Adolf Hitler

Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990-048-29A / CC-BY-SA 3.0

You think I enjoy talking about Hitler? Like, I have some bizarre fetish for the guy?

Believe me, it annoys me as much as it does you. I’m fatigued by it.

But, for better or worse (spoiler: worse), we’re neck-deep in Hitler this election, with a half-dozen GOP candidates (not fringies but party-endorsed) having expressed, to one degree or another, fondness for the guy, with the richest man in the world boosting Hitler fanboys, with the largest-following rightist influencers on Twitter being Hitler fanboys (and fangirls; didn’t mean to leave you out, Candace), with Tucker Carlson drawing his biggest numbers by doing pro-Hitler shows, and with the most monied conservative donors making generous offers to Nazis.

I never thought I’d see the day when “you can sell more books if there’s a swastika on the cover” (an old publishing adage mainly applied to spy novels) became “you can get a major party’s nomination, millions of dollars in monetization, and the support of the richest man on earth by promoting the swastika.”

Remember, I’m the guy who was canceled, and is still canceled, and is unpublishable but for Takimag and, for now, Substack, because of Holocaust-related things I said thirty years ago as a kid, and today the highest-engagement idiots online cite me daily.

How can this not interest me? Still, I’m not here for me, I’m here for you, my wonderful readers—the most intelligent and good-looking people on earth (buy me a beer!). So, as I stated on Substack recently, after the election, no more Hitler pieces until 2025 and then only if there’s an obvious reason for them.

Hang with me—the embargo starts soon. I may have to bring him up in my postelection wrap-up, but after that, he’s evacuated to the east for the rest of the year.

But for today, well…I gotta write about that Daily Mail/J.L. Partners poll last week. According to the results, 21 percent of Zoomers think Hitler had some great ideas! (21 percent is more than one-in-five…I have to explain that for my Zoomer readers, who don’t know math.)

As I’ve said to every sexual partner I’ve ever had, let me ease into this gently.

Because the story isn’t really about Zoomers but boomers.

A few days ago, a brilliant friend who wishes to remain anonymous because he has a life pointed out that the most boomer thing of the Trump era was QAnon/MAGA (falsely) naming Tom Hanks as the captain of Hollywood’s “pedo ring.”

Hanks was chosen because boomers know him, and only because of that. QAnon needed a name your Mike Lindell pillow-buying Trump-loving MAGA grandpa would recognize. Because QAnon/MAGA depend so much on codgers (especially in terms of money; sure, there are plenty of young MAGAs, but they don’t have boomer bank accounts), the “pedo ring” had to be pinned on a celebrity who (a) has boomer name recognition and (b) isn’t dead.

As a result, QAnon/MAGA totally missed the real culprits behind the pedo sex parties.

[Spoken in old man voice] “Diddy? What the Sam Hill is a ‘Diddy?’ Is he that fella from the Sullivan show who used to tap-dance in a fedora? I loved that guy. There was a guy with a talking mouse, too. Topogio Winces or something like that.”

Even when Bill Cosby was arrested for sex crimes, most MAGAs chose the angle expressed by MAGA influencer and Fox personality David Marcus: “Bill Cosby is an American hero. And he was destroyed because the left couldn’t stand his idea that black people can achieve in America.”

Yes, MAGA could’ve gone with “Cosby’s likely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sexual misdeeds of black celebrities,” and people like Marcus would’ve looked prescient. But give older MAGAs the choice between a “based” angle regarding blacks (“even the ‘respectable’ ones can’t keep it in their pants”) and a “Democrats are the real racists” angle, they’ll always choose the latter.

Angles, see? It’s always about angles.

When I was a kid, there were two “moon hoax” angles: “we never went” and “we went, but the government found aliens and they’ve been hiding it ever since.” The former prevailed because you can always trust the far right to choose the dumbest possible option (to be clear, both “hoaxes” are equally false, but “we never went” is provably false, while “they’re hiding aliens” is by the nature of the argument something that can’t be proven false via evidence).

So that brings us to Hitler. Neil Armstrong found him living on the moon in a crater with Eva, and Nixon covered it up.

Okay, maybe that’s not true. But when it comes to choosing the wrong angle, boomers really fucked up when it came to Hitler.

One of the favorite talking points of mainstream conservatives for the past several decades is “Hitler was a socialist.” It’s a reaction to the left’s constant attempts to tie everything rightist to Hitler. It’s just the Hitler version of “Democrats are the real racists.” They call you racist, you reflexively say, “No, you are.” They say, “You own the Hitler legacy,” you reflexively say, “No, you do.”

The “Hitler was a socialist” talking point trickled down from boomers to Gen Xers to millennials—from Sowell and the Mises Institute gang to David Horowitz’s acolytes to Glenn Beck to Rand Paul to Dinesh D’Souza to Jonah Goldberg and everyone at Townhall to Steven Crowder (who was only able to make the Hitler/socialist case by taking a quote from Gregor Strasser, a man Hitler murdered for being a socialist, and misattributing it to der Führer).

