This Yr. In Nazis

JD Vance is Merely the Latest Conservative Christian to Use Nazi Camps to Cleanse His Antisemitism Sins

These people are Nazi scum.

On Thursday of this past week, Vice President JD Vance visited the site of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, making him the latest in a string of American public officials to visit a former Nazi camp. The visit, timed to coincide with Vance’s trip to Germany for the Munich Security Conference, comes a year after Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and newly-installed most powerful person in the United States, visited Auschwitz last January.

It’s worth recalling the circumstances that led to Musk’s visit to Auschwitz a year ago. The visit came after months of antisemitic statements, including using his social media platform X to boost conspiracy theories accusing Jews of “flooding their country” with “hordes of minorities”; threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for being the “biggest generators of anti-Semitism”; and accusing Hungarian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor George Soros of attempting to “erode the very fabric of civilization” because he “hates humanity.”

Finally, in the wake of a threatened advertiser boycott with the potential to harm Musk’s bottom line, he did what any wealthy celebrity accused of antisemitism does these days: he made a ritualized visit to a concentration camp or Holocaust museum to have his sins of bigotry washed clean. (In Musk’s case, he also made a similarly ritualized visit to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who, of course, has a long history of giving kosher passes to far-right antisemites in exchange for their support for the most right-wing elements within the Israeli government.) Musk’s brief trip to Auschwitz was enough to win instant forgiveness for his sins of antisemitism.

Except, of course, Musk was not radically, instantaneously transformed by his time at Auschwitz. He was not magically cleansed of his antisemitism. In the year after his trip to the infamous Nazi concentration camp, Musk reinstated the accounts of Holocaust deniers and praised a Holocaust revisionist historian. In just the past month alone, Musk infamously performed a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration rally; joked about the Holocaust; told supporters of the German far-right party Alternative for Germany that Germany needs to “move beyond” its historical guilt for the Holocaust; and reinstated a briefly-fired 25-year-old government employee who had bragged about being “racist before it was cool” and called for the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

[Religion Dispatches]