Kevin Williamson of National Review Online focuses on the left-wing zealots who have decided to engage in physical harassment of their right-wing opponents, all of whom are treated as Nazis.
My objection to these absurd claims of Nazism isn’t so much that they might inspire violence (Americans generally require very little inspiration on that front) but that they are not true. Ron DeSantis is not a Nazi. No amount of petulant weeping and chocolate-milk tossing is going to make that true. Mitt Romney, lately of Utah, did not get himself elected to the Senate in the service of a white-nationalist agenda. Rick Scott has nothing in common with the Ku Klux Klan. Mitch McConnell is not very much like Benito Mussolini. These are the facts of the case. The politics of opposition, like the politics of government, should be based if not on things that are self-evidently true then at least on those that are not self-evidently false.
Calling yourself an “antifascist” while defining “fascism” as “the enforcement of ordinary immigration laws” or “thinking that Bernie Sanders is a grumpy Muppet who should be kept far from the levers of power” is entirely childish and deeply stupid. (These absurd characterizations also, not that anybody really cares, drown out legitimate criticisms of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans.) These play-acting buffoons aren’t the moral equivalent of the French Resistance — they are mincing would-be thugs looking for something that will make them feel better about themselves. Apparently, terrorizing Tucker Carlson’s wife scratches an itch that weed and NetFlix don’t.