White supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes. Photo: YouTube screenshot.

“Why do neo-Nazis keep getting arrested for child sexual abuse material?” Vice News recently asked. “A surprising number of far-right extremists have been caught with some of the worst content imaginable — is this a trend, or is child sexual abuse material just distressingly more commonplace than most realize?”

Whatever the answer to that question, one thing is certain: sexual perversion has been a far-right trend for a long time, going back to Nazi Germany itself. A running theme in William Shirer’s classic history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is that National Socialism knowingly attracted sexual deviants, including in the party’s top brass.

“Hitler had known all along, from the earliest days of the party, that a large number of his closest and most important followers were sexual perverts and convicted murderers,” Shirer reports. “These things Hitler had not only tolerated but defended; more than once he had warned his party comrades against being too squeamish about a man’s personal morals if he were a fanatical fighter for the movement.”

An especially appalling example of Nazism’s toleration for perverts and psychopaths was Oskar Dirlewanger, a convicted child rapist and sexual sadist, who commanded a military unit called “the Black Hunters” that committed unspeakable horrors against enslaved women and children. For his brutality, the pedophile Dirlewanger was honored with the “Knight’s Cross,” a big deal to Nazis.

Other German pedophiles also scurried from the shadows like orcs to serve the Third Reich. One of the creepiest passages in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir, Night, occurs in chapter four when young Elie is relocated from Auschwitz to the nearby Buna slave labor warehouse — and there discovers “a veritable traffic of children” among the master race.

Wiesel’s own “tent leader” at Buna was a fat Nazi pedophile with an “assassin’s face, fleshy lips, hands resembling a wolf’s paws.” Like a witch in a German fairy tale, he’d give the starving Jewish kids extra soup to fatten them up for his sick torture.

What makes the Nazis’ twisted sexual violence even more galling is that it was made possible through a relentless propaganda campaign — in books, films, articles, cartoons, radio broadcasts, and elementary school curricula — that depicted the Jewish minority as a sexual threat to Europeans and their family values.

Orchestrated by Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, himself known as a “predatory sex pest” who later murdered his six young kids, German society was saturated with the lust libel — an ancient antisemitic conspiracy theory that accuses Jews of using sado-sexual plots to weaken and control non-Jews, especially their children.

According to historian Elizabeth Heineman, Nazi claims that Jews constituted a sexual danger — “for example, propaganda representing Jewish men as leering seducers of Aryan maidens” — made ordinary Germans indifferent to the passage of anti-Jewish legislation and the disappearance of Jewish neighbors. The lust libel, in other words, helped lay the ground for the Holocaust.

Disturbingly, the same lurid propaganda is now being revived in our own day, and sometimes with lethal results. The 2019 Poway synagogue shooter’s manifesto, for instance, seethed with lewd antisemitic allegations of Jewish perversion and predation.

He likely picked up the lust libel from far-right online influencers, who are now flooding social media channels with all the old lies: that “Judaism allows child rape,” that “grooming is Jewish,” that the Talmud is a degenerate sex manual, that pornography is a devious Jewish creation and weapon. And, of course, when LGBTQ controversies erupt in American society, the Jews are invariably blamed as the seedy puppet masters.

And as the old lies have returned, so have old hypocrisies. The Vice News article, for example, highlights that police discovered extensive child pornography on the phone of neo-Nazi Jared Boyce, 28, just after Boyce had been out protesting a gay pride event where he slurred attendees as groomers. With similar duplicity, he’d been slandering Jews online by using the screen name “@PedosnJooshang,” meaning “Pedos and Jews hang.”

Witness, too, the hypocrisy of America’s currently most famous antisemitic demagogues: Nick Fuentes and Kanye West. Both men joined forces on various podcasts to denounce alleged Jewish carnal sin and to make a public display of their supposedly devout Christian faith.

Not long after, however, journalists reported that Kanye West is an abusive porn addict who used this material to bully and control his staff, including making them watch his own sex tapes. In recent days, West again made salacious headlines when outraged Italians called for his arrest after he was filmed, pants down, with a woman in front of shocked onlookers in Venice, Italy.

“Italian authorities need to arrest them for indecency doing that lewd and disgusting behavior in public,” one commentator said. “There are clearly crowds; kids probably saw.”

News reports also revealed that Nick Fuentes, a supposedly pious Catholic, was entangled in a disturbing sex scandal of his own. He was reported to be aware of his business associate Ali Alexander’s alleged grooming of teenage boys. One underage victim claims Fuentes was “100 percent aware” of the alleged sexual abuse but did nothing to stop it. Yet another young victim alleges that Fuentes actively tried to make him, the victimized teen, apologize to the alleged groomer in a cover up effort.

Online video clips would later show Fuentes confessing that he himself lusts for a “pristine, untouched, uncorrupted, innocent” 16-year-old girl. He went on to assert, on purportedly Christian grounds, that he opposes age of consent laws and doesn’t believe in marital rape.

Add up these vomit-inducing confessions to the other disgusting cases of neo-Nazi pedophilia in the Vice News article — plus all the sexual violence documented over the years by historians and far-right watchdog groups — and it’s impossible not to “notice,” to borrow a favorite word of the antisemites, that harrowingly sick perversions are a trend among the far right, both now and in the past.

Their sanctimonious accusations against the Jews combined with their abject hypocrisy, though evil, at least provide a clue to what’s really going on inside today’s purveyors of the lust libel: projection.

French scholar Isidore Loeb summed it up well in the 1800s. “The Jew is there only to put into action the dream they carry within themselves,” he wrote. “They burden the Jews with playing in their place the drama which simultaneously attracts and terrifies them.”

Jonah Cohen is director of communications for CAMERA.