regime.
The first step in Germany's "descent into hell," Gore said, quoting the philosopher Theodor Adorno, was "'the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.' He described how the Nazis 'attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.'"
Asked to comment on Gore's remarks, the White House pointed to a post on the social media site X from Communications Director Steven Cheung: "Usually those who yell the loudest about Nazis are often times using their same tactics themselves."
At the San Francisco conference, Gore focused on actions taken by the Trump administration to chip away at efforts to tackle climate change progress.
"It is abundantly clear, after only three months and one day, that the new Trump administration is attempting to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future and a deep reduction in the burning of fossil fuels," he said. "If you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource."
Gore's comments come weeks after his fellow former vice president, Kamala Harris, also spoke out about the Trump administration's actions.
“We are seeing those who are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats,” she said. “And these are the things that we are witnessing each day in these last few months in our country. And it understandably creates a great sense of fear.”
