The Weaponization of Antisemitism: What the Pocan–Miller Clash Really Reveals
How history was erased and outrage weaponized after a tweet about immigration, identity, and authoritarianism.
The Tweet Heard Around the Timeline
On June 25, 2025, Rep. Mark Pocan, a progressive Democrat representing Wisconsin’s 2nd Congressional District, responded to a tweet from Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. Miller had weighed in on the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim American democratic socialist of Ugandan and Indian descent, had just secured the party’s nomination.
Instead of focusing on policy or political strategy, Miller turned to a familiar scapegoat: immigration. He tweeted:
“The commentary about NYC Democrats nominating an anarchist-socialist for Mayor omits one point: how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That’s how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.”
The dog whistle wasn’t subtle. Miller blamed immigrant populations, especially Muslims and working-class voters, for New York’s supposed “decline,” effectively echoing Great Replacement Theory.
Pocan’s response was blunt and furious:
“Racist f**k. Go back to 1930’s Germany.”
The backlash was immediate and intense:
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly called the tweet “absolutely disgusting,” demanded that Pocan “seek professional help,” and warned that his “crazed antisemitic hatred” would “embolden radicals to target Jewish Americans.”
GOP strategists, conservative pundits, and outlets joined in, calling the remark “shameful behavior,” “antisemitic,” and “Holocaust denial adjacent”, with not a single mention of Miller’s own rhetoric or policies.
You’d think, based on the reactions, that Pocan had denied the Holocaust. In reality, he called out demographic fear-mongering, an ideology rooted in xenophobia, not historical clarity.
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New York Was Always an Immigrant City
Before diving into the political ideology behind Miller’s tweet, it’s worth pausing to address how deeply ahistorical his claim really is. The idea that immigration has somehow “remade” New York City, as though it were once a culturally monolithic place, is simply false. NYC has always been an immigrant city. For centuries, it has served as a gateway for millions: Jews fleeing pogroms, Italians escaping poverty, Irish fleeing famine, Haitians, Dominicans, Koreans, Mexicans, Bangladeshis, Egyptians, Tibetans, West Africans, all arriving, building, and remaking the city in waves.
The Ellis Island era, in particular, was a period of mass immigration that directly shaped New York’s neighborhoods, politics, languages, religions, and economy. In other words, the city hasn’t been “remade” by immigration; it has been sustained and defined by it.
Miller’s comment erases this history and reframes one of the country’s most successful immigrant stories as a cautionary tale of national decline. It’s not just a racist dog whistle—it’s a profound misunderstanding of American history.
Who Is Stephen Miller & Why That Background Matters
Stephen Miller is one of the most powerful architects of White House policies. Reinstated as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor following Trump’s re-election, Miller is now actively drafting and implementing the administration’s second-term immigration agenda. That agenda is even more aggressive, more sweeping, and more authoritarian than his first.
This isn’t theoretical. Under Miller’s direction, the Trump administration has already declared a national emergency at the southern border, ramped up ICE raids, fast-tracked mass deportations, and proposed expansive expedited removal powers that allow for arrest and deportation without hearings. He’s reportedly targeting up to 3,000 migrants per day for removal and is chairing a new Homeland Security task force that centralizes immigration and criminal enforcement authority under the White House.
Stephen Miller has figured prominently in our reporting. See some of that here for futher context:
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This level of power, paired with Miller’s ideological convictions, is alarming to many. His rhetoric routinely invokes demographic change as a threat to American identity. His recent tweet blaming immigration for the “remaking” of New York’s electorate is just the latest iteration of his long-standing alignment with white nationalist talking points. This worldview sees multiculturalism and immigration not as features of American life, but as existential threats to it.
Though often identified as Jewish by his critics and defenders alike, Miller was raised in a secular household and does not publicly practice the faith. This detail complicates the claim that Pocan’s tweet was an attack on Jewish identity rather than policy.
