by Steven Richards
Normalizing hate speech? The "Combat Antisemitism Movement" says one of the the latest viral podcast discussions containing suggestions of killing Jews as a part of a broader shift tolerating anti-Semitism in alternative media.
The viral spread of a recent podcast episode featuring Nazi apologia and a defense of the Holocaust highlights a disturbing trend in American alternative media of growing antisemitism, Holocaust denial or minimization, and pro-Nazi commentary, advocates say.
"How do we take the Jews down?” one host on the self-described “Men’s podcast” Fresh and Fit asked, speaking to fellow panelists in an episode that garnered widespread social media attention in recent days.
"We gotta kill the motherf*****s,” another guest chimed in. “My bad ya’ll,” she added.
In the episode of the show, which has since been removed from streaming platforms, co-hosts Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes, who go by the monikers "Fit" and "Fresh," respectively, centered on a conversation about the Nazi regime, the causes of the Holocaust, and “taking down” the Jews.
Defending Hitler, blaming Jews for Holocaust: "They started it"
The hosts and guests justified Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party’s "Final Solution" to murder Jews in the Holocaust. The participants also rebranded common anti-Semitic tropes, such as blaming the Jewish people for the Nazi’s hatred, according to a clip of the episode posted to social media earlier this week.
“What do you guys think about Hitler?” Gaines asked the guests.
The “Jewish [people] did something to the Germans that made them act a certain way, but nobody wants to talk about it,” one guest answered. “They started it. Like Germans wanted to take them out, all of them out.”
She continued, “The Holocaust was the only way he can take out a huge population, like, a huge amount of Jews all in one sitting,” though later admitting that their chosen solution was particularly “gruesome.”
The Fresh and Fit show is considered part of the “manosphere”—pro-masculinty and anti-feminist websites that promote fringe theories of dating. For example, Myron Gaines, whose birth name is Amrou Fudl, wrote in his 2023 book “Why Women Deserve Less” that the historical relationship between men and women has been based on prostitution; “All men are Johns” and “All women are whores.”
Not the first controversy for the podcasters
The episode in question aired on Rumble, a video platform that promotes free speech for content creators, but that episode was removed from the platform for violating its terms of use, a Rumble spokesperson confirmed to Just the News.
The platform prohibits “transmitting any message” that “is abusive, inciting violence, harassing, harmful, hateful, anti-semitic, racist or threatening.” The duos' other current content is still available on Rumble.
The duo was kicked off of the YouTube monetized "Partner Program" in 2023. The Sun reported that the duo said that they didn't know why YouTube made its decision, but "they suspect it has something to do with their controversial topics."
Their content created up to 2024 appears to still be distributed on Apple, and on Spotify.
"Surge of Jew-hatred" not spontaneous, critic says
Sacha Roytman, Chief Executive Director of the Combat Antisemitism Movement, argues that the “surge of Jew-hatred in alternative media spaces is not spontaneous” and that it can inspire violence if not checked.
“It draws on centuries-old antisemitic tropes, now repackaged and broadcast to millions. What we’re seeing today is not just hateful ignorance — it is dangerous incitement fueled by misinformation, conspiracy theories, and a disturbing appetite for scapegoating Jews,” he said.
“You don’t need a podcast host laughing as guests urge the murder of Jews to understand that this isn’t fringe rhetoric. It’s a call for violence,” Roytman continued.
“When influential media figures legitimize conspiratorial or revisionist narratives about Jewish power or the Holocaust, they embolden a growing ecosystem of hate. The very history some now choose to deny shows us exactly where this path leads. We must confront it before more damage is done.”
While a particularly egregious example from a fringe podcast, this sample appears to fall in line with a growing trend, especially in right-wing alternative media, but also among leftists, exemplified by the widespread anti-Israel and pro-Hamas campus protests and escalating violent attacks motivated by antisemitism.
“I think a lot of this, in my opinion, has to do with the education system and the fact that it’s failed the students in the United States,” Jewish-American Natalie Sanandaji, Public Affairs Officer for the Combat Antisemitism Movement, told Just the News.
Sanandaji, who was in Israel during the October 7 attack and told The New York Post she narrowly escaped death at the Nova Music Festival, described her public school experience growing up in New York and lamented how little the history classes covered the Holocaust and the growing antisemitism in inter-war Germany.
“I remember feeling so confused and I remember raising my hand to ask my teacher… ‘Are we not gonna talk about where it started?” Sanandaji recounted.
“The fact that it started with propaganda, the fact that it didn't start with the final solution, like, there were so many things leading up to it that if students learned these things, they would realize that history is repeating itself right now,” she said.
Conservative figures bringing controversial notions to the fore
Another recent example comes from Candace Owens, who became popular through her affiliation with conservative media outlet The Daily Wire where she adopted the branding of a black conservative who had the courage to walk away from the Democratic Party. But, since splitting with the company, Owens has increasingly focused on Jews and the modern State of Israel.
In one instance, Owens downplayed the gruesome human experiments by Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, who was described by the U.S. Department of Justice as the “most notorious Nazi criminal” whose whereabouts remained unknown after the Second World War.
Some of her views appear somewhat disconnected from perceived reality or are unsupported by history. She has accused Israel of being behind the John F. Kennedy assassination. She previously described Holocaust education as “indoctrination” in an episode of her show titled “Literally Hitler: Why can’t we talk about him?”
Sometimes, conservatives draw ire not for what they say, but for allowing fringe views to be expressed on their shows, an action sometimes called "platforming."
Tucker Carlson, a former television commentator on CNN, MSNBC and most famously, Fox News, has also faced criticism for hosting a fringe historian who minimized the Holocaust while painting British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as the “chief villain” in the war.
The contrarian historian, Darryl Cooper—who posts publicly under the username MartyrMade—told Carlson's audience that the murder of millions of Jews in the concentration camps during the war was not intentional, but rather an unintended consequence of a state unprepared for war. “They went in with no plan for that and they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there,” Cooper said in an interview last year.
Cooper also called Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II and said he was “primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, becoming something other than an invasion of Poland.” He even credited Churchill’s standing in politics to the support of Zionists—those who supported the formation of an independent Jewish country in the Middle East. “You read stories about Churchill going bankrupt and needing money, getting bailed out by people who shared his interests in terms of Zionism,” he said.
Carlson has been criticized not for adopting these questionable views, but for allowing them to be heard and for not refuting such claims on air. The New York Times reported that Carlson called Cooper "the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Critic equates fringe views as responsible for hatred
Sanandaji said comments like these, and what she called the one-sided criticisms of the modern state of Israel, "perpetuates this idea that it’s okay to hate the Jews.”
She continued, “If you want to talk about conflicts, if you want to talk about people dying, I think it's so important to talk about both sides.”
Unlike the Fresh and Fit podcast, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have a much wider reach, and ostensibly, greater influence. Owens has nearly 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube and Carlson’s X account, where he streams his show, has 16.5 million followers. Carlson is also a successful writer, whose 2018 book "Ship of Fools" is highly rated on Amazon, with an 82% five-star rating from almost 10,000 reviewers.
“These people have a big platform, and with…great power comes great responsibility,” Sanandaji added. “These words don’t just fall on deaf ears.”
Steven Richards
Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/extremism/advocates-raise-alarm-about-growing-nazi-apologism-and-jew-hatred-alternative
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