past. we have to keep a record of what is happening here. black people in the south, they didn t want us to go to school because they knew that education was a path to freedom and change. they lost that battle, thank goodness. now, they don t want education to include our stories, which is, in some ways, a more frightening form of erasure. the denial that happens is dangerous. it is a regression. we know well that denying the abject massive scale tragedy of what happened in the ghettos, cattle cars and toxic chambers of germany and poland in the 1930s and 40s in living memory, and emmett till s would be living memory, is ugly and dangerous for democracy and for humanity. denying the abject massive tragedy of what
see the remnants of gas chambers and if you look over dennis shoulder over there, you can see one gas chamber, the remnants of one gas chamber here at birkenau. where tens of thousands of jews and others were brought in cattle cars and the immediately decided they were going to be killed. most of them were in fact killed and it s just a painful story, especially for those of us who lost loved ones. all four of my grandparents were killed during the holocaust. two of them here at auschwitz. and you know, john, we were person. i guess they call it auschwitz. auschwitz won. the two of us walked into the gas chamber, the gas chamber there. and you were told that that was almost certainly where your grandparents were murdered and we saw that and also saw where they were put into the crematorium. the my paternal. my dad s parents. my dad grew up in a town right outside of this death camp. it was called the yiddish protein in polish team.
auschwitz birkenau right now we re at birkenau. this is where the main death chamber was at auschwitz, and we re here on what s called the march of the living where people from all over the world, especially a lot of young people come here to remember the six million jews who were murdered during the holocaust and for a lot of us, this is very, very personal for me. especially very personal, since all four of my grandparents polish jews were killed during the holocaust or obviously seeing the gas chambers, the crematorium, the railroad cars that cattle cars that brought these jews here from all over europe. they brought him to auschwitz beer canal where they were killed, most of them almost all of them were killed in the process. it s really been special, especially to meet with some of the holocaust survivors, and increasingly, there are fewer and fewer holocaust survivors left. but you hear their stories and you hear their testimony of what they went through. it is so
what do we do? exactly what jose said. we have to pose this as an argument between those who believe in multi-racial democracy and those who believe in the end of democracy on behalf of white nationalism because there s no middle ground. i mean, the reality is that the so-called demographic shift in this country isn t even because of immigration. it s because the median age of white people is 43 and folks in their mid-40s ain t having a whole lot of babies so the reality is you could stop immigration tomorrow theoretically and the numbers are still going to change, so if you don t like that because you have this belief in the loss of the fundamental racial stock of legacy americans or whatever tucker carlson, let s just ups, you can t solve that so-called problem unless you do mass deportation. i m talking rounding people up in cattle cars. are you can t do anything about it unless you sterilize black and brown women and do like some nazi eugenic program to fund white families to do
parallelisms to rights of jews, it s one step from a process of dehumanization that led to them being herded up into the get ghetto, led into cattle cars, and systematically murdered. you try to understand whether it s this congressman or tom massie or marjorie taylor greene or boebert, how they can make these comparisons. it s the silencing from republicans who know better. holocaust comparisons should not happen, period, any time for any reason. your book also talks about the rise of the cancel culture and how parties have used it to stifle meaningful debate. what do you mean by that? i think we re living in a moment where we have sort of an extreme right and radical left