Republicans and Holocaust denial

Republicans are having difficulty deciding how they should think about Nazis and the Holocaust. 

Unbelievably, they even deny the actions they have publicly taken, propagate and then delete messages, verbally promote and legislatively limit teaching about what the Nazis did. They seem confused (Dah! ya'think?), but aren’t. Some Republicans cozy up to Nazis. Some Republicans, often the same ones, call Democrats Nazis. Many Republicans across the country are attacking the foundation of Holocaust teaching. These three arms of Republican behavior around the Nazis have a single result: (Danger!) to trivialize the Holocaust.

From 1933-1945 the world watched in shameful silence as the demonic anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler, attempted to exterminate the Jewish people from Europe.

Embracing Nazis always makes news. Carl Paladino, Republican nominee for NY Governor in 2010, Trump’s NY campaign chair in 2016, and current House candidate, is simply the latest fascist advocate. In a radio interview last year, which somehow did not become public news until this month, he praised Hitler: “He would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just, they were hypnotized by him. I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer.” Paladino combines admiration for Nazis and old-fashioned American racism: in 2016, he hoped that Barack Obama would die of mad cow disease and suggested that Michelle Obama be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

Amazingly, the overlap between conservative Republicans and neo-Nazism has a long history. Former Nazis and neo-Nazis were founders of the Republican Heritage Groups Council in 1969, which excluded Black and Jewish Americans. 

Some Republican candidates in the 2018, elections were open Nazis, white supremacists and/or Holocaust deniers: Vox said 5, the Forward said 9. Illinois Rep. Mary Miller approvingly quoted Hitler the day before the January 6 riots, and recently won the Republican primary.

More Republicans stand next to Nazis without themselves praising Hitler. Arizona Republican office holders and candidates appeared at a 2021, rally organized by Matt Braynard, former director of data and strategy for Trump’s 2020, campaign, featuring Greyson Arnold as a speaker, who calls Nazis “the pure race” and supports the neo-Nazi group Stormfront. 

Mroeover, the Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin appeared this year at the America First Political Action Conference, which is hosted by white nationalists who express antisemitism and deny the Holocaust. She posed for pictures with Holocaust denier Vincent James Foxx. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood proudly next to Nazi-sympathizer Nick Fuentes at the same conference, where he later praised Putin and Hitler.

White supremacy has become integral to Republican messaging. A Twitter employee in 2019 argued internally that getting rid of racist content would involve deleting Republican Party messages, including Trump’s: “on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material”. Prominent Republicans who have openly promoted the “white replacement theory” that Democrats are trying to replace real Americans with ethnic minorities in order to win elections include Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, and House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. FOX’s Tucker Carlson has been the most vocal propagator of this theory. German Nazis could not have been so bad if our political celebrities want to take selfies with their American cousins and parrot their racist nonsense.

It only seems contradictory that for many Republicans, including those who happily consort with American fascists, “Nazi” is a favorite label for politicians and government employees they don’t like. Donald Trump, Jr., in 2018 said the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform was “awfully similar” to Nazi Party platforms. Doug Mastriano, the Pennsylvania nominee for governor, compared Democrats’ gun control proposals to the Nazis in 2018 and again this year. In June 2021, Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry said Democrats were like Nazis who want to destroy America. Even though Trump’s most notable achievement was the development of a vaccine, Republicans as a Party have criticized every government effort to save lives through masks and vaccines. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert called government advocates of vaccinations “needle Nazis” and “medical brownshirts” in front of a cheering CPAC crowd in July 2021. Sen. candidate Josh Mandel in Ohio in April 2021 and Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson in January 2022 compared our government’s health policy to the Nazis. Lara Logan, a host on Fox News Media’s streaming service, said in November that Anthony Fauci “represents Josef Mengele”.

Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced the media for comparing Republicans to Nazis in May 2021, then said the Democrats were the “national socialist party”. When Nancy Pelosi announced rules in May 2021 requiring unvaccinated members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor, Greene said on a Christian Broadcasting Network program: “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany. And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.” After the American Jewish Congress tweeted back, “Such comparisons demean the Holocaust”, she insisted: “I stand by all of my statements; I said nothing wrong, I think any rational Jewish person didn’t like what happened in Nazi Germany, and any rational Jewish person doesn’t like what’s happening with overbearing mask mandates and overbearing vaccine policies.” She was so convinced of her imagery, she used it the next week in a tweet about one company’s vaccination policy: “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

Greene is not demeaning the Holocaust. Playing with Nazis, calling her opponents Nazis, and comparing herself to Jewish Holocaust victims all serve to diminish the Holocaust. Republicans are attempting to remake the Holocaust into a normal political event. If America’s doctors are like German Stormtroopers, if requiring one’s employees or our members of Congress to follow the most obvious public health rules is like murdering thousands of Jews and others every day for years, then the Holocaust as a singular event has disappeared.

