I can't imagine what it would feel like to wake up as the descendant of one of Captain America's original creators right now and find out that one of your loved one's greatest legacies for justice has been turned into a Nazi.

Steve Rogers, the original Captain America was created by Jewish-Americans who wished to bring awareness to the Holocaust and xenophobic violence everywhere. However, today, despite the fact that Europe is in the most xenophobic environment it has seen since WW2, despite the fact that recently Krystallnacht was recreated in France as its perpetrators sang "Gas the Jews," Marvel Comics announced that in their new comic series, Captain America will be a sleeper agent for human experimentation performing Nazi deep science division HYDRA, even released panels of him saying the infamous words "Hail Hydra."

This is sick. Captain America was always mean to symbolize the greatest ideals of American diversity and remind readers of everything America is meant to be as a melting pot and the land of the free, not necessarily a reflection of what America was, but rather what it had the potential to be. He was always a character with a lot of integrity, who stood up for what he believed was right. Even in times of great adversity the character always made important distinctions between knowing ones enemy and making sweeping judgments. When asked by a German man he came to look up to if beating up Germans was the reason he wanted to fight in World War II, this is what he had to say:

But now, that mouthpiece for the good we saw in our country has turned into a mouthpiece for what we feared it could be: a virulent xenophobe. He represents an America where African American males between the ages of 15 and 34 comprised more than 15 percent of all cases of police deadly force in 2015, a rate was five times higher than their white peers, and where the highest polling presidential candidate has connections to the Ku Klux Klan and both encourages and welcomes comparisons between him and Hitler.

Overwhelmingly the new interpretation has brought forth rage from the fingertips of Internet users from all walks of life, including from some of Marvel’s celebrated actors including Hayley Atwell, and even Chris Evans, the man currently behind the iconic Captain America mask and shield.

However, many others have sprung forth to defend the decision including Stan Lee, the man who essentially started the Marvel Comics media empire it has grown to be today. One way or another, nevertheless, most cases of defense have gone further to prove critics' arguments than the other way around.

For example, Clark Gregg, who plays Phil Coulon, a SHIELD agent, and a huge fan of Captain America has consistently stated in the past that he dislikes how HYDRA is sometimes turned into a joke or worse a seen as an edgy but harmless way to identify oneself as a Marvel fan if being on the side of the heroes isn’t edgy enough for you. After seeing Gregg’s shocked reaction on Twitter, Nick Spencer, the creator and mastermind behind the new Captain America arc, and formerly one of the many who identified himself as HYDRA on his Twitter bio (taken down in response to the backlash to his #HYDRACap), beckoned for Gregg to “join us.” To say that that is not the best thing to say to a man who married into a Jewish family like Gregg is a massive understatement.

Additionally, one of the most popular defenses of the shocking twist has been that this version of Captain America, like all versions of any comic book character, is finite, and that soon Cap will be back to his old self in the form of a new series of the comics. But that does not hold weight for me. The series not only takes away from Steve Rogers’s legacy as the creation of Jewish writers, but it also reflects a scary turn in how we perceive ‘the other.’ One huge red flag there is that Rogers’s backstory as the son of an impoverished Irish immigrant for a father, now has a father who is a drunkard and an abuser, which is a startling revelation in light of the country’s sudden turn toward the anti-immigrant far right. What shall we record as the right thing to do that Captain America always stood up for? Neo-Nazism, apparently.

This is not the Captain America I grew up with, nor the Captain America many children are now mourning the loss of. It isn’t the man who befriended Japanese Americans during a time of their internment after Pearl Harbor, or the Captain America who stormed enemy lines to rescue his best friend from human experimentation. He’s a Nazi and a murderer, and this is only from the first issue of this new series. Many fans, including myself, are boycotting Nick Spencer’s series, opting instead to spend the amount of money equivalent to the price of the comic on donations to Holocaust memorial organizations.

In the immortal words of Peggy Carter, Captain America’s 1940s love interest, an advocate, and a hero in her own right, “Compromise where you can. And where you can’t, don’t. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right, even if the whole world is telling you to move. It is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye and say, ‘No. You move.’”