It's hard to dispute anymore that the culture of cruelty, shamelessness, and provocation for its own sake that now dominates our political culture is trickling down to the kids. The trolls have broken out of your computer, and they're smirking through the halls of high schools across this country. The latest example comes to us from Baraboo, Wisconsin, where a group of 50-plus white kids decided to throw up Nazi salutes for a junior prom picture. It blew up Sunday night, and the controversy continued into well into Monday:

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If anybody from Baraboo High School in Wisconsin can clue me in on why it appears the entire male class of 2018 is throwing up a Sig Heil during their prom photos - that would be great.



h/t @CarlySidey pic.twitter.com/BL8lDVLMA4 — Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) November 12, 2018

According to the journalist who shared the original photo, Jules Suzdaltsev,‏ the students are actually members of the class of 2019, meaning they're seniors this year. The incident sits on the troubling line between the rise of a genuine ethno-nationalist movement in this country and the tendency for teenagers—especially teenage boys—to do things just to get a rise out of people. But in our current context—it's a year and change after neo-Nazis and other white supremacists marched the streets of Charlottesville, and one of them murdered a counter-protester, Heather Heyer, with his car—the rapid normalization of hate speech and right-wing extremism is dangerous no matter what the original motive.

The Auschwitz Memorial said as much in a response Monday:

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It is so hard to find words...



This is why every single day we work hard to educate. We need to explain what is the danger of hateful ideology rising. Auschwitz with its gas chambers was at the very end of the long process of normalizing and accommodating hatred. https://t.co/13AzZaMGJR — Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) November 12, 2018

Kids did a lot of stupid shit at my high school, but nobody would have thought it was funny—or conscionable—to engage in Nazi symbolism with a smile twisted across your face. That wasn't very long ago. Remember kids: the Nazis are the bad guys. We all used to agree that the United States was on the right side of World War II. Now you can find neo-Nazis marching armed through the streets of an American city, chanting the president's name.

Suzdaltsev‏ has already started to compile stories from other students who attended the Baraboo school. If those are anything to go on, then loud, vicious racism is a longstanding problem in the system because the administration does nothing to combat it. But the real problem with these kinds of demonstrations is that not everyone needs to be a True Believer to become part of a serious problem. It's enough for this big group of kids to just all be doing this.

Like in that famous photo from a Nazi shipyard in 1936, not everyone mindlessly followed the group. Here's an account from Jordan Blue, the kid in the top right of the photo who isn't grinning and Sieg Heiling like a complete moron.

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I spoke with the only student who is visibly not comfortable with the “salute”, he provided this statement. pic.twitter.com/HbNBc8xLOK — Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) November 12, 2018

You've got to be taught to hate, and it seems the Baraboo school system might be allowing a few too many to get lessons. But this is now a larger cultural problem. The gap between trollism and Trumpism online is increasingly hard to distinguish, particularly among the kind of young people who joined the movement through 4chan or Reddit. But when the president speaks, the kids are listening.

Soon after Donald Trump won election to the presidency, reports surfaced of white high schoolers using "Build the Wall!" as invective against students from a rival school with a large Hispanic population. In another case, the kids simply shouted "Trump!" So, you might remember, did the marchers in Charlottesville. The president might deny that when he calls himself a "nationalist," the adjective that goes in front of it is understood. But it seems plenty of people are getting the message. Tax cuts might not trickle down, but the hate does.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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