Anybody that lived in Europe during the 1930's knows how the Nazi party got its rise, and the lengths the party went to in blaming the Jewish population of Germany for their role in how Germany was a shell of what it was during World War I. The Nazi Party and its supporters felt like they got stabbed in the back by the Jews, who acquiesced to the Allies when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on the heels of the first World War.
Their leader and future Fuhrer of Germany, Adolf Hitler, led many speeches including the Beer Hall Putsch outlining the plans of how Germany would be Made Great Again. Eventually, Germany's breaking of the Treaty of Versailles were some of the warning signs that World War II would be started. Germany would eventually invade Poland, institute Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" of rounding up 6 million Jewish people into concentration camps, and the start of World War II would come.
It's easy to see that the Hitler and Nazi card can be played to people's fears and anxieties to win support for a particular party, or denounce a party with which it can be used against.
However, this card is often used incorrectly and pretty brazenly incorrectly ever since The Third Reich's rise. The recent case of this improper usage is with Donald Trump Jr, who recently compared the present-day Democratic Party to Nazis and disparaged history taught by academics.
A notable quote from the eldest son of #45 is:
"I've been out hearing the left talking about all these things, fascism, Nazism on the right,"
The things #45 Jr. is hearing is correct; when freedom of the press is suppressed against media members you perceive to be your "enemy," while you allow press members who write nothing but fluff for you, that is the very definition of fascism. As for the Nazism comparison, when you round up members of a particular race and separate them from their parents, and you try to institute a ban on a particular religion from entering your country, how do you differentiate that from what the Nazis did to 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust?
Even so, with your father trying to nominate his second* Supreme Court nomination in Brett Kavanaugh, who would be the favorite to suppress the Mueller investigation, it would not be wrong for anybody to make the stretch to connect both Nazism AND fascism?
Also, academia is not "influenced by the Left;" Academia is influenced by events and facts that, objectively, cannot be debated by the who, what, where, when, why, and how it got started. Granted, I'd like to see more about how Christopher Columbus and his guys "explored America" and got their start in what is known currently as America, but that is another discussion for another day. That conversation is neither here nor there.
(* - His first SCOTUS nomination: other was stolen from Obama)
