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Back in January 2016, conservative web site Louder with Crowder dipped its toes into the world of fact-checking with an article (MYTH BUSTED: Actually, Yes, Hitler Was a Socialist Liberal) that makes the claim that leftists have unfairly rewritten history to paint Hitler as right wing, based in part on the fact that the Nazi party had the word socialist in its name. Perhaps ironically, that article opens with a tidbit of literally rewritten history, misattributing a quote by Nazi party member Gregor Strasser to Adolf Hitler: While Hitler may have co-opted elements of this language when it was politically expedient, they are not his words. Instead, these are the words of early Nazi party official Gregor Strasser, printed in a 1926 pamphlet titled Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future. That pamphlet, as we will discuss in detail below, attempted to appeal to ultranationalist movements on both the left and the right at a time when the Nazis were a fringe political party seeking to carve out as big a part of the German electorate as possible. Strasser's pamphlet went on to make these decidedly non-socialist sounding statements as well: Gregor Strasser was a prominent Nazi propagandist in the formative days of the Nazi party. A World War I veteran active in post-war anti-Soviet paramilitary activities, he — along with Adolf Hitler — became one of the two most prominent voices for the party as it attempted to build a cohesive ideology and broad support across the various factions within a deeply divided Germany. As discussed in a biography of Strasser: As it happens, Hitler was not a fan of Strasser’s ideas. While his efforts helped the Nazi’s with early electoral victories in the elections of 1928, his views became dangerously discordant with Hitler’s, and he was assassinated on Hitler’s orders in 1934: The fact that Hitler disagreed with Strasser’s view of National Socialism so much that he was killed in part for holding those views makes it all the more absurd to attribute this quote to Hitler, as Louder with Crowder has done. The political milieu of Germany in the 1920s was a hotbed of political unrest and paramilitary violence that cannot easily fit into simple left and right binaries. Hitler’s use of socialism attempted to borrow the rhetorical devices of the left, but not the ideological ones, as discussed in The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans: The post suggests that this nifty thing called 'history' in combination with 'the internet' can bust this myth that Hitler was right wing. However, the web site takes a superficial view of German history based, in large part, on a comically misattributed quote. If anything, Louder with Crowder has made a strong argument for including some books along with that internet research.
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