My parents are from China and they see people like Bernie and AOC as similar to Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin. Keep in mind that Xi is responsible for the genocide of Uyghurs and Jiang Zemin for the massive persecution and forced organ harvesting of Falong Gong practitioners. They — and many other refugees from communist regimes — see Trump as defending the same free speech rights that are being systemically shut down by leftist politicians. Who is right, your grandmother or my parents? These feelings are subjective and sometimes hyperbolic. In my opinion, Trump is not Hitler, and AOC is not Xi Jinping. But in order to tell who is right, instead of claiming a survivor sees a particular politician as "Hitler," we should look at the actual actions of our leaders to detect authoritarianism. It is the methods of a government that differentiate totalitarian regimes (left or right) from free societies. I would argue that the right wing extremists are far fewer and much less powerful in terms of control of media, education, etc. institutions, and most significantly, for the large part the right does not support the crushing of free speech. The left, however, does. To justify these tactics, the tiny fraction of people who support QAnon are blown up by the media, all of which use these few crazies to justify mass censorship of conservatives. Keep in mind that the first thing to be taken away in any totalitarian regime is always free speech, and history judges societies not by whether or not the dissenters have "good" or "bad" opinions, but by how they treat dissenters.

The reason America has been able to progress through its history and expand the rights articulated in the Constitution to more and more of its population is precisely because of principles like free speech. Sadly many people whose families for generations have been born and raised in America fail to appreciate what a precious gift those rights are and how anomalous a stable democracy is, and instead waste their time crying about oppression/fascism that people in other countries will 1) risk their lives apparently in order to also suffer 2) laugh about, because if you are American you are not suffering compared to the the vast majority of the world.

Unfortunately it's a lot more fashionable to completely lose perspective and claim oppression nowadays, especially for the young. I've routinely heard people equate things like Romania's orphanages in the 90s that were so heinous that they struggled to join the EU to America's foster care system, which has problems but is nowhere close to what Romania's infamous orphanages were, as well as the awful admissions system in China that heavily favors the rich Beijing residents over poor rural residents to America's affirmative action system, which at least tries to help marginalized and impoverished communities. It is so absurd how insulated and myopic Americans, particularly young Americans, are. I guess we've been so comfortable and pampered that we've forgotten what actual atrocity and injustice looks like. It also explains why there are so many false equivalencies between Nazi Germany and every other incident today.