I was recommended this video since I usually listen to video essays while gaming/working, but I'm only 5 minutes into the 43 minute runtime and I'm already fatigued.
It's about
The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, a children's book where a Nazi officer's son befriends a jewish boy, they switch places, and the german boy is killed in a gas chamber and the lesson is "holocaust bad." I'm like, okay, I know people were upset about this, maybe this video's about the inaccuracies of the book! Or maybe the book is actually really bad and they're reading it/dunking on it, which would be funny. I'm interested.
Almost immediately, Big Joel talks about how the author is a transphobe and had lunch with JK Rowling, and how the author thinks that's the ONLY reason anyone criticizes his book, because he's unpopular for the trans thing. I think that's off base, even if he's got a point (lbr if he said one of the boys was trans nobody would be allowed to criticize the book at all,) but then Big Joel says what the Auschwitz people actually criticized the book for: It's making kids
too empathetic.
Some 11 year old girl who read the book took away the lesson that "Nazi Germany was bad for everyone, not just the Jews," and she felt bad for the non-Jewish Germans. So naturally the irl Jews seethed and lost their minds like "HOW DARE YOU FEEL BAD FOR PEOPLE IN WARTIME GERMANY THE JEWS HAD IT WORSE!!!"
I'm not even interested in watching the next 30-odd minutes of this video, because I know it's going to be all groveling at the feet of jews and trannies. Like, for fuck's sake, you can criticize historical fiction or middle-grade fiction for simplifying real events, but when the fuck did "I feel bad for anyone who dies unfairly" become a bigoted opinion? Jesus H Christ.