Henri Philipe Pétain meeting Nazi Germany Chancellor in Montoire, just months after signing an armistice agreement that surrendered more than half of France’s territory to the Nazis. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Certain material is potent enough to get people to override what they already know is right. Once someone proves that material works, it gets reused — on new targets, in new packaging — for as long as using it stays free. Hitler is the proof that such material exists. Churchill is the proof that yielding to it was a choice, not an inevitability. And today’s DSA-aligned “neo culture” is the proof that the same material is back in circulation, retargeted.

Hitler proved the material works. Millions of Germans followed instructions they knew, on some level, were wrong. Hitler didn’t overcome that knowledge — he found the one material potent enough to defeat it: antisemitism and the conspiracy theories carrying it, already centuries old — blood libel, pogroms, “hidden Jewish hand” myths circulating in Europe long before he was born. His innovation wasn’t the material. It was scale: organizing scattered, local hatred into a national instrument, giving millions explicit permission to act on a prejudice they’d already been primed for.

Churchill proved giving in was never automatic — which is why rehabilitating Hitler requires discrediting Churchill first. You can’t sell moral capitulation as profitable without first taking down the man who proved it wasn’t required. That’s the project historian Andrew Roberts describes on The David Frum Show: revisionists recasting Churchill as bought and controlled by “the Jews,” a claim carried furthest by podcaster Darrell Cooper before Tucker Carlson’s 33 million listeners. It’s the same “hidden Jewish hand” material Hitler used, aimed backward at the man who resisted it — and it collapses on its own timeline. Churchill’s friend Bernard Baruch gave him financial support with no strings attached; others left him money only in their wills, meaning he couldn’t have known its scale, let alone acted in exchange for it, until after he was dead. The conspiracy requires money that could only have arrived after the purchase would already have had to happen.

The same material is circulating again, on a new target, through a new production method. “Neo culture” — my term for it — isn’t a formal ideology but the informal way today’s DSA-aligned left manufactures political fame by rewarding whoever transgresses furthest, fastest, on camera. It’s “neo” because the packaging is new (protest footage instead of a green room, a phone instead of a studio) and “culture” because it’s become the water the pipeline swims in, not a strategy anyone chose. The protest-to-platform pipeline that produced Zohran Mamdani, Francesca Hong, and Darializa Avila Chevez runs on the same logic reality TV and Cooper’s podcast both run on: attention accrues to whoever pushes furthest past what a room will tolerate.

What’s doing the pushing is anti-Zionist rhetoric functioning as a shorthand villain — “Israel” standing in, structurally, for the role “the Jewish bankers” played in Cooper’s telling of Churchill. It’s the central material, not one tactic among several, because of what kind it is: not criticism of a specific Israeli government or policy, but opposition to the state’s existence itself. A state’s existence is binary in a way its policies aren’t, which makes rejecting it outright maximally transgressive — the fastest route to visibility, the surest way to distinguish a candidate from a merely liberal one. Housing and health care move slower and ask more of an audience. Israel is the one subject where maximum transgression is available on demand.

One difference from Hitler’s era matters: In the 1930s and ’40s there was no State of Israel to target, only a scattered, stateless people. Today’s version aims at something Hitler’s never had to be — not diffuse hatred of a people without a homeland, but explicit calls for the destruction of an actual country and the people in it. That’s not a smaller target. It’s a more concrete one.

And as with Hitler, the mechanism runs on what doesn’t push back. Democratic officials who’d challenge almost any other line within their coalition largely don’t challenge this one; institutions that police rhetoric closely elsewhere treat this material as outside their jurisdiction. It isn’t that every activist in that pipeline is antisemitic — it’s that the mechanism selects for transgression, and antisemitism, redirected at a state instead of a man, stays disproportionately represented in the inventory because nothing else carries as much pre-loaded shock value, and because using it has stayed nearly free.

The mechanism has one input: cost. It runs wherever using this material is free and stops wherever it isn’t — the entire difference between Hitler’s era and Churchill’s response to it. Making it expensive again starts with elected officials: withheld endorsements, primary challenges funded the way they’d be run against a candidate who used racist language, loss of committee assignments rather than a statement issued after the fact and forgotten. It extends to institutions enforcing rules already on the books, and to the audience that makes the whole economy run: editors declining to book the guest whose only distinguishing material is the transgression itself, donors pulling funding the way they already do when a figure crosses other lines.

Hitler proved this material could move millions past their own conscience. Churchill proved, in the same moment, that it didn’t have to work — because enough people made resisting it cost something to skip. Today’s revisionists are trying to erase that second proof so the first stands alone, and DSA-aligned “neo culture” has learned the same lesson Hitler did: This is the material that works best, and it will keep getting used for exactly as long as it keeps costing nothing to use.

Karen Lehmann is a journalist, photographer, and columnist based in Washington, DC. She blogs for The Times of Israel and writes a column for Man and Culture, covering American politics, public policy, Israel, and culture.