Twitter posts from the Atlantic writer Jemele Hill caught fire from the online community after she unfavorably compared the United States to Nazi Germany without citing any specifics.
Hill prefixed her controversial Sunday tweet by saying that she has been reflecting on a racial history book called ‘Caste’ by Isabel Wilkerson. The pundit said that via this text she reached the conclusion that people who are “of the opinion that the United States wasn't nearly as bad as Nazi Germany” are “wrong.”
This post provoked thousands of reactions and propelled the term “Nazi Germany” into national US Twitter trends.
The tweet received an utter avalanche of criticism, with Hill's detractors calling the comparison “irresponsible” and called it a “horror show of an opinion.”
Other commenters pointed out that to them any allusions to Nazis are a tired partisan “cliche,” often levied against American conservatives.
Mainly Hill's critics seemed to have been ridiculing her point for excessive exaggeration, as the US isn't “literally Nazi Germany.” Moreover, to them “just the basic fact” that Hill has a media platform speaks to the opposite.
However, the controversial opinion did find its defenders, who believed that the comparison was somewhat apt.
Hill herself didn't seem to specifically agree with such positions as she later tried to clarify that she only meant the history of race relations in both countries.
These finer details, however, have largely been lost in the massive online discourse Hill's initial more vague statement incited.
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