Here’s proof that having an affiliation with Harvard doesn’t mean you’re smart: Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz recently claimed that anyone who compares Donald Trump to Hitler is a “Holocaust denier”:

Dershowitz said that ignorance about history was leading to false analogies targeting Trump and others. “Everybody is compared to Hitler. Everybody is compared to the Holocaust. Israel defending itself against Gaza rockets — oh, they’re Nazis. Anybody who compares Trump or anybody else to Hitler essentially is a Holocaust denier, because what they’re saying [is] well, there were no gas chambers, there was no Auschwitz, there was no plan to kill six million Jews. They minimize it,” he explained. “To say that anything that happened since then is comparable to the Holocaust and certainly to compare the American political system to anything that happened in the Holocaust is just outrageous,” Dershowitz added.

To be sure, no liberal is actually saying what Trump is doing is equivalent to Hitler. When this claim is made, people are generally saying that Trump’s actions looks like the ingredients that led to the Holocaust. For example, what Hitler did didn’t just happen overnight. People didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to massacre millions of people.

Tragedies like the Holocaust start small. They start when people of influence advise the public not to trust the media. And when those influencers find a convenient scapegoat for society’s problems and regularly speak of them using inflammatory rhetoric. And when it becomes easier to think of minority groups as less than human, referring to them instead as “animals” from “shithole countries.”

No, Donald Trump has yet to organize death camps, even though innocent children have died in Republican-backed camps. That’s not what historians mean when they compare him to Hitler. Rather, they are saying that, like Hitler, Trump is using his political power to sow division and empower bigots. It led to disaster in the past. The critics are trying to prevent that disaster from occurring again.