And Miller has not been without criticism from Jewish communities. Groups like Bend the Arc, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace have condemned Miller’s policies as fundamentally incompatible with Jewish values. In 2019, Bend the Arc ran a campaign against him, stating:
“Stephen Miller is a white nationalist and a disgrace to our shared heritage. Being Jewish does not excuse you from promoting policies rooted in hatred.”
These groups argue that Miller’s actions violate essential Jewish ethical principles, most notably tzedek (justice) and the commandment to welcome the stranger, and they warn against using his Jewish identity as a shield against valid critique.
Based on his own comments, when Rep. Pocan invoked “1930s Germany,” it wasn’t because Miller is Jewish; it was because Miller is orchestrating policies that mirror the logic of early-stage authoritarian regimes: mass detentions, surveillance, racial targeting, and a deep hostility toward pluralism.
Why the “1930s Germany” Reference Was Historically Grounded
Much of the backlash against Pocan zeroed in on a single element of his tweet: the phrase “go back to 1930s Germany.” To critics, it was immediately framed as a personal attack on Stephen Miller’s Jewish identity, a rhetorical sin so grave that it overshadowed the actual policies being discussed. But context, as always, matters.
So does history.
Contrary to how the right has portrayed it, 1930s Germany was not yet the Holocaust. It was the buildup, the legal, bureaucratic, and cultural conditioning that made genocide possible. During that period:
Jews, political dissidents, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and others were rounded up by state forces, often sent to third countries for detainment.
Citizenship was stripped.
Due process was eliminated for targeted groups.
Pocan himself made this clear in a follow-up post, writing:
“It happened to Jews, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities, political opponents and more who didn’t meet a false 'purity' definition. We can never go back to that treatment of human beings. That’s why I’m so repulsed by racism and xenophobia. We all should be.”
He wasn’t invoking Auschwitz. He was invoking warning signs, and they weren’t subtle.
Pocan’s own record is not without controversy. In February 2024, he tweeted: “I’m starting to think that @AIPAC isn’t just a puppet of Netanyahu, but a partner. They cover for his murdering of innocents in the course of supposedly going after Hamas… They seem fine with that & don’t mind the killing of kids.” The post drew swift criticism, with Jewish Insider and other outlets highlighting its resemblance to classic antisemitic tropes, including accusations of blood libel and dual loyalty—concerns that persist even among progressive Jewish circles.
Pocan’s tweet was, by any measure, blunt and emotionally charged. It may not have been the most careful rhetorical move, and it’s fair to say he underestimated how it would be weaponized. That said, it also wasn’t untrue or necessarily cruel in intent.
Pocan, who is openly gay, wasn’t invoking the 1930s as a detached observer. The Nazi regime targeted not just Jews, but LGBTQ+ people, disabled individuals, political dissidents, and others deemed “impure” under fascist ideology. His reference wasn’t just historical. It was personal.
His original tweet drew a historically grounded connection between Miller’s policies and the systemic, authoritarian framework that emerged in Germany long before the gas chambers. As Pocan later said:
“They rounded up people in the 30s, just as they are today with zero due process.”
To call that antisemitic is not only disingenuous. It’s a dangerous erasure of how authoritarianism actually unfolds.
We’ve made the same comparison to the Trump regime’s policies. See that reporting here:
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Bad History, Bad Faith
There’s a deeper pattern running through this controversy, one that ties Miller’s comments and the backlash to Pocan together. It’s not just about political ideology. It’s about historical erasure.
When Stephen Miller paints New York’s immigrant-driven political shift as a crisis, he isn’t just expressing nativist fear; he’s displaying a complete disregard for the city’s actual past. New York has never been anything but an immigrant city since Europeans set foot there. Immigrants didn’t “remake” it. They made it.
And when the right reacts to Pocan’s invocation of “1930s Germany” as if he were referencing gas chambers instead of state surveillance, detention without due process, and racialized legal regimes, they’re not defending history. They’re rewriting it. They collapse an entire decade of fascist rise into one unutterable symbol, and then weaponize that symbol against anyone who dares point out the parallels.
