Americans throw around the terms “Nazi,” “fascist,” “Hitler,” and similar words without serious enough consideration for their actual meaning. JD Vance referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler”. We compare foreign regimes to the Third Reich all the time. And many chronically online young men have begun indulging edge-lord Neo-Nazism. None of these three ideas have much in common with the historical Adolf Hitler. There are four very distinct ways in which Adolf Hitler is understood today: as 1) The German dictator, 2) left-wing Satan, 3) war hawk enemy, 4) I hate my parents!
The German Dictator
Adolf Hitler himself is perhaps the least interesting of the four uses for this article’s purposes. It is rare that politicians or commentators discuss the actual WWII battles, the Holocaust, or Hitler’s rise to power.
People need to understand their history: The Second World War established America as the foremost global power, preceded the Cold War, which dominated the latter half of the 20th century, and revealed the potential evil that exists within the human psyche. There are many excellent books on these subjects, two of which I personally recommend are Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning and Winston Churchill’s six volume WWII series. But most Americans have so little knowledge of the past that WWII has become one of our only cultural touchstones.
We therefore allude to it for many purposes, most of which stretch the concept of Nazism well beyond its original meaning. Hitler was an evil man who plunged Europe into the most violent war in world history and killed six million Jews. But that is not what most people are talking about when they refer to Hitler. Indeed, the number of Americans in Neo-Nazi groups is small. Adolf Hitler does not have many true fans.
Left Wing Satan
The left is largely secular. Conservatives are much more likely than liberals to be Christian and therefore possess a common language about good and evil. The left, without the same God versus Satan dichotomy to draw from, has replaced Satan with Hitler. When figures on the left compare an ordinary American to a National Socialist, they are not implying that he wants a mass sterilization program or intends to invade Poland. They simply mean to call him evil. Hitler to them exemplifies all different kinds of wickedness and wrongdoing across a wide range of circumstances. They therefore find it appropriate to liken beliefs they dislike to Hitler’s, regardless of how far removed those beliefs are from Hitler’s genuine evil.
Recent examples of the left drawing false equivalencies to Hitler include Biden insisting Trump uses “Nazi rhetoric”, Tim Walz comparing Trump campaign events to Nazi rallies, and James Carville likening Trump to the Nazis, stating, “they have promised military roundup”. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Governor Pritzker, Mayor Wu, and many other prominent democrat leaders have compared ICE to the Gestapo or other Nazi/Neo-Nazi groups. These verbal attacks are directed towards the commentariat class and layfolk as well.
UCLA tenured professor Melina Abdullah refers to Ben Shapiro (who is famously Jewish) as a “Neo-Nazi” and “Neo-KKK”. Crowds gathered at Charlie Kirk events to chant “You spread hate. You spread lies. We see Nazis in disguise.” Directly following the death of Charlie Kirk, Democratic State Representative from Delaware Eric Morrison referred to a potential military recruitment campaign linked to the assassination as “full on Nazi Youth recruitment.” Many on the left liken Trump, Shapiro, Kirk, and even everyday people to the Nazis.
Because Nazis deserve to be vanquished, and Hitler deserves to be killed, this rhetoric risks encouraging political violence. There have been three recent attempted assassinations of President Trump. Charlie Kirk’s assassin wrote “hey fascist catch” on one of the bullet casings used to murder him. The FBI was forced to issue a warning after terrorist attacks against Tesla in at least nine states because of Elon’s association with Trump. When Michael Knowles came to debate at the University of Pittsburgh, a screaming mob appeared, and someone threw an explosive, injuring several police officers. More incidents include the congressional baseball shooting, attacks on ICE detention centers, and an attempted assassination of Brett Kavanaugh.
If you publicly call someone a Nazi enough times, eventually some people will believe you. Consequently, following in the footsteps of heroes like Claus von Stauffenberg (who tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944), such people may try to kill the new Hitler. This would be appropriate if the language applied to an actual genocidal dictator. But as a label used against mainstream conservatives, it only serves to endanger good people.
War Hawk Enemy
The left is not our only political constituency that invokes the Nazis inappropriately. Our geopolitical commentators and politicians often exploit our historical memory to justify foreign wars.