Weeks later Greene apologized. As one of the most public faces of the Republican Party, she had gone one step too fast in pursuit of the Party’s goal of normalizing the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is a dangerous subject for American conservatives, because it was the mass murder of Jews by Christians. A few prominent Nazis espoused crackpot theories of Aryan paganism, and Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox Christians were also slaughtered in vast numbers. But the murder of 6 million Jews was the culmination of centuries of official Christian persecution. Teaching about the Holocaust should begin with the Bible and must explain the violent antisemitism of nearly all Christian denominations right into the 20th century. Anti-Jewish racism was embedded in Christian European and American societies and their legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white Christians. The recognition of Christian responsibility for Western antisemitism and the Holocaust led every Christian denomination in Western Europe and America after 1945 to repudiate centuries of their own dogma.

The wave of Republican censorship of public school and university curricula in response to the sudden American reckoning on race after George Floyd’s murder purports to be about “critical race theory”. When Florida’s Board of Education banned “critical race theory” from public school classrooms one year ago, the Board seemed to protect Holocaust education by also banning any teaching that denies the Holocaust. But their language points in the opposite direction. Critical race theory “distorts historical events” by asserting “that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” The Holocaust was caused by precisely such embedded white supremacy. And like American anti-Black racism, that white supremacy had deep roots in official Christianity.

I have seen my students become uncomfortable when confronted with facts about Christian persecution of Jews and Nazi admiration for American Jim Crow legislation in the 1930s as a model for the Nuremberg laws. The American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose 1916 eulogy for Nordic supremacy was entitled “The Passing of the Great Race”, was equally popular with American segregationists and Adolf Hitler, who called the book his “bible”. They were disturbed by the realization that German Jews, from the passage of Nuremberg Laws in 1935 until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, were treated essentially the same as African Americans here, whose racial persecution continued unabated into the 1960s. That same knowledge frightens today’s right-wing Christians across the Western world. The Christian nationalist parties in Europe all seek to diminish the Holocaust, especially the role played by Christians in their own nations: those in power in Poland and Hungary, and those trying for power in Germany and France.

The literal wording of recent Republican censorship laws bans education that doesn’t exist. The fake narrative that critical race theory is taught in public schools is the basis of this wave of legislation. A different and broader invention imperils Holocaust education: the claim in Wisconsin’s 2021 law that it is necessary to forbid teachers from indoctrinating their students with the idea “that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex and that an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex.” That kind of systematically damaging pedagogy was in fact integral to American education for centuries. The long racial reckoning which began in the 1960s demonstrated how white supremacy was written into all levels of educational curricula. The claim that American racism is over, the foundation of the attacks on critical race theory, ignores the continuing power and weight of adult Americans who were subject for years to those curricula, as I was.

Any hint that a teacher is promoting racial or gender superiority is likely to be called out without any help from new laws. The Republicans are not anxiously hunting for hidden examples of white supremacy or male superiority. That’s what they promote. They want their supporters to believe that they will reveal and defeat the teaching that blacks are superior to whites and that women are superior to men, exactly the kind of fake crisis that dominates the politico-cultural war.

Over years of interacting with teachers of the Holocaust, I never heard of any who told students that they bore “responsibility for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race or sex”. Holocaust teachers do mention that this was precisely what Christian churches had been saying for centuries about Jews. Such claims were fundamental to murderous persecution. But inducing guilt in today’s students is hardly useful in teaching history.

