Gen Z’s Hitler Problem - And What’s Fueling It

“Jews are the reason why the healthcare system is collapsing.”

“Hitler had a way to take out large swaths of Jews for a reason.”

These insane statements, made by a few beautiful and giggling women on a podcast with 1.5 million followers, are not the product of the open internet or platforms like Rumble or X. They are the result of something much deeper, something that began with the left in the 1970s and ends with the right of today. The video, which garnered millions of views, is now triggering a deep reckoning within the American right.

Watching it reveals women from different and mixed racial backgrounds, including a Black stripper, a white dancer, and several Latina women, speaking with feminine softness (a current trend on the American right) about how the Holocaust was justified because “the Jews were plotting something against Germany.” Then we hear that perhaps six million Jews weren’t really killed in the Holocaust. Finally, we are told that there may arise a need to kill the Jews of America.

There is no doubt that America has created something new in the global sky Afro-Nazis.

What is the source of this? The foundation lies in the fact that the moral world order we knew since 1945 which used Auschwitz as a moment of moral awakening as a moral tautology intended to prevent people from doing evil and repeating such horrors at least in the West slowly unraveled after being pushed to the limit by the left. It was the left that brought discourse to the absurd point where every second person is potentially a Nazi.

The right, honestly, and especially Gen Z, got tired. It decided if I’m already being called a Nazi maybe I should go and find out what that even means.

Philosophically speaking, perhaps it’s good that the morality of Auschwitz faded. We want to live in a world where ethics are primarily theological or natural not a historical lecture. A world where people don’t need the horrors of the Holocaust to know right from wrong but can turn to the Bible or to the writings of great ethicists. A world where people don’t need German-made morality based on the killing of God’s children the Jews in order to forge from their blood a new moral order that from the start required the genocide of the people who gave the world a sublime, universal, humanistic ethic.

But it turns out that while the story of Auschwitz became less relatable or credible no one bothered to revive the biblical story. And all that happened was a return to viewing the absolute taboo of Jew-hatred as something tiresome. This same taboo which originally fueled the antisemitic narrative that provided moral cover for a Bible-less West over the last seventy years and which was thoroughly eroded by the global left. A chasm opened up sometime between 2017 and today.

It must be acknowledged the radical left exploited Auschwitz and the concept of racism for decades to silence people in cynical and unfair ways even here in Israel from expressing conservative views.

But between that and the celebration and agreement with Nazism as we see today among many millions of America’s younger generation from all races the shift seems to have happened quite rapidly.

Indeed in the absence of theology and humanism making their way into civil society and with the addition of an unholy cult of white supremacists Black antisemites and Muslim antisemites we have arrived at something that goes far beyond historical revisionism.

Something that does not merely signal the end of guilt over Auschwitz and the end of using Auschwitz as a tool to remember the sins of history and prevent extreme nationalism we have reached acceptance and longing for those very things.

And here we learn a lesson about the nature of ethics. When it is based on a precedent whose context and temporal dimension are real then the moment those elements disintegrate the moral credo itself loses relevance.

Ethics are capable of enduring especially when their dependence on time memory and particularistic language diminishes.

Toward the end I must say I have for years criticized the political use the global and Israeli left made of the Holocaust. For years I grumbled and warned of the price to be paid for calling every nationalist a Hitler and labeling anyone who prefers their own race a hidden Nazi.

That criticism of mine was valid.

For heaven’s sake, who on the Israeli left hasn’t used the Holocaust in a sick way to prevent Israel from being openly a Jewish state? Everyone from Aharon Barak to Yair Golan.

I will not now claim in hindsight that the left’s obsessive attempts to control the discourse and weaponize the Holocaust were justified by the terrifying trends now emerging from the American right.

I will only say that the right did not prepare a religious or moral alternative for this moment of fatigue with time-and-identity-based ethics.

The right’s resistance to the cynical use of morality derived from Auschwitz as a universal leftist interpretation aimed at stopping it from implementing sane national policies has now among the younger generation become not just a rejection of learning morality from Auschwitz but a celebration and glorification of Auschwitz.

And finally one of the most puzzling things in this entire story is that suddenly the American left is completely silent.

The same left that screamed Trump is antisemitic for no reason and that his movement is antisemitic for no reason suddenly now that it cannot exploit the rise of real antisemitism among the young right for political purposes namely to attack Republicans during election season suddenly it abandons the Jews to their fate.

Now the question arises what will happen next What is the moral Rubicon America must cross to become a fully antisemitic nation To replace the sin of slavery with the sin of antisemitism

That answer remains unknown.