As observers of daytime TV can tell you, skinheads are white supremacists who idolize Hitler. But as observers of history can tell you, this means that skinheads are doubly stupid. First, for BEING white supremacists, and second, for picking Adolf Hitler as their hero.

Hitler, after all, was not a white supremacist. He was an Aryan supremacist. Virtually everyone killed in Hitler’s racial extermination camps, including the Jews, the Poles and the Gypsies, were white.

In addition, the weakened state of Europe after World War II sped the loss of European colonies. Far from being a champion of white supremacy, it is hard to imagine anyone who hurt whites in such “disproportionate numbers” as Hitler did.

Skinheads aren’t exactly renowned for their intellectual rigor. So even though a white supremacist idolizing Hitler is like a vegetarian idolizing Wendy’s Dave Thomas, skinheads are not likely to put down their swastikas.

If stupidity can explain why skinheads are so spectacularly wrong, what explains the equally wrong description of Hitler given by liberal politicians and academics?

Some of these educated people actually characterize Hitler as being a mainstream American conservative!

That can be shown to be as preposterous as skinheads thinking

Hitler was a white supremacist. On important issues such as economics, racial politics, freedom of speech and religion and respect for human life, Hitler was nothing like mainstream conservatives.

Nazis were the National Socialists and had direct control over the economy. A difference between fascists and communists was that communist governments owned the industries outright, while the fascists tightly controlled industry by force and regulation.

American conservatives usually fight attempts to increase government control over the private sector, such as the Clinton plan to socialize medicine.

When it comes to racial policies, there is even less connection between Hitler and American conservatives. Hitler forwarded the notion that identity is determined by race.

He used the educational system in Germany to promote this notion and purged instructors who wouldn’t go along with it. He also held everyone who belonged to a given race personally responsible for past wrongs. For example, he held all Jews responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War.

Leading conservatives in America believe in color-blindness and treating people as individuals. They hold that the government should not discriminate or grant preferential treatment based on race.

On freedom of speech issues, again Hitler was not conservative.

While conservatives often oppose subsidizing offensive speech with tax dollars, it is rare to see liberal speakers shouted-down on college campuses by conservatives. It is also rare to see an edition of a liberal campus newspaper stolen and publicly burned by conservative activists.

As a side note, hundreds of copies of the “Cornell Review” were stolen and set ablaze by liberal activists last April. The Cornell administration took no action.

Hitler severely restricted religion. He drove religion out of public life and put mystical salvation-by-the-government theology and racial identity in its place.

How does this compare to conservative ideas of returning voluntary prayer to schools and wanting to include religious schools in their school-choice programs?

Finally, there is the issue of respect for human life. The Nazis used abortion extensively, sometimes even after the war. According to an “A&E” special, war criminal Dr. Joseph Mengela made his living by performing abortions after World War II.

Conservatives often oppose abortion because they view the human fetus, especially in the final few months of pregnancy, as a life needing to be protected by law.

A good example of the inappropriateness of comparing conservatives with Hitler comes from Congressman Charles Rangel. Rangel said that plans to eliminate racial preferences by the U.S. government were like Hitler’s plans to eliminate the Jews.

Statements like that should leave thinking people scratching their heads in confusion. After all, wasn’t the Holocaust the most extreme form of a government racial preference program?

Studying the past is critical to making intelligent contributions to public debate. But it is often apparent that when it comes to intelligently referencing Hitler, white supremacists are not the only ones who need to hit the books a little more.

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Benjamin Studenski is a senior in industrial engineering from Hastings, Minn.