New Delhi: Elon Musk shared a satirical video on X that imagines an encounter between a self-described modern-day liberal and Adolf Hitler.
The video starts with the liberal woman from 2025, who has travelled back in time to kill Hitler, pressing a bright orange plastic gun to Hitler’s head. The German dictator sighs in exasperation. “Why do all the time travellers always try to kill me?” he asks, before complaining that if they keep showing up, he will never get to finish his paintings.
“I am a progressive, a liberal, a fighter for social justice, and you are a fascist who implemented a reign of terror,” the woman says.
The eight-minute video, produced by conservative satire outlet The Babylon Bee, follows a time traveller determined to assassinate the failed painter before his rise to power. But the encounter turns into a conversation in which they discover apparent ideological common ground on issues ranging from state control to reproductive policy and eugenics.
“I tried to come back here and kill Hitler, but we actually agree on a lot,” the activist says, lowering her flare gun.
Originally released in 2025, the video remained within conservative online circles until Musk reposted it on X on Wednesday.
Supporters described it as a thought-provoking critique of progressive politics, while critics dismissed it as a misleading comparison that trivialises both Nazi ideology and modern reproductive rights.
“Very good, except a little unrealistic with the white liberal woman actually listening to the other person speak,” one X user wrote.
What the video argues
Wearing a Planned Parenthood T-shirt and carrying a flare gun, the activist confronts a young Hitler. As the conversation continues, Hitler points to what the satire presents as similarities between his views and those the activist initially defends.
“Boomer slop humour filled with fake facts and false information,” one user wrote.
Some users argued that the satire unfairly equated modern liberal politics with fascism and ignored the historical differences between them. Others defended Planned Parenthood, noting that the organisation today provides contraception, cancer screenings, sexual health services and other reproductive healthcare, in addition to abortion services. They argued its current work should not be judged solely by the views of its founder, Margaret Sanger.
Others accused Musk of using the video to promote his long-held views on falling birth rates and his criticism of abortion.
The historical context
As the conversation shifts to creating a “better” society by eliminating “undesirable” groups, Hitler asks the activist, “Like the Jews?” She initially responds, “Yes, like the Jews,” before quickly correcting herself. She says modern progressives do not support racial segregation in the Nazi sense, but references identity-based graduation ceremonies, dormitories, admissions policies and hiring initiatives.
The exchange is followed by another awkward moment when Hitler shows her one of his paintings, titled “An Empire Without Jews” in German. Unable to understand the language, the activist replies that she does not know what he said but that it “sounds beautiful.”
Throughout the video, the Hitler character claims to find common ground with the liberal character on using government power to impose ideas, silencing dissenters, removing “undesirable” groups, restricting guns for certain people, eugenics-linked policies, socialised healthcare and vegetarianism.
The video’s central premise is that these positions reveal ideological similarities between modern progressivism and Nazism. Historians, however, generally reject such direct comparisons.
Nazi Germany was a totalitarian dictatorship built on racial supremacy, extreme nationalism and violent repression. Hitler’s regime used state power to eliminate political opponents, strip Jews and other minorities of their rights, and ultimately carry out the Holocaust.
Why Planned Parenthood and eugenics feature
The video references eugenics, a movement that had supporters in several countries during the early twentieth century, including the United States. Nazi Germany took that idea to an extreme through forced sterilisation programmes, the Aktion T4 killings and the Holocaust.
Sanger, who later founded Planned Parenthood, supported parts of the eugenics movement, which held that society could be improved by encouraging some people to have children while discouraging others from doing so. At the time, these ideas had support among many academics, politicians and public health reformers in the US and Europe, but they are now widely condemned.
Sanger believed birth control could help reduce poverty and limit births among those she considered “unfit.” Historians, however, distinguish her views from Nazi ideology, arguing that she did not advocate racial persecution or the coercive policies.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)