In one of his many previous careers, Charles Sasser was a police officer in Miami when the 1968 Republican National Convention came to town.

With the convention came nasty riots: Entire city blocks were burned down, and Sasser's police car ended up with 13 bullet holes in it before the ruckus was over.

But that was, relatively, nothing.

"We're going to see much worse than that now," Sasser warned in an interview with "The Hagmann Report." "This is just the beginning – just the beginning. We haven't seen anything yet."

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Indeed, the rumblings of social unrest are already apparent. The city of St. Louis dealt with a string of nights of violent protests, while on the campus of U.C. Berkeley, scheduled appearances by conservative speakers have been met with riots by antifa and other leftists.

Sasser thinks the rioters don't even fully understand the reason they're rioting.

"It doesn't matter what they're protesting. The protest doesn't matter," he emphasized. "It's the fact that they're out there shutting up people, shutting up the opposition, instilling fear. Hey, these guys are the Brownshirts. These guys are Hitler's Brownshirts. They're … stormtroopers. I mean, this is not new."

In addition to his four-year stint as a police officer, Sasser is a longtime historian and author. He sees startling parallels between today's violent left-wing rioters and the totalitarian thugs of yesteryear. It's a connection he explores in his newest book, "Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing."

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Sasser told "The Hagmann Report" audience that while communism and fascism are often thought to be on opposite poles of the political spectrum, they are actually the same thing. They both derive from Marxism.

He pointed out Antonio Gramsci, the well-known Italian Marxist theorist, became a fascist philosopher later in life. Likewise, Benito Mussolini, the notorious Italian fascist dictator, read plenty of Marxist literature and once considered himself to be a Marxist, describing Karl Marx as "the greatest of all theorists of socialism."

Sasser said the American progressives rioting today arose from the fascist branch of Marxism, not the communist branch.

"What we're having here is fascist techniques used by Marxists in order to take over and silence people like me and Ann Coulter," he said.

But it's not only the so-called antifa who are showing signs of fascism. Some of the best-known Democratic Party leaders in the U.S. have used language similar to the great fascists of old.

Sasser read a quote from Mussolini: "All is in the state and nothing. Nothing exists or has value outside the state."

He also quoted the early 20th century fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile: "For fascism, the state and the individual are one."

He then encouraged listeners to compare those two quotes to this line from a video shown at the 2012 Democratic National Convention: "Government is the only thing that we all belong to."

And this quote from Hillary Clinton: "Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."

"Now how close does that resemble quotes by Mussolini or Gentile or some of these other guys?' Sasser asked. "These are fascist quotes, and they're extremely dangerous because we don’t understand what is happening."

Charles Sasser's "Crushing the Collective: The Last Chance to Keep America Free and Self-Governing" is available now at the WND Superstore!