The discussions during the Republican effort in Louisiana to ban critical race theory display how the right-wing ideology of the Holocaust plays out at the state level. Republican state representative Valarie Hodges sponsored a bill in 2021 to mandate Holocaust education in Louisiana. Hodges was an avid promoter of the idea that Democrats are as bad as Nazis. She was part of the effort of conservative Republicans in the state to require the teaching of patriotic themes in American history and to block more teaching about America’s racial history. Hodges brought a Metairie resident to testify about the dangers of “communism” in our government: “To put it in Holocaust terms, the communists are now the Nazis and we are the Jews. They are the predators. We are the prey. We need to teach this history to our future citizens so we don’t end up like the Jews.” No Jewish organizations testified in favor of Hodges’ bill. The executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, speaking for professional historians in America, recognized the ultimate goal. “You’re saying, ‘You have to teach the history of the Holocaust, but you can’t teach the history of institutionalized, deeply embedded racism in the United States.’”

Rep. Ray Garofalo, the head of the Louisiana House Education Committee, sponsored a bill barring teaching about institutional racism. He then slipped and said the right-wing truth: any lessons about American slavery should include “the good, the bad, the ugly”. Garafalo’s other unprofessional antics made him such an easy target, that the Republican Speaker of the House removed him as chair, and replaced him with another Republican. All the bills about mandating and preventing subjects in Louisiana public education ultimately failed.

The legislative history of Republican censorship in Arizona offers similar clues about what the issues are and what will be attempted in the future. Arizona Republicans in the state legislature are unanimously in favor of putting an amendment to the state’s constitution before the voters. The bill’s lengthy section B enumerates seven varieties of fake complaints about non-existent educational practices. The key is section A: teachers in public schools from elementary to high school: “may not use public monies for instruction that promotes or advocates for any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex”. The bill’s sponsor, Michelle Udall, argued that, “If a teacher can’t teach [history] without placing blame or judgment on the basis of race, they shouldn’t be teaching.” She was clear about what she meant: it will be okay to say that a mass murder in a Buffalo grocery story happened, but it would “not be appropriate” to say that the mass murderer was a white supremacist. Her bill would insure that such teachers could be personally punished. Republicans in the Arizona House and Senate unanimously voted in favor. The bill was signed into law as part of a budget whose main item was a tax cut for better-off Arizonans.

How does one teach the Holocaust or slavery without detailing the responsibility of particular human groups for inhuman treatment of fellow humans of other groups based on racist ideologies?

Conservative politicians can count on well-funded organizations to create the local crises around curriculum that alarm enough parents to get educators fired. Nearly 900 school districts across the country, educating one-third of all public school students in the country, were targeted by anti-CRT efforts from September 2020 to August 2021. The most thorough study of the nationwide campaign against teaching about race concluded: “The anti “CRT” effort is a purposeful, nationally/state interconnected, and locally-driven conflict campaign to block or restrict proactive teaching and professional development related to race, racism, bias, and many aspects of proactive diversity/equity/inclusion efforts in schools, while — for some — gaining political power and control. The conflict campaign’s loudest, most powerful voices caricature actual teaching and stoke parent anxiety in a quest to control both schools and government.”

The real danger that Republican curricular censorship presents to Holocaust teaching is not the occasional eruption of stupidity, as in Southlake, Texas. Texas House Bill 3979 requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. Gina Peddy, the executive director of curriculum and instruction in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, told teachers,

“Just try to remember the concepts of 3979 . . . make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.” That caused a small scandal. Despite posing for photographs with Holocaust deniers, Republican politicians don’t yet demand that Holocaust denial become part of the curriculum.

But when Holocaust denial comes from within the community, from antisemitic parents, the new laws make teaching difficult. A North Carolina teacher wrote: “My SUPERINTENDENT asked us to advise students to ‘ask your parents’ rather than insist that the Holocaust was real. We received professional development to help us navigate this political environment safely. Our superintendent attended and told us to advise kids to ‘ask your parents’ instead of try to show evidence to a child whose family swears the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

New Republican laws and their emboldened approach to white supremacy will inevitably lead to an attack on any Holocaust teaching which goes beyond the discussion of prejudice to analyze the power of embedded racism and Christian white supremacy.

For Republicans, teaching the histories of America and of the Holocaust is too dangerous to allow. Those educations cause intellectual, then social disturbance. Both explain the role of embedded racism in Western society and the disastrous consequences. The Holocaust is over, and Christian nationalists all over Western society have been calling for Jews to get over it. But American racism and sexism are not. The success of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements in demonstrating the continuing influence of male and white supremacy has frightened Christian conservatives. They are using the inevitable discomfort of students learning that their predecessors committed genocide to try to sanitize the history they will learn.

