A new opinion poll has revealed that more than one in five young adults in the United States defend German leader Adolf Hitler in a stunning demonstration of the spread of pro-Nazi sympathies in the Western world.
The survey conducted by the polling firm J.L. Partners and sponsored by the British tabloid The Daily Mail asked likely American voters whether they believed the notorious dictator had some “good ideas” or was “evil and had no redeeming features.”
A full 21% of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 agreed Hitler had good ideas, while another 20% claimed they were unsure.
Additionally, 19% of Hispanic respondents agreed the German leader had good ideas while another 27% were unsure. Some 21% of Black voters agreed with the statement along with 14% of male respondents.
“If you need an example of the corrosive impact that social media can have on younger Americans' view of the world, this is it,” said J.L. Partners founder James Johnson, reflecting an increasingly common view among Western political elites that governments must play a stronger role in regulating speech and expression online.
The sentiment has led to the effective banning of the video sharing website Rumble in France and legislation set to force the platform TikTok to cease operations in the United States.
“Earlier this month, TikTok was forced to remove AI-generated and translated videos of Hitler's speeches that had racked up more than one million views,” the Daily Mail reported.
“The TikTok clip is also translated in a way to suggest the Fuhrer wanted to protect the lives of women and children,” the newspaper reported. Such rhetoric has featured heavily among online adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that a Satanic cabal of cannibalistic child sex traffickers secretly guides world events.
The Daily Mail noted that Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions of children during his genocidal march across Europe. An estimated 2.8 million Soviet children died during World War II as well as 1.5 million Jewish children and thousands of Romani children and German minors with physical and mental disabilities.
The Soviet Union bore the brunt of Nazi brutality, with an estimated 27 million Soviet citizens dying during the conflict. The fascist leader killed some 6 million Jews in a systematic program of mass extermination known as the Holocaust along with hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Poles, national and religious minorities.