In both cases, it’s not just a distortion of facts. It’s a refusal to learn the lessons that history offers, because acknowledging those lessons would make certain ideologies untenable.
The Media’s Role in Obscuring the Real Conversation
Once the backlash to Pocan’s tweet began, most mainstream media outlets followed a familiar script of focusing on the conflict, flattening the nuance, and ignoring the policy context altogether.
Headlines emphasized the controversy—“Pocan under fire for Nazi comparison,” “Democrat’s antisemitic tweet sparks outrage”—but few explained what Miller had said. Even fewer acknowledged the long track record of Miller’s anti-immigrant policies or the human rights concerns surrounding his current role. Instead of asking why Pocan made the comparison, coverage defaulted to the question of whether he had crossed a rhetorical line.
This is a textbook case of outrage displacement:
Instead of confronting Miller’s ideology, a worldview that blames immigrants for political outcomes and seeks to reshape America through racial exclusion, coverage centered on Pocan’s tone.
Instead of interrogating the historical parallels Pocan invoked, the media allowed the conversation to devolve into identity politics performance: Who said what to whom? Was it offensive? Is he Jewish?
The more profound message got lost, that an active U.S. official, with a documented history of crafting policies condemned by human rights groups, was once again espousing rhetoric rooted in demographic panic, and a sitting member of Congress responded by sounding the historical alarm.
In doing so, the media didn’t just trade substance for spectacle. They stripped the moment of historical context and amplified the outrage. There was little to no acknowledgment that Pocan’s reference to 1930s Germany was factually grounded, or that Miller’s comment about New York ignores the city’s centuries-long immigrant identity. The result was a debate about tone, not truth, and the erasure of exactly the historical lessons Pocan was trying to invoke.
The Dark Alliance: Evangelical Zionism and the Right’s Convenient Antisemitism
To understand the full political theater behind the backlash to Pocan’s tweet, it helps to look at a deeper, more unsettling trend: the American right’s recent and highly selective embrace of Zionism and antisemitism discourse.
Historically, the conservative movement in the U.S. was no haven for Jews. From Charles Lindbergh’s America First rhetoric to Nixon’s recorded slurs, antisemitism has long simmered beneath the surface. Even in the Trump era, antisemitic tropes, including globalist cabals, George Soros, or media control, have been deployed without consequence. Charlottesville’s “Jews will not replace us” marchers weren’t denounced by name. Marjorie Taylor Greene's “Jewish space lasers” remark didn’t cause a rift in GOP leadership. Donald Trump himself has pushed dual-loyalty narratives about American Jews more than once.
And yet, when it’s politically convenient, the right has become the loudest defender of Jewish dignity, so long as it can be used to punish a political opponent.
This strategic philo-Semitism is most visible in the GOP’s alliance with Christian Zionists, particularly the evangelical right. These groups claim to love Israel and protect Jews, but their theology tells a different story. In the end-times narrative they promote, Jews must return to Israel not for safety, but so they can either convert or die in the final apocalyptic battle. In this worldview, Jews are instruments in someone else’s salvation fantasy, not people with enduring religious and cultural identity.
It’s not real support. It’s a transaction: political backing in exchange for prophetic fulfillment.
This alliance props up U.S. support for the Israeli right, demonizes Muslims and Palestinians, and aggressively brands any criticism of Israel—or, in this case, of a Jewish official pushing xenophobic policy—as antisemitic. It weaponizes Jewish identity while erasing Jewish ethics, many of which—like tzedek (justice), chesed (compassion), and never again—form the moral backbone of Jewish progressive resistance.
Pocan wasn’t opposing Miller’s Jewishness. He was opposing a political project that seeks to dehumanize immigrants and centralize power under a nationalist ideology. That Jewish organizations themselves have condemned Miller's policies underscores just how hollow and hypocritical the right’s antisemitism accusations truly are.
Weaponized Identity and the Danger of Bad-Faith Outrage
The Pocan-Miller firestorm is a case study in how identity can be weaponized not to protect marginalized people, but to shield power from accountability.
