Tinpot in Tinseltown

from the abandoned Nazi fortress in Los Angeles, to today’s Hollywood executives, to the history of the United States and all of Western Civilization

When I heard a rumor there was an abandoned Nazi bunker in Los Angeles, I had to find out more. I looked into it, and learned Herr Schmidt, possibly a German spy, convinced Norman and Winona Stephens to spend $4 million 1930s dollars (about $97 million in 2025) to build the Murphy ranch. It was to be Hitler and the Third Reich's headquarters in America.

I got a group of friends together to go explore this odd relic and ruin.

Massive water and fuel tanks, stepped hillsides for growing food, ruins of a barn for horses, ruins of the rumored mansion where the group (referred to as the silver shirts) held their events, the old gate and driveway that they'd surely planned to deck out in swastikas after America fell, so many concrete stairs going down into this canyon nestled in the mountains, not far from Santa Monica on the coast.

As we emerged from exploring and returned to the fire road to walk back to where we'd parked, I saw the Pacific Ocean below, and the valley from the coast to this spot of planned domination.

I could visualize the Japanese landing craft making a beachhead, connecting up with the silver shirts, and for the rest of the day could picture red, white and black swastika banners on the lampposts of every road as Hollywood would have been transformed into the propaganda arm of the Reich in the New World.

But the legend is, the FBI rounded up the people at Murphy Ranch in the week after Pearl Harbor was attacked. Herr Schmidt's vision fell into disrepair, was briefly used as an artist's colony in maybe the 70s, even was home to Henry Miller the novelist at one time, and then, rumor is the city or county demolished the remaining ruins sometime in the last ten years. The silver shirts' plans dashed.

Or were they? A merger last month places an "ombudsman" at CBS to make sure the public airwaves they broadcast on contain what the president wants, and only that. The company even committed further to spending $20 million on public service announcements that support causes important to him.

Is it a stretch to say that people cosplaying as the Third Reich in Los Angeles in the 1930s are some how related to the compliance of media and entertainment companies with the wanna-be-autocrat President? Maybe. But the presence of fascist ideas in American culture is not recent. Glorification of authoritarian rule, suppression of dissent, extreme nationalism, enforced unity, control of media, militarism, scapegoating minorities, rejecting of democracy, and the subordination of individual freedoms to a single-party state’s power aren't even new ideas for the period of the existence of the United States. And to some extent before that too.

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Any democracy, every democracy, is always at risk of collapsing into autocracy, from the very first. Legend is that Rome decided not to have kings anymore, and so created the first modern-ish democratic republic, because of a sex crime committed by someone close to their king (see Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece for an artistic sort of recounting of events). Legend is the Romans exiled their last king.

But their purely democratic-ish republic gave way in not too much time to Empire, and with it Emperors with awfully king-like executive powers. France, shortly after their revolution, also stumbled into Empire and Emperors too (they got better). The instability and loss of broad confidence in republican (little R) institutions made a return to monarch-like Emperors easier in both cases (which were different in other ways I'm not gonna delve into here).

I am abbreviating a ton of history and shoving those two examples toward the Greek historian Polybius' idea of anacyclosis (and Polybius was probably riffing on Plato, Aristotle and earlier thinkers, and was later discussed by Cicero and others). Bear with me as I try to take thousands of years of political theory and write them into an ill-fitting sentence.

Anacyclosis is kinda a mash of Western ancient political thought about a familiar cycle of political revolution: monarchy becoming tyranny, becoming aristocracy, becoming oligarchy, becoming (not quite modern) democracy and finally landing on mob-rule (ochlocracy or mobocracy).

But the United States, as the first modern (relative to what came before) democratic republic, sort of avoided that sequence or cycle.

Now I will oversimplify our history. Sure, the United States first tried out the loose affiliation of the Articles of Confederation after the American Revolution, before finding it unworkable and writing the Constitution. And sure the country tore itself apart in bloody conflict in the Civil War after decades of missteps intended to avoid Civil War. And sure, yet again, the Business Plot coup attempt in 1933 (same basic time the compound in Los Angeles was being built) got uncomfortably close to unmaking American Democracy and FDR's Presidency. And, yes: during most of U.S. history, huge swaths of the population weren't allowed to vote, or have human rights, and so by modern 21st Century democratic (little D) standards: it was pretty un-democratic (little D again). But: the U.S. did serve as the first modern instance of a sort of continuous democratic republican government (both little D and little R) on Earth.

The United States has perhaps teetered through echoes of a sort of anacyclosis-like cycle, or a disjoint similar sequence, during our whole history. As the pendulum of public opinion and political power/s has swung, the ebb and flow of centralized power and decentralized power shifts, a rise and fall of loud calls to do one thing, and then shortly after do the opposite: all have been present throughout the American Experiment. With a Constitution that includes provisions for it to be changed (the Amendments), changes via non-violent revolutions have been possible. And, for almost 250 years, the United States had by and large solved what the Roman Republic never did: succession, the peaceful transition of power. The U.S. had basically solved that, until January 6, 2021 that is.

“It cannot be repeated too often that nothing is more fertile in prodigies [remarkable or extraordinary occurrences] than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty [harder to learn than how to use than freedom].”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

And now here we are today, over six months into this Presidency, and the President is working to: suspend habeas corpus (which was basically invented way back in 1166), figuratively and literally erase parts of the U.S. Constitution and consolidate all power in the President. History not reconciled and not resolved can bleed into the present and future. It is bleeding.

It's not landing craft, and not yet red, white and black swastika flags hanging from the lampposts, but the Silver Legion of America, those silver shirts legend says were hauled away by the FBI, seem to persist. But instead of in a self-contained early 20th Century compound in the mountains of the Pacific Palisades, instead of at that ranch named for a likely fictional mining heiress named Murphy and funded from Berlin, here we are all these 84 years later: they have the boardrooms of Skydance/Paramount/CBS, and also the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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© Copyright August 9, 2025, David August, all rights reserved davidaugust.com

David August is an award-winning actor, acting coach, writer, director, and producer. He plays a role in the movie Dependent’s Day, and after its theatrical run, it’s now out on Amazon (affiliate link). He has appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, on the TV show Ghost Town, and many others. His artwork has been used and featured by multiple writers, filmmakers, theatre practitioners, and others to express visually. Off-screen, he has worked at ad agencies, start-ups, production companies, and major studios, helping them tell stories their customers and clients adore. He has guest lectured at USC’s Marshall School of Business about the Internet.