"You Nazi!"
On the Hitler Epithet
Back in the good old days when words meant something, the Pope was the ‘antichrist,’ the Catholic Duke Henry of Brunswick “blubber[s] and writhe[s] along with all the devils in hell,” and a Cologne Dominican was a “[m]ad, bloodthirsty murderer, a blind and hardened donkey, who ought to be put to scratch for dung-beetles in the manure-heaps of the Papists.” Those are all insults from the sometimes pugnacious reformer Martin Luther.1 Shakespeare had some great insults: “Thou churlish hasty-witted mammet!” Here’s another from the Bard: “Thou droning common-kissing horn-beast!”2 I’ve just scratched the surface. Back then, both Catholics and Protestants gave as good as they got.
Our insults today are…meh. We lack the imagination of our forebears. Basically, we’ve boiled our insults down to one or two stock figures. Well, just one. Hitler! Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donal Trump have all been called Hitler at some point in their public life. The Republican Party also has come under fire:
California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton offered this analysis: “(Republicans) lie, and they don’t care if people think they lie. As long as you lie, (Nazi propaganda minister) Joseph Goebbels — the big lie — you keep repeating it.”3
Even your humble writer has been called Hitler!
It’s difficult to disagree with Alec Ryrie:
The ‘post-war’ era (as we still call it) is the age of Hitler because Adolf Hitler is its most potent, unifying figure. He is our touchstone and our backstop. In a world where we seem increasingly unable to agree on anything, we can still mostly agree on condemning him. Or rather, the few people who do defend him thereby reveal themselves to be monsters. Whenever we want to condemn anyone, we almost instinctively do it by comparing them to him. His indisputable evil makes him a unique and invaluable fixed reference point in our moral landscape. As soon as Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, images of Vladimir Putin bearing that unmistakable toothbrush moustache began to appear - even as he himself stridently (and absurdly) claimed that his war aim was to ‘denazify’ Ukraine. Even now, it seems, we still define our values principally, and ultimately, with reference to the Nazis, and we cannot shake our fascination with them and their leader.4
Why can we not shake our fascination with the Nazis? How did Hitler displace Satan?
Probably secularism has much to do with answering the latter question. Satan and demons cannot live a materialistic world. Horror vacui sic Hitler!5 Since the Left was (at least initially) enthralled with Stalin, who murdered more people than Hitler, they needed an arch Bad Guy. Hitler fit the bill. The Nazis were also seen as a greater threat during WWII itself. Roosevelt and Churchill decided on a Europe first approach to winning the war. Thus Hitler!
Hitler has seen better days recently. Politico exposed a handful of young Republicans joking about Hitler in text chats.6 More worryingly, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner had a Totenkopf symbol tattooed on his chest. The Totenkopf is the Death’s Head symbol à la the Nazi SS! According to a former acquaintance, Platner called his tattoo “‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” in a “cutesy way.”7
He claims not to be a secret Nazi and only had the Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest after drinking one night. How many people get Nazi symbols accidentally tattooed on themselves after drinking? I digress. Platner may not be a secret Nazi—if he’s to be believed—because he’s actually a Communist.8 I’m not sure that’s much of an upgrade considering the gulags and the Holodomor, not to mention those who died under Mao and other Communist leaders. One researcher has estimated that “[o]verall, the communists murdered approximately 168,759,000 from 1900 to 1987.”9
Call me ‘old fashioned,’ but identifying with any person or movement that commits mass murder seems like bad form.
All the name calling, jokes, and tattoos just minimize the evil the Nazi and Communist regimes committed. Note well: they were all atheistic regimes. How ironic then that the so-called “Four Horsemen” of the new atheism should turn their ire on religion. The atrocities committed on 9/11 were awful. Yet, they pale in comparison to the Holocaust and the Holodomor where millions, not thousands, were intentionally murdered.
Calling our opponents ‘Hitler’ is a Pavlovian reflex (particularly on the left). One wonders if the Republican youths were just inured to the Hitler insult and so took up the taunt as a joke, to turn it on its head. Still, it’s not a good thing. It’s time to eschew all rhetoric that insists our opponents are Hitler or Nazis (not to mention joking about the Nazis and getting Nazi tattoos). The rhetoric simultaneously inflames the current political climate while degrading all the victims of those horrors. I would say shame on those who use the epithet, but we’ve forgotten how to blush.
Chris Seidel, Shakespeare Insulter, 1996, http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/index.html?.
Larry Elder, “Comparing Republicans To Nazis—Who Started It?,” Investor’s Business Daily, 12 September 2012, https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/democrats-have-long-history-of-calling-republicans-nazis/.
Alec Ryrie, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (London: Reaktion Books, 2025), 42, Kindle.
I’m not a Latinist, so forgive me if I just bungled it!
Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo, “‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat,” Politico, 14 October 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146.
Matthew Kassel, “Graham Platner says ‘I am not a secret Nazi’ after photos of his tattoo emerge,” Jewish Insider, 21 October 2025, https://jewishinsider.com/2025/10/graham-platner-ss-tattoo-maine-senate/.
Alexandra Marquez and Ryan Brooks, “Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner apologizes for past social media posts,” NBC News, 18 October 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/maine-democratic-senate-candidate-graham-platner-apologizes-reddit-rcna238327.
David Kopel, “Data on Mass Murder by Government in the 20th Century,” Reason, 09 November 2022, https://reason.com/volokh/2022/11/09/data-on-mass-murder-by-government-in-the-20th-century/.