Glenn Beck attempted to “set the record straight” tonight, presenting a “special report” positing that, despite everything you may have heard, the Nazis were not actually right-wing. The package relied mostly on commentary from author Jonah Goldberg, who argued that Hitler’s positions were not fundamentally any different from someone like Stalin’s.
“The common assumption is that the Nazis were a right-wing phenomenon, a right-wing party … and Hitler was a man of the right,” he explains. “And there are a lot of problems with this. His social agenda was for expanding universal access to health care, for expanding access to education … it was for attacking big business and high finance … almost anything you can find on a checklist that allegedly proves Hitler was a right-winger you can apply to almost any of the major communist dictators of the 20th century.”
