“Jugendverführer and Jugendverderber”: The Republicans borrow another strategy from Nazi Germany.
The GOP claiming to protect masculinity and youth — and referring to your opponents as child predators — comes straight out of the Nazi playbook.
I suspect you’re as tired as me of hearing how today’s Republican fascism parallels European fascism in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, the recent surge in anti-queer rhetoric from the US Right requires a brief lesson in history.
Ideas about defending masculinity and the traditional family, and about protecting youth from indoctrination, were key to Nazi propaganda campaigns. Numerous historians have covered how central ideas of masculinity and gender were to the Third Reich. Isaac Carmichael wrote in 2002 about how consciously Joseph Goebbels reinforced such messages in Nazi cinema and propaganda. But it was this bit that really caught my attention:
To combat fears of the prevalence of homosexual behavior, Nazi propaganda projected the image of gay men as “corruptors of youth” who would “lure ‘normal’ young men into depravity and thus spread the ‘epidemic’ of homosexuality.”
Carmichael cites Stefan Micheler, writing for the Journal of the History of Sexuality, also in 2002 (emphasis is mine):
“…the stereotype of the “homosexual”…