By the dawn of the Trump era, it was pretty much canon on the mainstream right: Hitler was not right-wing—he was a progressive socialist. Hell, the congressional MAGAs even took that argument to the House floor!

The “Hitler was a socialist” thing often reaches levels of surreal absurdity. In 2021, the popular conservative “street artist” Sabo posted a photo on Facebook of WWII anti-Nazi partisan Lepa Radić about to be hanged. Sadly, I can’t recall the exact caption, as Sabo’s FB was nuked so the link I saved has my angry response but not his original post, but basically the dude declared “this young woman so badly didn’t want to live under socialism that she fought to the death, preferring execution to the horrors of socialized medicine!”

WWII in a nutshell: socialist Nazis vs. people rejecting Canadian-style health care. That’s what the whole war was aboot!

In fact, Yugoslav partisan Radić was a straight-up communist, to the extreme left of socialists, and she was fighting not to defeat socialism but to replace Nazism with Stalinism. Nobody fought Nazism because of an aversion to free health care; ordinary East Europeans risked and lost their lives because the Nazis sought to ethnically cleanse Eastern nations and make the inhabitants slaves or corpses (as would’ve been the fate of Poles and Russians).

I argued the merits of that silly “Hitler was a socialist” thing in a previous column. What I want to discuss here is the effect that talking point has on Zoomers. Because it helps explain the Daily Mail poll.

Much like how QAnon missed the boat on pedo parties because of a limited scope of cultural hipness, boomer “Hitler was a socialist” advocates and their descendants have suffered—sorry, made us suffer—because of their lack of understanding of the Zoomer mind.

Zoomers, regardless of their ideology, are plagued by anxiety. It doesn’t matter the extent to which that anxiety is justified; Gen Z is defined by it. Study after study—every study on the topic, in fact—confirms this. Fear of not being able to afford the basics: fear of not being able to afford health care, or a house, or early retirement, or retirement at all. Fear of not being able to marry or afford kids. These anxieties define this age group; over two-thirds of Zoomers report daily strain from these fears. Many, if not most, have lost faith in major American institutions, especially Wall Street and capitalism in general.

Now here come the Republican boomers and Gen Xers, and their only mental image of a young conservative is Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties. A kid who can’t wait to be on Wall Street! Supply-side economics rules! Yay junk bonds! Mallory, bring me my Hayek.

Tell that kid that Hitler was a socialist, and he’ll go, “Ew! Gross!”

But right-leaning Zoomers? What do they hear when you tell them that evil Hitler was in favor of free health care for his volk and redistribution of wealth from the “banksters” and government handouts to young couples who have kids? A year ago, The Wall Street Journal reported on the explosion of interest in socialism among Zoomers. Most Zoomers, right or left, are very open to socialist ideas. But right-leaning Zoomers are also obsessed with being based. So if you tell those kids that Hitler was socialist and racist, they’ll hear “socialist and based!” and voilà, you’ve made a Hitler fan.

This is literally how you create Zoomer Hitler fanboys. Rightist Zoomers want a government safety net, and they want it from a based leader, not some faggoty open-borders globalist.

“Hitler was a socialist who put his people above others” makes these kids love Hitler more, you boobs.

Add another factor: Zoomers refuse to read anything longer than a meme. No Zoomer’s gonna read the exceptionally significant debate of 1930 between Hitler and Otto Strasser (Gregor’s brother) in which Hitler—not yet in power—quite clearly explained that for him socialism was just opportunism, something to lure the dirty-faced commoners, the workers in factories he dismissed as dolts but whose votes he needed in the upcoming election. To learn why Hitler was not a “Canadian-style health care” sweetie-pie, you have to read. Zoomers don’t.

The account of that Hitler/Strasser debate runs 5,614 words. Can’t fit that in a meme!

A perfect storm: a generation of fearful illiterate kids bitter that Gen X and boomers “had it better” and salted the earth for those who came after. Friendly to socialism whether they’re left or right, with the rightist ones also worshipping “based.” And here come the boomer/Gen X conservative geniuses saying, “Hitler was a racist socialist, but don’t worry—the oldies you despise killed him real good so that we in America can live in freely with our bootstraps and flags and crippling debt.”

Today’s Zoomer rightists would not be friends with Alex P. Keaton; they’d beat the shit out of him.

To be honest, my only surprise regarding that Daily Mail poll is that it’s only 21 percent.

Wanna help keep it from going higher?

Knock it off with the “socialist Hitler” crap. It’s false, and it’s Nazifying the kids.

Of course, according to Tucker and the Wilks Brothers and Musk and the pro-Hitler GOPs, that’s a good thing.

Well, you guys goose-step off that cliff together. Me? In a few weeks I’ll have better things to talk about.