AI Distortion: The Threat to Holocaust History We Cannot Ignore

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, historians and memorials sounded a chilling alarm: a flood of photorealistic AI images and fabricated stories is washing over social media and rewriting the evidence of Nazi crimes. These fake images — pushed by content farms and bad actors looking for clicks or political leverage — are not harmless memes; they are corrosive distortions that will shape how the next generation understands history.

We have seen concrete examples: invented victims and staged scenes presented as authentic, which prompted more than 30 memorial sites in Germany to issue an open letter demanding platforms act. That is the very definition of historical theft — a hijacking of real suffering for profit or politics — and it should outrage every decent American who values truth.

At the same time, violent and hostile antisemitism is spiking on our streets and on college campuses, not shrinking into the past. The Anti-Defamation League recorded a record 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, with assaults, vandalism and campus harassment surging in ways that show denial and hatred are no longer confined to fringe corners.

We are also losing the living witnesses who kept this horror tethered to fact: the number of Holocaust survivors worldwide has dropped below 200,000, a grim milestone that makes the fight against distortion urgent. With the eyewitness generation passing, the job of preserving truth falls to families, churches, schools and patriots who refuse to let the left’s cultural gatekeepers and the algorithms erase uncomfortable history.

Worse, the memory of the Holocaust is being flippantly appropriated in modern partisan fights — a practice the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum rightly condemned when political figures invoked Anne Frank or Nazi analogies for contemporary policy disputes. Cheap moral analogies and weaponized history not only dishonor victims, they trivialize genocide and fuel the very polarization that allows hate to spread.

The remedy is not censorship by coastal elites but responsibility and muscle from institutions that once defended decency. Social platforms must stop monetizing toxic, revisionist content and enforce clear labels and takedowns; schools must teach the facts with courage and precision; and religious and civic leaders must push back loudly when history is bent into propaganda.

Americans of faith and common sense should lead this fight. We should demand honest curricula, support survivor testimony projects, and hold tech giants and campus administrators accountable when they allow a culture of denial and mockery to flourish. Conservatism has always stood for memory, virtue and the preservation of truth — now is the time to live up to that calling.

If we fail to protect the historical record now, we do more than dishonor the dead — we imperil our future. Hardworking Americans who believe in God, country and truth must rise and ensure that the lessons of Auschwitz are not repackaged as political theater or lost to the feed. Stand with truth, stand with our Jewish neighbors, and refuse to let lies and convenience rewrite what happened.