Noah Berlatsky has published some criticism of a recent Katie Halper interview. Here’s a typical passage:

Halper…bizarrely suggests that what is really needed in discussions of the Holocaust is less focus on anti-Semitism and more discussion of German economic grievances and anger over Versailles…This, then, is the sad endpoint of the dirtbag left’s confused efforts to throw the mantle of working class authenticity over asshole racists.

Since Berlatsky is dealing in paraphrases here, I was curious about what Halper actually said, so I decided to give it a listen. Halper:

I think that sometimes the comparisons [between Trump’s America and Nazi Germany] are good, but the point is, the people who are so quick to make those comparisons… they’re very selective in it. So they’ve compared Trump to Hitler, but they won’t… look at the Weimar Republic and how it compares to now, right? I don’t think most of these people would look at the Holocaust and say “it was just anti-Semitism – nothing about the economic collapse, nothing about the treaty of Versailles had anything to do with it.” Maybe they would, and they’re more idiotic than I think, but…

TL;DR – Berlatsky alleges that Halper has called for “less focus on anti-Semitism and more discussion of German economic grievances and anger over Versailles” in “discussions about the Holocaust.” But what Halper actually argues is the exact opposite: we already focus on these factors appropriately. Her point is not that we should change how we talk about the Holocaust, but that we should change how we talk about Trump’s America. She is holding up our typical discussions of the Holocaust as a standard, in their nuance and sophistication, to which today’s discussions of fascism in America should aspire.

I won’t add much more except to note that this misrepresentation is pretty typical of Berlatsky’s piece.