With 11 million streams per episode, “The Joe Rogan Experience” boasts an audience almost 20 times CNN’s prime time news ratings, nearly double the subscription readership of The New York Times, and larger than most, if not all other episodic programs in any form of media. In short: what happens on Joe Rogan’s podcast, matters.

That’s why we must talk about what happened on February 4, when Rogan hosted Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of the “Breaking Points” podcast. During a discussion about embattled Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN)’s infamous 2019 tweet “It’s all about the Benjamins” (a reference to Jews and money), Ball came to Omar’s defense saying “She shouldn’t have apologized” and Rogan agreed, saying “It’s not an antisemitic statement, I don’t think that is. Benjamins are money. You know, the idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza.”

It’s not clear whether Rogan shared this antisemitic trope out of malice, or merely out of ignorance. In either case, he had essentially misinformed his audience because Congresswoman Omar didn’t actually say that Jews are “into money.“ To the contrary, Omar made her infamous tweet in the context of several longer statements from around the same time: including one in which she claimed that pro-Israel groups exert control over the United States Congress by paying off its members, as well as another in which Omar questioned whether, as a group, American Jews owe their allegiance to a foreign country.

In sum, the Congresswoman has articulated a narrative in which Jews stand accused of being untrustworthy, disloyal citizens, who control America through the use of money. This is characteristically different from saying that Jews like money or Italians like pizza. To the contrary, Omar’s rhetoric almost precisely tracks the content and structure of the propaganda used by the Nazi party in the years leading up to Hitler’s Final Solution, as well as countless other leaders who sought to persecute and murder Jews.

In his 1925 autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf,” Hitler blamed Germany’s Jews for controlling the country’s politics through money, destroying its economy, and undermining the state itself:

In economics, he [the Jew] undermines the state until the social enterprises which have become unprofitable are taken from the state and subjected to his financial control … In the political field he refuses the state the means for its self-preservation, destroys the foundations of all national self-maintenance and defense, destroys faith in the leadership, scoffs at its history and past, and drags everything that is truly great into the gutter.

Hitler’s specific threats against Jewish communities evolved over time, but the underlying philosophy remained firmly rooted in the idea that Jews use wealth to exert political control over others.

For example, in a 1941 speech to the Reichtag, Hilter blamed Jewish “financiers” for causing World War II, as well as the previous world war,  saying, “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging nations once more into a world war, then the result [will be] the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!”

The Final Solution began six months later.

When Ilhan Omar said “It’s all about the Benjamins,” she didn’t mean that Jews “are into” money. According to her own statements, Omar meant that America’s support for Israel (one of its closest allies) and for American Jewish communities (one of America’s most loyal and most vulnerable minority groups) couldn’t possibly be the result of shared values or even American self interest, but rather the result of Jewish manipulation of the political system through the use of money. This idea isn’t true and it isn’t new: we’ve already seen where it leads.

This should not be seen as an issue of Democrats versus Republicans: Omar’s own party has more than once condemned her statements as being “antisemitic tropes” and “deeply offensive,” and in 2019, Congressional committees debated “House Resolution 241” – Condemning the anti-Semitic comments of Representative Ilhan Omar from Minnesota.

However, the bill was subsequently watered down to a critique of antisemitism in general, and the Democratic House leadership allowed Omar to continue serving on the House Foreign Relations committee, a body that manages America’s relations with the world, including with its key ally, Israel. This year, the new Republican House leadership removed Omar from the Foreign Relations committee, sparking a renewed public debate about her antisemitic rhetoric.

Our organization, RealityCheck, is dedicated to rigorous, reliable research studies, and our current project is an examination of the impact of Holocaust education. Our results are not yet published (keep your eyes out for more to come on this!) however preliminary findings already show that proper Holocaust education is strongly correlated to reductions in hate crimes: and not just against Jews but also against Muslim and Black communities, LGBTQ+, Hispanic communities, Americans with disabilities, and every other community we’ve studied.

In this case, the host of one of the most viewed media products in the US was unaware of the lessons of the Holocaust. Yet our research shows that something as simple as building a proper understanding of our shared history can make the world a better, safer place, for everyone in it.

As appeared on Algemeiner.