ahopefullycuterrobot
Fascists were always cringe. Himmler was a weird occultist. Goering was a drug addict still high on his glorious from World War I. Hitler was a profoundly lazy man with terrible taste in art. There were normal fascists (there had to be), but the leadership was always cringe. Unfortunately, being cringe doesn’t stop a movement from killing vast numbers of people.
Haven’t watched Z’s video, but I’d also note I’m deeply sceptical that the nerd/jock distinction was ever real past maybe the 90s.
In my own school (and those of all the people I’ve discussed it with), if you were in advanced classes, you almost always played a sport. Even geeky interests - like video games, some anime (Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon), and to a lesser extent comics - were incredibly popular. There were cliques, but those cliques were normally personality and friend based rather than academic vs. sport. If there were a divide, it was between those who were socially skilled and those who were not, but that didn’t neatly map onto whether you were smart or not.
Even as a kid, I mostly thought of the nerd/jock stuff as being a marketing ploy, rather than reflecting my own experiences. Which isn’t to say you wouldn’t get people identifying as nerds or geeks, but to say that the actual social reality didn’t seem to match.
Yes! I have my issues with Jojo Rabbit, but it does a good job of portraying Nazism as a laughable ideology. It’s good praxis, because Nazis like to portray themselves as being cool (fast cars, uniforms, the brotherhood of the trenches), but in reality, it was a mix of cringe, parvenu social climbing, and disgusting.