The American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association, along with other educational organizations, released a statement in June 2021 opposing the new rollout of bills restricting the teaching of history. The statement focuses entirely on “the role of racism in the history of the United States”. Thus far, Holocaust teaching has suffered only collateral damage in the Republican war against American history. But without trivializing Holocaust education into anodyne lessons on intolerance, Republicans will never be able to cover up the historical truth that critical race theory foregrounds: racism has been and may still be embedded in American life.

Today teachers of American history are the targets of Republican censorship. Holocaust teachers, you’re next.

Donald Trump and racism: An Arizona point of view

Echo letter to the editor published in the Arizona newspaper the Tucson Daily Star (Tucson.com)

Trump reopens old wounds, turns a profit

Over 150 years ago, this nation’s bloodiest war ended slavery. Almost 75 years ago, we defeated the Nazis in a world war. Fifty years ago, the decades-old Civil Rights movement was finally changing systemic and legally sanctioned racism and bigotry and focused the nation’s attention on the injustices and horrors of segregation.

But here we are in the 21st century with a president whose blatant bigotry and racism earned him the enthusiastic support of neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. He even claims that these evil hate groups include “nice people.”

He has reopened all the wounds for his personal and political gain (the two cannot be separated in his case). He has figured out a way to turn back time. Will this ever end? If it doesn’t, then the notion of “American exceptionalism” is gone.

From Vance Holliday, Foothills Arizona

Republicans won't condemn Trump hate rhetoric - abandon moral leadership

Echo opinion published in the Baltimore Jewish Times

by Ron Klein and Dan Berger*

More than 400,000 Americans were killed during World War II, the majority fighting the war in Europe against Nazi Germany. 

During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered more than 6 million Jews and millions of others. The Nazi movement was based on a toxic combination of morally repugnant beliefs concerning racial supremacy and ultra-nationalism — so-called “blood and soil.” These obscene ideas were later discredited in Europe by the catastrophe of war but, unfortunately, the flames of racially-charged hatred were never fully extinguished and provided the foundation for the white supremacist movement in the United States.

Also — unfortunately and dangerously — they now appear to have entered the mainstream of American politics in the age of Trump, specifically in today’s Republican Party. Amazingly, today in 2018, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Holocaust-deniers, white supremacists and those who align with them are running for Congress — all under the Republican banner.

Arthur Jones of Illinois is an actual Nazi. John Fitzgerald of California is a Holocaust denier. Corey Stewart of Virginia has taken pro-Confederate and alt-right stances. Bill Fawell of Illinois thinks Israel was one of the “masterminds” of 9/11. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) all but admitted the truth of allegations that he addressed a white supremacist rally. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) held a fundraiser in July with Holocaust denier Charles Johnson after both had previously been criticized for associating with Johnson.


And those are just some of the Republicans running for Congress. The GOP is also plagued with candidates at the state level like Steve West, who promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on his radio show and said “Hitler was right.” On Aug. 7, he won a contested Republican Missouri House of Representatives primary with more than 49 percent of the vote.

The leader of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, equated innocent victims of violence with neo-Nazis protesting in Charlottesville in 2017. Trump’s refusal to unequivocally condemn the hatred in his own party and among his own supporters is an unacceptable abdication of moral leadership. Trump’s refusal to condemn those who espouse hatred and march under the Republican banner is itself encouragement and abetting of such behavior.

Sadly, Trump’s followers in the Republican Party are not doing much better. Some Republicans have condemned the Nazis, neo-Nazis and white supremacists representing their party in the November elections, but that is not nearly enough. At some point, we must all put country above party. We can argue about exactly where the line should be drawn, but is there any doubt that wherever the line is drawn, racists and anti-Semites are on the wrong side of that line?

We don’t expect leaders of either party to endorse candidates of the other party simply because of policy disagreements, no matter how strong, where reasonable minds can differ. But when hatred and intolerance are at issue, when values that hundreds of thousands of Americans fought and died for are at stake, we can and must demand more.

The refusal of Republican members of the House and Senate to endorse the Democrats running against these problematic candidates — not because they agree with them on policy, but because they have found the courage and conviction to stand up for American values — is nothing less than moral bankruptcy.