WWII was “The Good War”. People who want to go to war against Vietnam, Iraq, Syria, Iran, etc. argue by analogy that the new war is also good. In 1965, President Johnson invoked failures at Munich as a justification for war in Vietnam. Three days before launching the Iraq war in 2003, George W. Bush likened Saddam Hussein to “20th century murderous dictators, whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide”. In 2013, Secretary of State Kerry referred to the situation in Syria as “our Munich moment.” And more recently, WWII has been routinely cited to justify the war in Iran, such as in Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz’s opening statement in his debate against Dave Smith.
Nazi language obscures the particular circumstances of a given war. The decision to go to war should always account for pragmatic considerations. It was prudent to fight Hitler in the 1940’s. Yet other wars against dictators who resemble Hitler only loosely have not been nearly as prudent.
It is much easier to sell a war against Hitler. Leaders might argue that Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Bashar Al-Assad, or Ayatollah Khomeini are Hitler to justify fighting them. Outside these leaders’ shared evil and despicable disdain for human life, this analogy carries little water, given the lack of similarity between the situations surrounding them. The comparison is one used to lie us into war.
I Hate My Parents!
The last major usage of Hitler is by edgy, chronically online men. In previous generations, these would be the punk rockers with satanic symbolism. But Satan is hardly transgressive anymore. Music by Sam Smith, Lil Nas X, Doja Cat, etc. routinely invokes such imagery and even goes so far as to make themselves into Lucifer. If you want to scandalize modern culture, you have to use the new Satan, which, as discussed above, is Hitler.
We all know young men are more likely to make offensive jokes, and many studies support this. But what is left to be offensive about? In our current culture, it is perfectly normal for Sydney Sweeney to pose nude in a gambling advertisement. We live in an era of school shooting drills. And young people are increasingly desensitized to violence and inappropriate content online. One investigation out of the UK found as many as 26% of teen minors have seen inappropriate violence online in the last three months, mostly by accident while scrolling. Having destroyed most other taboos, our culture of transgression has led rebel types to embrace edge-lording racism and Neo-Nazism.
At the same time, we have seen a rise in cancel culture and identity politics. Telling transgressive young people they are not allowed to say something makes them want to say it more. This proclivity has been aggravated by a general insistence that one’s racial identity is his most important feature. If enough young people are told that their most important feature is their whiteness and that they are racist because of it, some of them will accept the accusation and no longer consider racism to be shameful. They say, “Okay, I am a racist; now what?”
Some of these young men make and enjoy racist jokes without believing the underlying hateful content. Satire and edge are, by definition, imprecise. Yet people also couch their racist thoughts behind a mask of humor. They themselves may not even be fully aware of whether they are joking or not. And sometimes, the mask of humor is dropped entirely.
As a result, modern culture now has no good response to genuine racism. See Nick Fuentes’ interview with Piers Morgan for an example of an older member of the cultural elite having no idea how to respond to someone admitting to racial animus.
Enough people who are mad at their culture, at their fathers, or at whatever other power structure may choose an inappropriate way to rebel. They decide to say, “I am literally Hitler.”
Conclusion
Hitler committed evil. If you support him, you are committing an evil. You are also doing something deeply wrong if you invoke his name incorrectly. Trump is not Hitler. ICE is not the Gestapo. Irresponsible language suggesting as much increases political animosity and likely contributed to the conditions that led to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. There is nothing vaguely appropriate about such comparisons.
Likewise, although Saddam and the Ayatollah also committed evil, they too are not Hitler. The conditions of the wars fought against them are so different to those of WWII that comparisons between them are unreasonable. Such allusions prey on the poor historical knowledge and patriotic fever of Americans to justify wars that should not be fought. See my Tory article written earlier this year criticizing the Iran War.
Lastly, we need to be careful about how we treat young, edgy men. The racist pipeline is very real. We first need to recognize that the left-wing’s undisciplined use of ‘Hitler’ has spurred rebellious teens to pretend they like National Socialism without any clue of what that really means. Then, we need to stop the woke speech controls and telling young white men they are evil because they are white and men. If our culture identifies enough people as racist, some of them will embrace the label. We will then have created new, unabashed racists. And lastly, we need to be prepared to actually explain why racism is wrong, how it fails to perceive and degrades the dignity of other human beings. The accusation “you’re racist” no longer silences these people or causes them to apologize. These people are angry and we need to give them better answers and outlets. It is time to explain why it is unacceptable to think of yourself as Hitler.
Image Credit: Winston Churchill in the Second World War – Wikimedia Commons
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