A famous image reminding that the Nazis started inside of elite German universities. Local Nazi orgs and “student activists” worked to bring Nazi ideals to German campuses.

I deal with Nazis—people who openly cite Nazi websites, share forged Talmud passages, and peddle claims that Jews "invented" the LGBT+ community. Some come from the far right, some from the far left. What unites them is the obsession with accusing Jews of being the “real” Nazis. Even when you point out their sources are lifted straight from literal Nazi propaganda, people rush to defend them, not the Jews they're targeting.

In modern times, everyone seems OK with calling Elon Musk a Nazi, pro-choice people Nazis, Jews defending themselves Nazis, just not the people who target and harass Jews.

Benjamin Kerstein’s latest piece, The Rise of the Anti-Nazi Nazis, is a sharp look at how this twisted inversion has become mainstream. He traces how fascist logic has been adopted under the guise of anti-fascism—and how it always seems to point in the same direction: against the Jews. Subscribe to his substack.

Link 1: https://benjaminkerstein.substack.com/p/rise-of-the-anti-nazi-nazis
Link 2: https://substack.com/home/post/p-160002598

Rise of the ‘anti-Nazi’ Nazis

Progressives think they own anti-Nazism while acting very much like Nazis themselves.
Benjamin Kerstein; Mar 28, 2025

"2017.03.26 Anti-Israel Protest, Washington, DC USA 01929" by tedeytan is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It often seems as if irony is the sole motive force of history. This was underlined on Monday when Columbia University Professor Reinhold Martin, also president of the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter, denounced the Trump administration’s attempt to hold his institution accountable for indulging a genocidally antisemitic campus movement.

“Right now, our public officials have not been especially robust in defending the institutions of higher education to which they send—many of them send—their children,” he told far-left taxpayer-funded radio station WBUR. “So, this is a moment of truth. We’re in New York in 2025 with echoes of Frankfurt and Berlin in 1933. That’s the context in which we need to understand this.”

Putting aside Martin’s inadvertent admission that the Ivy League is little more than a nepotism factory, it is difficult to fully unpack the astounding hypocrisy and bad faith of his claims. One hardly knows where to start.

Perhaps one can start by observing the larger phenomenon at work: The progressive left believes that it owns anti-Nazism. Literally owns it. Anti-Nazism is progressivism’s personal property, and no one else has any right to it. As such, progressivism can wield anti-Nazism as a weapon against anyone and anything it finds distasteful with total impunity.

Today, with campus antisemites stating at every possible opportunity that their goal is a second genocide of the Jews and engaging in the racist hate crimes necessary to prove it, we are faced with an irony that is world-historical in scope: Progressives use anti-Nazism to defend people who are very much like Nazis. Progressives then go even further and claim that these people are victims of Nazism.

I hope that, in making such claims, Martin is simply oblivious to reality. Indeed, I do not wish to believe in other possibilities. After all, while we should take the campus antisemites at their word when they proclaim their genocidal ambitions, it is theoretically possible for a privileged and pampered university professor to convince himself that we shouldn’t. We ought to hope this is the case.

However, I do know that, in intention or effect, Martin’s claims are unquestionably evil.

The reason is that, whatever their pretensions otherwise, progressives do not own anti-Nazism. In fact, they have no claim to anti-Nazism whatsoever. Genuine anti-Nazism can only lie with those who oppose genocidal antisemitism, because if Nazism is not genocidally antisemitic, then it is not Nazism. You cannot be anti-Nazi while defending genocidal antisemites. It is impossible.

Moreover, by claiming that antisemites are somehow victims of Nazism, progressives are engaging in an act of monstrous blasphemy. They are defaming the millions of Jews who died at antisemitism’s hands and appropriating the generational trauma of those who survived.

Historically, this is par for the course. Antisemites have always been happy to appropriate whatever they wish from the Jews and then spit in our faces. But it is no less disgraceful for its great age.

This is offensive enough, but progressives dig the hole even deeper: They claim that the Jews are Nazis. This blood libel is a staple of progressive rhetoric and wildly popular among the campus antisemites. In many ways, it has become part of “legitimate” discourse in academia. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fully convey the depth of the sadism and cruelty inherent in it.

It appropriates a people’s epochal trauma in order to claim that they are as monstrous as those who inflicted the trauma. It literally accuses the survivors of the crimes of Nazism of being Nazis. It then accuses their descendants of being Nazis; the Nazis who murdered and tortured their parents and grandparents. This is akin to the person who raped and murdered your daughter standing up in court and claiming that you raped and murdered your daughter. It is more than monstrous. It is satanic. And this is what Martin, in his bumbling way, is defending.

I will not engage in further condemnations, as they would be superfluous. The thing condemns itself with perfect eloquence. I note only the final irony that progressives may claim to own anti-Nazism, but in embracing genocidal antisemitism, they merely prove an essential truth: Jews are, by definition, inherently anti-Nazi, because by our very existence, we thwart Nazism’s supreme ambition.

The answer, then, to Mr. Martin and those like him, is to simply point out an essential truth: You do not own anti-Nazism. You cannot own it because you refuse to know what Nazism is. But we do know. We have met the Nazis, sir, and they are your friends and allies. Until you, at long last, admit to this, we reserve the right not to listen to a word you say.