Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, describing fear and disorder tied to federal immigration enforcement and street-level unrest, reached for a loaded analogy. “We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside. Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s going to write that children’s story about Minnesota.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum responded on X in the register of moral correction, declaring, “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish,” and warning, “Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable,” adding, “Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
That exchange is useful mainly as a diagnostic. An institution scolding others for “politicizing” Holocaust memory is a reasonable starting point for asking who, precisely, controls that institution’s megaphone, and what those controllers do with it. In the USHMM’s case, the answer points straight to a governing structure explicitly filtered through U.S. presidential politics, and to board members whose public record includes open endorsement of genocidal logic toward Palestinians in Gaza.
The result is not merely hypocrisy. It is a case study in how moral language becomes a bureaucratic weapon: “Don’t politicize,” for you. “History mandates,” for us.
A governing board designed for political loyalty
The Museum’s governing body is the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and it is not a detached guild of historians. The Council was established by Congress in 1980, and it became the Museum’s board of trustees when the Museum opened. The Museum describes itself as “an independent establishment of the United States government,” operating as a “public-private partnership” that “receives some federal funding.” That mix of state authority and private branding is not incidental. It is the institutional formula for turning memory into soft power.
The Council “consists of 55 members appointed by the president,” plus congressional appointees and executive-branch ex officio members. Presidential appointees “serve at the pleasure of the president or until their terms expire.” A board that serves “at the pleasure” of a politician is not insulated from politics. It is politics, by job description.
That design choice matters because it allows foreign-policy loyalty tests to be smuggled into Holocaust stewardship. When the Trump administration removed Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and other Biden-era nominees from the Council, the White House spokesperson framed replacements in explicitly geopolitical terms: “President Trump looks forward to appointing new individuals who will not only continue to honor the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, but who are also steadfast supporters of the State of Israel.”
This is the point where the mask slips. The criterion is not curatorial competence, scholarly seriousness, or ethical independence. It is solidarity with a modern state, in the middle of an ongoing atrocity, treated as boardroom virtue. When an institution organized this way later scolds a governor for political misuse of Holocaust imagery, it is not guarding history from politics. It is enforcing a hierarchy of permissible politics.
Martin Oliner and the rhetoric of collective punishment
The Council’s own roster, “as of December 29, 2025,” lists “Martin Oliner, Lawrence, NY,” among presidential appointees. Oliner is not a quiet trustee with a background in archival work. He is a leading figure in organized ideological advocacy. At a May 30, 2024 dinner in Manhattan hosted by the Israel Heritage Foundation, he appeared as “chair of the Religious Zionists of America,” addressing Israel’s New York consul general about how Israel should operate in Gaza.
The remarks documented from that event are not merely partisan. They normalize civilian slaughter as strategy. “Look, we’ve been accused of genocide, so maybe it’s up to us to actually kill civilians,” he said. Moments later, after praising “the lessons” of the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan, he returned to the theme: “But we’re still being accused of genocide. But maybe we need to kill more civilians.” A crowd applauded, according to the same documentation. The video of the event was removed from the IFH’s YouTube channel.
This is the language of exterminatory politics, delivered casually, in a friendly room, while holding a seat on America’s central Holocaust-remembrance governing board.
Oliner’s published writing fits the same pattern. In a February 2025 Jerusalem Post opinion column endorsing a “relocation” concept for Gaza, he described Gazans as “collectively guilty,” and wrote, “Those like myself who do not believe Gazans are worthy of any mercy should welcome it as well,” adding, “They are fundamentally evil, and they must pay a price for their actions.”
This is not analysis. It is demographic condemnation. It erases the civilian category by design, and it makes collective punishment sound like moral clarity. It also creates the exact rhetorical environment international law warns about: the conversion of an entire protected group into a legitimate target.
A Council member can publicly flirt with the logic of mass civilian killing, and remain in place on the USHMM’s own published roster. The Museum’s posture toward Walz, then, reads less like principled restraint and more like institutional discipline. Holocaust references are policed downward, while genocidal talk is tolerated upward.
The same playbook in legacy media and platform governance
Once a narrative is treated as strategic territory, control follows the usual institutional routes: appointments, acquisitions, and moderation systems.
At CBS News, control has moved through ownership and leadership change. In October 2025, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison appointed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News as part of a deal to acquire her outlet, The Free Press, with Weiss describing herself as “proudly pro-Israel.” In January 2026, Weiss announced a newsroom strategy aimed at engineering a “political reset,” including adding 19 contributors and boosting commentary, amid internal dissension and disputes about editorial decisions.
Since then, the network’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza has been, at best, sanitized, and at worst, ignored entirely. A recent example would be the killing of CBS News freelance cameraman Abed Shaat by Israeli Defense Forces while operating a camera drone well within Israel’s “yellow line” boundary. The network acknowledged the loss of their crew member, but fell well short of condemnation of Israel for his murder. Whatever one thinks of Weiss’s talents, the institutional lesson is clear: editorial boundaries can be reshaped without rewriting a single mission statement, simply by changing who holds the levers.
TikTok’s U.S. platform illustrates the same principle in the technological realm. In January 2026, TikTok finalized a new “majority American-owned” joint venture, with Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX each holding 15%, and ByteDance retaining 19.9%. The venture was purported to “secure U.S. user data, apps, and algorithms,” and that it will “retrain, test and update” the recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data, secured in Oracle’s U.S. cloud. TikTok’s own joint venture announcement framed “content moderation” and “algorithm security” as part of the safeguard package.
With the deal now finalized, the platform sporting over 1.5 billion monthly active users globally will be in the hands of billionaires like Larry Ellison and Safra Catz, giving them “the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.” When control of algorithm and moderation shifts, the boundaries of political speech can shift with it, quietly, and at scale.
Evidence of suppression of pro-Palestinian speech on major platforms has been documented already. Human Rights Watch’s report on Meta reviewed over 1,050 cases and found 1,049 involved peaceful pro-Palestine content that was censored or unduly suppressed, describing the censorship as “systemic and global,” and detailing patterns including removals, account suspensions, feature restrictions, and “shadow banning.” Other reports likewise document systematic silencing of Palestinian voices and the removal of content including documentation of atrocities and human rights abuses.
The role of state-linked pressure is also documented. The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes how platforms have worked with Israel’s Cyber Unit, a government office issuing takedown requests, and notes a reported surge of takedown requests and high compliance rates, warning that moderation shaped “at the request” of a government can bias platforms toward that government’s favored positions.
Against that backdrop, an institution like the USHMM functions as a cultural amplifier for the same boundary-policing impulse. It teaches millions how to name genocide in the past, while its governing elite treats genocide in the present as unmentionable, or worse, as desirable.
Speaking truth for power rather than to power
A museum cannot stop people from making bad analogies. It can, however, decide whether it will be governed by political loyalty tests, and whether trustees who speak in the register of civilian slaughter will be treated as moral authorities. The USHMM’s rebuke of Walz was not the central event. The central event is the structure and leadership behind the rebuke: a presidentially controlled board explicitly filtered for pro-Israel allegiance, and a trustee who publicly endorses collective punishment and flirts with the logic of killing civilians, while remaining on the Council’s published roster.
When genocide memory is governed this way, “Don’t politicize the Holocaust” does not mean “protect historical truth.” It means “protect institutional authority.” It means “protect the permitted narrative.” It means, in practice, that genocide is condemned most loudly when it is safely over, and least urgently when it is underway.
