A viral clip recently rocked the city of Rochester, Minnesota. A white woman, later identified as Shiloh Hendrix, brazenly hurled the N-word at a 5-year-old autistic Black child on a public playground. While being filmed, she readily admitted she used the slur against the child, saying he “act[ed] like one” and claiming he stole from her son’s diaper bag. The video shows her cackling and flipping off the man recording her — also calling him the N-word multiple times.

The woman has raised, as of this writing, a little over $700,000 on the controversial fundraising platform GiveSendGo to assist with “protecting [her] family” after having “been put into a very dire situation.” According to Hendrix in her fundraiser, she “called out the kid for what he was” and now “must relocate.”

The enormous outpouring of financial support from across the country to protect this woman from the consequences of her act of despicable racism against a child is striking. While we always hesitate to make allusions to Nazism based on current events, one can’t help but draw parallels to the Nazi social welfare organizations of the 1930s, which directed charitable donations to “racially superior” Germans aligned with the Nazi regime. And in the early days of the Nazis’ rise to power, as their paramilitary fighters battled ideological opponents in the streets, the party offered its “activists the possibility of insuring themselves … against contingencies like death, injury or damages while defending their cause,” according to a history professor at the University of the Basque Country. Aren’t Hendrix’s financial aiders and abettors morally indistinguishable from the underwriters of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich? At the very least, we should be deeply concerned to see that same popular interest in subsidizing hate alive and well in America today.

Sharmake Omar, the man who confronted and filmed Hendrix, echoed the confusion many of us likely felt upon learning Hendrix turned being exposed for her prejudice into an opportunity to profit to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Omar told KTTC. “I thought she was going to get punished for this, but apparently not. She’s getting rewarded.”

That’s not to say Hendrix’s racist diatribe, contemptible as it was, calls for firm criminal consequences. In the United States, the Constitution protects freedom of speech — especially speech that we hate. Even the most vile, racist epithets short of “fighting words” are protected. While the woman’s racism deserves ostracism (which has been forthcoming), charging her with a crime risks her elevation to martyrdom. Better to stick with the time-honored adage, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”

Community leaders have stepped up to support the child and ensure this woman’s hate is met with broad public condemnation. The Rochester branch of the NAACP launched its own fundraiser for the boy’s family, raising over $340,000 in solidarity with the child.

There is a message here for President Donald Trump and DOGE. Our country still has lessons to learn from our sometimes-painful history. This is no time to dismantle the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This is no time to diminish or disappear Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Emmett Till, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Riders, or Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney.

As William Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”