A local school board candidate in a suburb of Indianapolis is drawing criticism for insisting that “not all Nazis were bad” and that teaching that they were would represent “indoctrination”

Matt Keefer, an anesthesiologist who is running for school board in Zionsville, Indiana, initially made the comment in response to a Facebook user who pressed him for specifics about his platform, which starts with the statement, “Empower teachers to educate, not indoctrinate.” The user asked: Would teaching students that all Nazis are bad cross the line?

Keefer said it would. “All Nazis weren’t ‘bad’ as you specify. They did horrible things. They were in a group frenzy,” he wrote, adding, “Who is to say if we were both there in the same place and time, that we wouldn’t have done the same thing”

Keefer doubled down Thursday night as reports of his comments, first collected by a local Twitter account and first reported by an Indianapolis TV station on Thursday, burst into public view. “A few days ago I made the comment ‘not all Nazis were bad’ in my response to a question posed to me on Facebook. I am correct,” Keefer wrote in a lengthy statement on Facebook. But he added, “To be clear: I never was, am not now, and never will be a Nazi sympathizer”[…]
Keefer entered politics, he has said, because he was upset about pandemic restrictions and vaccine requirements, which he said one day might be perceived in hindsight as equally objectionable to Nazism