One of the favorite insults used by Alt-Right idiots is to accuse their opponents of being “snowflakes.” A November 16, 2016 Los Angeles Times article on the Alt-Right’s often confusing vocabulary notes that snowflake is,
Short for “special snowflake,” a pejorative for an entitled person. Most people protesting Trump are “snowflakes,” according to the alt-right, as are anti-Trump celebrities and most liberals.
This usage of “snowflake” by the Alt-Right has apparently led to some people to create a false etymology of the word: that it is a reference to the ashes of victims of Holocaust victims.
Sometimes the claim is that the Nazi’s themselves referred to Jews as “snowflakes”, such as this tweet:
As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that this is actually true.
Other times, the claim is that the Alt-Right itself created the term to references Jewish victims of the Holocaust, such as this Tweet,
The reality is that the use of “snowflake” as a pejorative to describe excessively fragile people appears to originate with Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club in 1999. Both the novel and the subsequent movie feature the line:
You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
From there, the phrase “special snowflake” entered popular usage both in the United States and some other English-speaking nations. As happens over time, the phrase “special snowflake” has been increasingly shortened to just “snowflake.”
The claim that Nazis used the term to refer to Jews or that the Alt-Right adopted it as an anti-Jewish slur appears to be nothing but a spurious, invented etymology for a phrase that has been in wide use for a couple of decades now.
