Ah, here we go again. Another centenarian who managed to escape the industrialized slaughter of the 1940s has crawled out of the wreckage of the 20th century to tell us that we are currently doing it all over again. What a shock. What a revelation. It is almost as if the collective IQ of the human race has the half-life of a radioactive isotope, decaying into pure, unadulterated sludge with every passing TikTok dance and televised debate. A Holocaust survivor has issued a warning that history is repeating itself, reflecting on the escalating violence around the world. It is the kind of headline that should make a civilized society stop and think, but since we are neither civilized nor prone to thinking, it will instead be consumed like a lukewarm diet soda—briefly fizzy, ultimately unsatisfying, and destined for the recycling bin of history.

Let’s be clear: Buck Valor doesn’t do ‘inspiration.’ I don’t do ‘poignancy.’ I do reality, and the reality is that we are currently living through a greatest-hits compilation of human depravity, and we’re all too busy arguing about the optics to notice the fire. The survivor speaks of violence, of the creeping shadows of dehumanization, and the terrifying realization that the lessons we claimed to have learned are being deleted from the hard drive of the public consciousness. But who, exactly, is she talking to? Is it the performative Left, who have spent the last decade devaluing the currency of words like ‘genocide’ and ‘fascism’ until they mean nothing more than ‘someone I disagree with on Twitter’? These are the people who treat ‘safe spaces’ as a human right while ignoring the actual, physical erasure of people across the globe because it doesn’t fit into a tidy narrative of intersectional grievances. They wear their empathy like a designer label, flaunting it for social capital while they sip lattes and curate their outrage for maximum engagement. To them, the survivor’s warning is just more content to be shared with a ‘this’ caption and a crying emoji, a digital participation trophy for the morally bankrupt.

Or perhaps she is addressing the moronic Right, a demographic so thoroughly lobotomized by ‘strongman’ fetishism that they would likely welcome a new era of authoritarianism as long as it promised to own the libs and lower the price of diesel. These are the geniuses who view the concept of ‘history’ as a buffet where they can pick and choose the bits that justify their current paranoia. They wrap themselves in the flag of freedom while salivating at the prospect of a leader who can ‘get things done’—usually by stepping on the necks of anyone who looks or thinks differently. They hear a survivor speak of the 1930s and they don’t see a warning; they see a blueprint. They are so terrified of a world that is changing that they would rather burn the whole thing down than adapt, convinced that they are the heroes of a story that ended in a bunker seventy-nine years ago.

Both sides of this pathetic political spectrum are currently engaged in a frantic race to see who can reach the bottom of the moral abyss first. The survivor’s warning is not a catalyst for change; it is a mirror reflecting our own grotesque incompetence. We have turned ‘Never Again’ into a lifestyle brand, a hollow slogan for the back of a laptop or a hashtag to be deployed when we want to feel superior without actually having to endure the inconvenience of action. History isn’t repeating itself in a literal sense—that would require a level of consistency that humanity simply lacks. Instead, it’s being remixed. We’ve kept the cruelty, the tribalism, and the irrational hatred, but we’ve swapped out the brownshirts for algorithmically generated echo chambers and the gas chambers for the slow, agonizing death of truth.

The tragedy of this news story isn't just the violence the survivor observes; it's the fact that she has to observe it at all. It’s the exhaustion of a woman who has seen the worst of humanity and is forced to spend her twilight years watching the same patterns emerge in high definition. We treat these warnings as entertainment. We nod our heads, feel a momentary pang of ‘awareness,’ and then return to our doom-scrolling, waiting for the next outrage to distract us from the fact that the floor is currently being pulled out from under us. The politicians on both sides will use her words as a cudgel to beat their opponents, twisting a plea for humanity into a partisan weapon for the next fundraising email. The grift never stops, even in the face of absolute horror.

So, by all means, read the article. Feel the fleeting sensation of being a 'good person' for acknowledging that violence is bad. But don't lie to yourselves. We are a species that prefers the comfort of its own delusions to the harsh light of reality. The survivor is shouting into a void filled with people who are too busy shouting at each other to hear her. History is repeating itself because we are too lazy, too stupid, and too invested in our own narrow ideologies to stop it. And as for me? I’ll be over here, pouring a double and watching the reruns. At least in the old version of the apocalypse, the costumes were better.