Are you right or wrong in who you necessarily are? The politics of identity and the lesson of the Shoah

Nazism made people guilty of belonging ineluctably to a demographic category. Along with an obsession with health and security, that was perhaps what was most distinctive about it. Anti-semitism had become racial because Jews had recently been for the first time declared a race. There were in fact several demographical categories that could qualify one for extermination.

"Leftists" who say that people are guilty of being white, male, or straight are articulating a left-wing Nazism. And actually it's not left-wing, it just thinks it is. They cannot hope to build a large-scale movement, opposing the majoritarian group. But then their purpose is surely just to give people a chance to vent anger and feel the comforts of being supported by those who think alike, while serving as a kind of adjunct to discriminatory policing by authorizing their own version of it, all the while bringing themselves and whoever is sucked in by them to the attention of the police.

Fascism will sneak in the back door on the coattails of people posturing as liberal or leftist, no less than some of their ideological opponents, with whom they share a style.

It's like a perversion of Lutheranism, for which people were "justified by faith." In Nazism people are justified by being. What you are is good or bad and has a politics in it that you can do nothing to change. Why would anyone be taken in by such monstrous and barbarous stupidities? Of course, when these people talk they do not make arguments and outsiders in their territory are subjected to threats.