Monday marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the infamous German concentration camp where some of the horrors of the Holocaust took place. The genocide, led by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in the early 1940s, took the lives of six million European Jews, around two thirds of the continent’s Jewish population at the time.
In 2025, one would think that everyone would agree that the Holocaust was a horrid part of human history, one we should recognize with shame. We should be able to acknowledge this dark chapter, one would suppose, and commit ourselves to not rewriting the tragic sins of the past.
Anyone — of any political stripe — should be willing to do the bare minimum, to simply state the obvious: Hitler and Nazism are bad and should be unequivocally condemned.
But as recent events have told us, the GOP can’t do this. The party who controls the White House and Congress, as well as Tennessee’s governorship and a supermajority in the state legislature can’t say what should be the most morally obvious thing to say.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported last week on a Hitler reference on the website for the Tennessee Federation of Republican Women, a far from fringe group in the Republican Party.