It’s a dangerous sleight of hand. When a Jewish official is criticized for pushing racist or authoritarian policies, the conversation shifts not to the harm being done, but to whether the criticism itself is antisemitic. This reframing is not accidental; it’s a calculated tactic to shut down debate, deflect moral scrutiny, and equate dissent with hate.
However, this logic collapses under the weight of reality.
Being Jewish doesn’t immunize someone from advancing harmful, exclusionary ideologies. Just as a Black person can embrace white supremacist rhetoric, or a gay person can hold transphobic beliefs, a Jewish person can promote policies that endanger and dehumanize others, including other Jews. Identity and ideology are not synonymous. To suggest otherwise is to erase both individual agency and collective accountability.
In fact, many of the loudest Jewish critics of Stephen Miller are motivated precisely by their Jewish values—values that call for justice, the protection of the vulnerable, and the memory of history’s darkest chapters. Their voices remind us that the Holocaust is not just a sacred trauma to be referenced only in mourning. It’s a warning about how fascism rises through normalization, bureaucracy, and fearmongering. The phrase “never again” doesn’t mean never say the word “Germany.” It means never let the conditions that allowed it to happen return.
To silence that warning because it makes people uncomfortable, especially when the uncomfortable target holds real power, is not just misguided. It’s dangerous.
What We Should Be Talking About
Mark Pocan’s tweet made people uncomfortable. That’s understandable. He could have been more nuanced or used less colorful language. However, discomfort isn’t always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes, it’s a sign that something needs to be faced.
The real question isn’t whether Pocan’s words were elegant. It’s whether his warning was accurate. And the facts—historical, political, and moral—suggest that it was. When a senior White House official uses Great Replacement rhetoric to blame immigrants for electoral outcomes, and when that same official is crafting real-time policies that strip due process, increase mass detention, and criminalize migration, then comparisons to 1930s authoritarianism aren’t rhetorical excess. They’re a call to vigilance.
Instead of obsessing over Pocan’s tone, we should be interrogating:
Why the right is amplifying the fear of demographic change,
Why antisemitism only matters when it can be used to silence critique,
And why the media continues to treat moral panic as news while ignoring the lived consequences of state violence.
Stephen Miller is not a private citizen. He is not an innocent target. He is a senior policymaker enacting one of the most aggressive anti-immigrant agendas in modern U.S. history. If our political discourse has devolved to the point where pointing that out is considered antisemitic, we haven’t learned from history. We’re repeating it, with better branding.
This moment demands clarity. It requires the ability to hold multiple truths: that antisemitism is real and rising, and also that being Jewish does not make someone’s policies sacred, that we can care deeply about Jewish safety and still call out those who endanger others, and that our moral responsibility is not to protect power, but to speak honestly about how it’s used.
If “never again” is to mean anything at all, it must apply to everyone, not just those with the right political credentials.
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Bibliography:
“White House condemns Democrat who told Stephen Miller to ‘go back to 1930’s Germany’.” Politico, June 26, 2025.
“Democratic congressman hurls profanity-laced message at Stephen Miller.” Fox News, June 26, 2025.
“Radical Leftist Congressman Doubles Down on Profanity‑Laced Insults Against Stephen Miller.” TownHall, June 26, 2025.
“Republicans slam Mark Pocan for social media post about White House aide.” Yahoo News, June 26, 2025.
“Important News on Stephen Miller.” Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, November 20, 2019.
“Jewish Groups Call For Stephen Miller To Resign Over White Nationalist Ties.” HuffPost, November 21, 2019.
"In Social Media War Against AIPAC, Rep. Mark Pocan Advances Antisemitic Tropes." Jewish Insider, June 6, 2024.
“Concentration Camps, 1933–39.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia.
“Gleichschaltung.” Wikipedia.
Kirsch, Adam. “The System.” The New Yorker, April 6, 2015.
“Concentration Camp System: In Depth.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia.
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I’m Jewish. My grandparents from Poland. The was made for immigrants.