The Right in 2025 Sounds a Lot Like the Nazis in 1925
Today’s far right may know it’s wrong to talk about a “superior race,” so it just frames it as a “superior culture” instead.
Calling out the fascist takeover of the global right has become sort of a controversial topic in Western political discourse. In the UK, Zack Polanski, the increasingly popular leader of the British Green Party, received considerable pushback when he called Nigel Farage, the leading far-right voice in UK politics, a fascist – even from traditional left allies. In the US, House Speaker Mike Johnson, among others, blamed the left for the assassination of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk, who was frequently branded a fascist by his critics. Kirk “had a podcast,” the Heritage Foundation put it, he was not “a radical, or a Nazi, or a fascist”.
To be honest, this is partly true: As children of the West, brought up on the legend of the Greatest Generation, Farage and those like him probably hate Hitler. Charlie Kirk, in fact, rejected the Nazi label and condemned neo-Nazis. But their rhetoric is becoming disturbingly similar to foundational Nazi ideas: that those who are different are inferior and deserve their fate – only now with a different, more contemporary flair. Today’s far right knows it’s wrong to talk about a “superior race,” so it frames it as a “superior culture” instead.
It might sound hyperbolic to say the modern right-wing rhetoric is essentially the same as Hitler’s 1925 rhetoric, but I mean it in the most literal way possible. The modern right might not call for extermination camps, but then again, neither did Hitler 100 years ago. And it is this 36-year-old Hitler, the one who wrote Mein Kampf in 1925, that has most in common with the modern right.
Don’t believe me? Ok, let’s try this. When was this text written? 1925 or 2025: