Despite the sheer craziness of the political and cultural landscape in recent months, one particularly nutty 2024 bingo-card item none of us expected began with the bizarre argument that the Nazis were somehow the victims of World War II. And now it’s morphed into the equally absurd claim that the Soviet Union was morally superior to the apparently war-crime-obsessed Western Allies.

This largely started with famed foreign policy expert Candace Owens, who tried to frame the bombing of Dresden in 1945 as an attack on Christians who were “burned alive on Ash Wednesday.” She also argued that the atomic bombing of Nagasaki targeted Christians, with “the bomb dropped 300 yards from a Catholic Church.” And who can forget her declaration that “Americans know nothing about real history” because “12 million Germans were ethnically cleansed after WW2.”