Every American, every elected official, is entitled to their opinion. Diversity of thought is a hallmark of our nation. But denying facts for political purposes will take us down a very dark road. This includes distorting the truth about the Holocaust.

There is no patriotism in the current plague of politicians who decry evidence-based truths because it feels politically expedient. On sites such as Twitter, false news travels six times faster, and people who listen could be driven to take actions that are deeply out of character. They could even participate in the unthinkable.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is opening an exhibit that I am proud to be the lead underwriter for. “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away” is the most comprehensive exhibition on Auschwitz ever presented in North America. With the alarming rise in antisemitism, this exhibit is urgent.

My parents fled Germany during the Holocaust, escaping to Uruguay and then emigrating to Washington state, where I was born in the 1950s. Antisemitism in America is at the highest level I have seen in my lifetime, and the numbers agree. In the last six years, antisemitic acts have tripled, and the Anti-Defamation League has declared a state of emergency.

How did we get here? While the words and actions of politicians and celebrities make headlines, especially those who associate with known Holocaust deniers, most acts are carried out by “regular” people who develop exclusionary views.

Genocide Watch defines the first stage of genocide as “classification,” the division of “us” and “them.” There is something that feels commonplace about this stereotyping, maybe even harmless to some. But genocides all over the globe began this way.

Scholars emphasize that genocide is a process, not an event. And oftentimes, the first spark of the process is the spread of lies about a group of people. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler used the German Jews as scapegoats, blaming them for the economic and political failures of the Weimar Republic. The lies and propaganda led to genocide.

An important word, perhaps the most important, in the steps leading to mass murder is “normal.” To organize the killing of 6 million Jews, it was not just leaders greasing the machinery of war, but the people believing their lies — normal, ordinary people. They were doctors and teachers, factory workers and business owners. They were people whom if you had told 10 years prior that they would be overlooking the execution of millions of their fellow citizens, even aiding it, they would never have believed you.

But genocide is not a perfectly laid-out plan. Genocides go through a long evolution of hate.

It’s critically important to consider what can happen when normal people believe lies, succumb to fear, and take steps toward collaboration. False information, racism, and an explosion of hate led to the Holocaust, to slavery and Jim Crow, to Japanese American internment. Any group can become the target of collective hate, and it could happen again in our lifetime. Even in America.

How, then, do we stay true to "never again"? We educate. We remember the suffering. And we push back against Holocaust distortion. Our First Amendment rights are strong, as they should be, but freedom of speech means that we must protect the facts. We all must — for a person cannot call oneself a Republican or a Democrat, a proud American, if the person is a Holocaust denier.

As knowledge of the Holocaust diminishes with every generation, the importance of this cannot be overstated. In a recent poll, two-thirds of U.S. millennials could not identify what Auschwitz is. In Europe, another poll found that one-third of the 7,000 respondents across seven countries knew “just a little or nothing at all” about the Holocaust.

With this global need in mind, “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away” is a traveling exhibit. When Auschwitz survivor David Lenga announced the exhibit coming to California, he reminded us that the “truth cannot be compromised but must be faced head-on and defended in every generation.” If you are able to see the more than 700 original objects and 400 photographs, to hear the human stories attached to them, I hope you’ll feel the same.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan laid the cornerstone of what is now the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “I think all of us here are aware of those, even among our own countrymen, who have dedicated themselves to the disgusting task of minimizing or even denying the truth of the Holocaust," he said. "This act of intellectual genocide must not go unchallenged, and those who advance these views must be held up to the scorn and wrath of all good and thinking people in this nation and across the world.”

We cannot afford to have another exhibit like “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away” a hundred years from now about yet another dark moment in time when the worst of humanity might prevail. But it is up to us to make this exhibit the last of its kind. We must be the good and thinking people.

Gordon Sondland served as the U.S. ambassador to the European Union from 2018 to 2020.