But as much as I’m trying to talk about other things, the steady flow of Nazis in the news continues.
Here, alas, is another Nazi imagery story: “Bishop apologizes after Catholic school uses Nazi symbol in Halloween parade.”
A Pennsylvania bishop has condemned a local Catholic school’s use of a prominent Nazi symbol on a float in a community Halloween parade.
“I was shocked and appalled to learn that the Halloween parade float from Saint Joseph Catholic school in Hanover included a replica of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp gate, bearing the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei,’ ” said Bishop Timothy C. Senior of Harrisburg in an Oct. 31 statement.
The statement was issued shortly after a float representing St. Joseph Catholic School in Hanover, Pennsylvania, displayed the symbol while participating in that town’s 2025 Halloween parade.
Video of the parade, which lasted more than 90 minutes, showed the school’s float — drawn by a truck, and also appearing to include a swing set with ghosts and a jukebox — framed by a gate replicating the one at Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of several extermination camps used by the Nazi regime to systematically murder 6 million Jews during the Shoah, the preferred Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
My state capital last made national news six months ago, when someone tried to kill our governor, who is Jewish, by burning down the governor’s house on the weekend of Passover. You may remember that. Everybody involved in creating and approving this “Halloween float” seems to have forgotten it.
The Catholic OSV News story linked above does a good job of trying to figure out how this happened and why. It appears to be a case of people being staggeringly negligent and ignorant. Disastrously ign’ant, dumb, and offensive, yes, but not actually a Nazi. The float’s designer apparently searched for images of cemetery gates and settled on this gate as his model without comprehending what he was doing. It doesn’t speak well of the school and parish that are supposed to be educating him that he knew so little and was so little able to understand what he was doing, But the act seems more to have been one of careless ignorance more than one of deliberate malice.
Please note that ignorance does not mean innocence. The ignorance here is the kind of ignorance that does not know about or care about or care to know about other people. That’s a different kind of selfish and self-absorbed than the kind of ignorance that consumes a person with hatred and contempt for other people, but the effect of this ignorance is often indistinguishable. People for whom others simply don’t register as real often behave much the same as people who view those others as contemptible enemies who are less than human.
But still, even though white Christians in Mastriano-country* have surrendered any presumption of charity, this horrifically ill-conceived float was not some Nick Fuentes-inspired statement designed by Groypers. The story here is not “Defiant Nazis March Through the Streets of Harrisburg” but, rather, “Ignorant Kids Do Really Offensive Thing Because They’re Ignorant Kids.”
That, of course, is roughly how J.D. Vance and other MAGA leaders sought to characterize the dozens of Republican Party officials, legislative aides, and elected representatives whose white supremacist, misogynist, and 4chan-quintuple-ironic-backflip Nazi garbage on Young Republican group chats was exposed. But that won’t do. Those “Young Republicans” were adults in their 30s, not teenagers still in high school, and they all clearly understood — and endorsed, and reveled in — the meaning of the vile language they used. Their deliberate ignorance was very different from the appalling-in-a-different-way ignorance of the actual kids behind that Harrisburg float.
“Young and dumb and didn’t know any better” was also Graham Platner’s defense for the SS tattoo he wore on his chest for decades. (He also explained that he was drunk when he got it, though he didn’t explain why he kept it after he sobered up the next day, or if he was drunk when he signed up to work for Blackwater.) I’d accept that as an explanation and part of an apology if it hadn’t taken him until now to get rid of the thing. Wearing it for all of those years isn’t like building one horribly ill-conceived Halloween float as a high school student — it’s like keeping that float on your front lawn for the next 20 years.
I appreciate that “edgy,” transgressive tattoos are sometimes a part of how military manly men perform military-man manliness for one another. But that still doesn’t explain why a member of the American military would get a tattoo of the symbol of one of America’s most infamous military opponents. This story would have been treated differently if Platner’s tattner had been a symbol lionizing al-Qaida or ISIS. But the meaning would not be any different, at all.
That’s interesting. I suppose there’s a bit of recency bias there — it’s too soon to use al-Qaida or ISIS as a symbol of one’s manly transgressive “edginess,” but enough time has passed that the symbols of previous enemies of America can be used. But I suspect that’s not the only reason that an al-Qaida tattoo would be more widely condemned than a Nazi SS skull or a Confederate flag is.
“I didn’t know” and “I didn’t realize at the time” was also the half-hearted defense local Republican official Meg Booth deployed when asked about her husband’s career as an explicitly Nazi YouTuber. A.R. Moxon has some helpful thoughts about the inadequacy of that defense:
It’s something people get to say these days, you know, about anything; it’s the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card: I didn’t know. Just say you aren’t familiar with whatever it is, or if you are familiar then you don’t know the details, or if you know the details it’s not right to comment on something that’s still unfolding. It’s not just local Michigan politicians who get to enjoy this immunity-by-ignorance. In most areas if somebody asks you about a matter centrally relevant to your job and you claim both ignorance and incuriosity, you’d probably get fired before too long. Not with politicians, though. The president can launch into a racist diatribe pushing the malicious white supremacist “replacement” hoax, and every member of the Republican Party gets to say they haven’t seen the post or heard the statements, and that’s usually the end of it; everyone asking is satisfied with their profession of ignorance on critical matters, everyone asking is willing to treat the alleged lack of awareness as fully exonerative, and on we all move tra-la-la down the road. And that’s if anyone even asks; these days it seems even asking the question is political, which is a relatively new word that means unfair to Republicans.
It’s becoming increasingly better not to ask, because it’s becoming increasingly better not to know. If you know, then you have to do something about it, and then you might get in trouble for doing something about it. If you don’t, you don’t, and you won’t. Thus, not knowing has become a virtue among people who would rather not have to give a shit. Shame dies by atrophy.
The students who built and paraded that Auschwitz float apparently didn’t know any better. That ignorance is incriminating, not exonerating. They should have known better. And they seem rightly ashamed not to have known better.
But the whole point of shame is that it works to make us change. The folks at Saint Joseph Catholic should understand this — that disgrace is meant to prod us to confession, penitence, repentance, and a return to grace.
In all of these stories, whether they did or did not really know any better, they should have known better. And now they do know better. So now that they know better, what are they going to do about it?
* Republican state senator Doug Mastriano, the GOP’s last candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, sought and received the support of openly white nationalist and Neo-Nazi-adjacent white right groups and podcasters during his campaign. His defense of this was exactly the same “not attacking our friends on the right” argument made by Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation for their welcoming the Nazi Nick Fuentes and his followers into the Republican coalition. But unlike Tucker and the folks at Heritage, Mastriano left out the pro forma bit about “while I may disagree with much of what they say” because, well, he didn’t disagree with much of what they said.
Mastriano lost the governors race in a landslide but still securely holds his seat representing Gettysburg in the state senate. And this is because, not in spite of, his enthusiasm for policies exactly like those endorsed by Meg Booth’s husband in his Nazi videos. As A.R. Moxon also writes:
There’s not much that Chris Booth is saying in video that isn’t also being said from the very top of the Republican Party’s seats of power and influence right now in the present. From the president down it’s all talk of ethnic cleansing and national purity and vengeance against the enemy within that’s poisoning the nation’s blood with diversity and equality, and none of this is being opposed meaningfully by members of that party — on the contrary, it’s being supported and advanced and accelerated by them.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In