Last week, a flurry of media personalities and 2020 Democratic presidential candidates set about likening President Trump to Adolf Hitler on the basis of misattributed statements Trump has made about members of a criminal gang. In the process, each has participated in the demonizing of the very person they wrongly accuse of dehumanizing immigrants.

While campaigning in Iowa on April 4, Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke spoke out against “the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals, but as animals and an infestation.” “I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke continued. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”

On April 5, fellow Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro agreed with O’Rourke, explaining that “one of the things that [the Third Reich] did was to dehumanize people.” Without a modicum of self-reflection, he later stated, “it’s very clear that we have a president who is bound and determined to dehumanize people to create fear and paranoia about them in order to boost his own political fortunes.”

O’Rourke’s original declaration is not correct. In fact, when the president stated, “ these aren’t people, these are animals ,” and mentioned the people “ pour[ing] into and infest[ing] our country ,” he specifically referenced members of the deadly MS-13. The gang’s involvement in trafficking drugs, sex, and humans led the Treasury Department to designate it a transnational criminal organization in 2012. Known for the brutality with which its members mutilate and dismember their victims, MS-13 has an estimated 10,000 members in the U.S., according to the Justice Department . CNN reports the gang is active in 46 states and the District of Columbia.

While Trump’s choice of words was worthy of reproach, the president did not refer to all immigrants as animals or an infestation, as O’Rourke implied.

O’Rourke and Castro were not the only candidates to play fast and loose with the context of Trump’s words. On April 5, the New York Times’ Mark Elliott tweeted an old, edited video which shows Trump’s reference to a group of immigrants, again, MS-13, as “animals.” In the video Elliott tweeted, this context is missing, and the writer purports that Trump is referencing all asylum seekers.

Elliott has since deleted the tweet, but not before it was retweeted by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand , D-N.Y., as well as by MSNBC host Chris Hayes , and filmmaker Judd Apatow.

Racist language like this has led to violence throughout the world’s history. No human being is an animal. We have to be better than this.https://t.co/TQ0MhJFGtq — Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) April 6, 2019

Gillibrand certainly played into Elliott’s misleading anti-Trump charade. However, Apatow and Hayes either readily and without review accepted, or deliberately and with malice distributed, false and damning content to paint the president as a Nazi. O’Rourke and Castro willingly likened Trump’s words, divorced and alien from their context, to those of the leader of the Third Reich.

People who make comparisons between modern day politicians and Hitler have one thing in common: They usually have very little understanding of the complex period of history about which they make their sweeping generalizations. In the darkest irony, they use a period marked by the mobilization of incredible hatred to launch hatred at those with whom they disagree.

These attacks work because public knowledge of the era and its lessons is waning. As discovered in a study conducted in February 2018 at the behest of The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 45% of U.S. adults and 49% of millennials are unable to name any of the 40,000 camps and ghettos used during the Holocaust. About 31% of adults and 41% of millennials believed that Hitler killed fewer than 2 million Jews, less than one third of the actual death toll.

Even if we have lost touch with the historical facts, Americans are quick to label anyone they perceive as unsavory as “Hitler.” The fallacious phenomenon happens so often it has its own name: Reductio ad Hitlerum .

The best way to combat the pervasive comparisons between Trump and Adolf Hitler is with actual history.

Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, the Nazi Party, in 1921. Through the years, with a combination of fear-mongering and establishing the party’s presence at all levels of German life, the Nazi party grew in strength, operating on the concepts Hitler elucidated in his book Mein Kampf: hatred of Jews, and the importance of creating, and expanding, “a racially pure state.”

It was only in January 1933 , and not through an election, that the Nazis found power when German President Paul von Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor in hopes that he could rein in the powerful Nazi party member.

Hitler and his two Nazi paramilitary forces, the Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel , would not be controlled.

In February, Hitler took advantage of the destruction by fire of the German parliament building. Claiming the fire was an act of arson perpetrated by Communists, he convinced Hindenburg to sign “a decree that suspended all basic civil rights and constitutional protections.”

By July, Hitler had eliminated all political parties except his own.

Throughout 1933, Hitler and his cohorts set about purging German culture of dangerous influences, burning books written by authors deemed “anti-German,” and censoring from all media any “viewpoints … threatening to Nazi beliefs.”

In the same year, Hitler began to imprison enemies of the state starting with “Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists,” and eventually including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Roma in concentration camps. He also issued the first of many decrees to dehumanize and restrict the civil liberties of Jews, an enemy he hated with especial fervor.

In June 1934, Hitler killed between 61 and 400 allegedly treasonous members of his own SA. Two months later, Hitler was elected president of Germany. He won 90% of the votes .

With the help of his propaganda team, Hitler displayed himself to the masses as a messianic figure, and the Germans were taken by their leader’s perceived charms.

Thus, the groundwork was laid for Hitler’s genocide. When Hitler passed his racially-based and pseudo-scientific Nuremberg Laws in 1935, there were few who dared dissent. Even as he dragged his country into a war to secure space for his fictional Aryan race and began to carry out the “Final Solution” against the Jews of Europe, few spoke out. Many were complicit in Hitler’s genocide against 5 million enemies of state and 6 million European Jews.

Any examination of history will prove that Trump is no Adolf Hitler. Regardless, plenty of fodder has been put forward to reinforce this damaging comparison, like the media-driven lie that the president referred to neo-Nazis at the Charlottesville protest as “fine people,” and the insistence by various political leaders that Trump’s travel ban , which suspends immigration from five Muslim-majority and two non-Muslim-majority countries, is a blanket “ Muslim ban. ”

Comparing a political opponent to Hitler is vile, vulgar, and lazy. It minimizes a horrific history and reduces the evil mastermind of a massive genocide against 11 million people to being simply “bad” while it conflates a human with no such tendencies or predilections with an amoral architect of genocide. Additionally, it demonstrates a lack of couthness and restraint in the accuser, who proves himself willing to sacrifice sound facts for a powerful sound byte.

This kind of language is likewise a signal to one’s supporters that it is perfectly acceptable to treat the alleged Hitler (in this case, Trump) exactly as one would the heinous Adolf Hitler. In the currently fraught political atmosphere, it should come as no surprise that Americans have reacted as expected, coming out in mass to condemn an allegedly genocidal president on Twitter.

Trump’s rhetoric is at times problematic. His Twitter rants show him to be a far cry from a polished statesman. However, the elites who mischaracterized Trump’s remarks and used them to liken Trump to Hitler and accuse the president of genocidal speech, have paved the way for the utter demonization of the president.

The effects of these incidents remind us why we must remember the full history of Hitler’s rise and genocide. The Holocaust is meant to teach us the dangers of hate, and at this critical point in time, it is clear that everyone needs to revisit its lessons.

We should expect more of our political and social leaders than to use disinformation to mobilize hate in the name of the Holocaust. For once and for all, we should retire Reductio ad Hitlerum and replace it with facts and civil discourse.

Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.