The issue is not whether both parties have members and candidates at the fringes who do not come close to representing the mainstream on certain issues. They do. The issue is that only one party has Nazis, neo-Nazis and white supremacists running under its banner, and the leaders of that party, the Republican Party, refuse to endorse the only Americans who can defeat them.

The failure of House and Senate Republicans to support a Democrat even over a Nazi makes them complicit. Statements are not enough. Only one of two candidates will win these races in November. Who do Republicans want to win? Only they can tell us, and so far, their refusal to do so speaks more than any statement, no matter how strongly worded.

Republicans have truly become the party of Trump if they cannot stand up against hatred and division. The American public — and particularly the Jewish community — will not forget the silence of Republicans in the face of rising racism and anti-Semitism, and will judge them harshly at the polls in November.

*Ron Klein is a former member of Congress from Florida and chairman of the Jewish Democratic Council of America. Dan Berger is a board member of the Jewish Democratic Council of America from Philadelphia.

Jews echo opinion of Trump and the Holocaust

Trum's voices of hatred:

An echo opinion published in the Houston newspaper, The Houston Chronicle by Richard Cherwitz*

As a Jew and proud American I am horrified and deeply offended by the increasing number of stories about the rise of anti-Semitism and racism both at home and abroad. 

Too often, we get embroiled in unproductive debates about whether Donald Trump is anti-Semitic and racist. Moreover, to suggest that he is directly the cause of this hatred and violent activity misses the point and obscures a legitimate worry.

What is clear is that Donald Trump's hateful rhetoric and actions have, at minimum, emboldened and empowered those such as the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. The best examples of this are Trump’s repeated unwillingness explicitly to condemn and disassociate from racist behaviors since he came down the escalator and announced his candidacy for president, as well as his suggestion that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville protest — all of which was taken as a wink and a nod to extremist groups. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that following his election these groups literally have come out of the shadows and are now a daily part of current events. The same is true in Europe as well, where the growing influence of nationalist leaders seems to be correlated with an increase in hateful discourse and behavior.

What especially troubles me is the context in which all of this is happening. First, political polarization, which may be at an all-time high and level of intensity, appears to feed on, as well as take advantage of and exacerbate, such hatred.

Second, we live at a point in history when the “Browning of America” unfortunately is regarded as threatening to some who for the first time will become the minority. Many of these people even blame their own problems on increasing numbers of the non-white population.

Third, and even more worrisome, is the fact that younger Americans, who as a professor I teach, as well as younger citizens of the world, do not have a memory or knowledge of the Holocaust that their parents and grandparents had. 

Several of my students told me last semester that, while they “believe” the Holocaust took place, they feel ill-equipped and unprepared to respond to those who suggest otherwise. 

Sadly, there are fewer individuals capable of making cogent arguments supported by more than opinion to rebut Holocaust deniers.

Fourth, and as has been repeated over and over in the last two years, too many people no longer have an understanding or appreciation of “facts” and truth.” 

All of these — and many additional factors — make anti-Semitism, racism and hatred more possible and tolerable.

The only antidote to this is awareness and resistance. The media has a professional obligation to expose this problem. Republicans, most of whom are good and decent people, must do what they haven’t, namely, speak out forcefully against the president’s racist discourse, telling him there will be no more business as usual. Put simply they must stop normalizing, protecting and enabling Trump simply because they fear political repercussions. Cowardice is no excuse for permitting unethical behavior; not reprimanding Trump is tantamount to agreeing with him.

Teachers must do a better job of educating students about the history of the Holocaust; but we must make sure the next generation understands the clear demarcation between “facts” and “opinion” and that statements like “the truth is not the truth” are unacceptable. 

They must have the wherewithal to argue effectively, always employing critical thinking skills.

And the rest of us, many of whom don’t follow or engage in politics, must avoid the complacency that existed in pre-Nazi Germany—a complacency that arguably allowed the rise of Adolph Hitler. Like many Germans then, we must stop saying this can’t or won’t happen in the United States. It is imperative that we have the courage to protest often and loudly, making clear “never again.”

Put simply, rather than merely debating whether President Trump is the cause of the problem or whether he himself is a racist and anti-Semitic, let’s move beyond partisanship, calling him out and vigorously resisting. While it may be trite to say, years from now all of us will be asked: What did you say or do to prevent this?

*Richard Cherwitz, Ph.D., is Ernest S. Sharpe Centennial Professor in the Moody College of Communication, University of Texas at Austin.