i've been fuckin saying this for a while but the zoomer generation has basically grown up with no tangible connection to ww2 and the events that transpired and thus they are going to have little sensitivity to it. like the millenial generation still grew up with grandparents who served or even just lived through it so in general i'd say we're pretty reluctant to joke about it but zoomer's grandparents are boomers so the connection is just not there like it was for us.
idk maybe it sounds like bullshit to others but i'm not surprised at all when zoomers do this kind of thing.
That’s way too simplistic and naive of an explanation.
There has been a concerted effort by far right and far right adjacent “but technically just conservative politicians” for decades to push this shit. It has been accelerated by far right believers who saw the potential of early tech and the internet to further radicalize people which has morphed into the current online edgelord/NRx/post-left situation and its more mainstreamed christofascist pushes (see “The War on Everyone” by Robert Evans for a quick intro).
You’re also ignoring that the far-right and fascist movements were present before, during, and after WW2 in the US. They mostly couched their fascist beliefs in anti-communism, but the John Birch Society has been around since 1958, the US had McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Southern Strategy, Hofstadter’s
The Paranoid Style in American Politics, constant fearmongering of “globalists,” and so much more. Add to that that WW2 troops and regiments were highly racist and segregated. And that many of the social policies the Nazis adopted were extensions of American eugenic projects and many widely accepted political and social positions in the US.
Americans (of which I am one) like to pretend that we were some kind of virtuous because we fought Nazis but it’s not true. I guarantee you so many of those WWII vets hated Jews, Romani, and gay people but just didn’t think they deserved death camps. Or if those death camps were for black people, they would be ok with it. You can’t say familial connections stopped people from being racist when the US was running concentration camps of Japanese-Americans the entire Second World War and grew on the back of genocides against Indigenous Americans that are perpetuated today via economic means.
The fact is that racism and bigotry is embedded in US history and will be until it’s actively eradicated. Most of the time, it’s subtle but we’re just at a point in society where those groups and people who agree with them feel confident to be more open about it or people who want to flirt with the aesthetic without thinking believe they should be allowed to. It has nothing to do with the historical distance from the Holocaust or whatever.
EDIT: This kinda shit happened alongside fascism’s rise in Europe. The US just wasn’t dealing with the devastation of WWI so it didn’t take hold but don’t pretend like the US was some ethical outlier at the time:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot