Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So there’s this whole principle on YouTube of calling someone a Nazi as the end of an argument. Are people using Nazi analogies or accusations online? I’m sure you see this on the X platform on posts.

Rick Rosner: Yes, so is it Godwin’s Law that as soon as you call somebody a Nazi, you’ve lost? It’s somebody’s law. You’ve lost the argument. That might have been true five or ten years ago. I don’t buy it anymore because we have actual Nazis marching through the streets of America, rioting in England, and trying to pull stuff in France. Sometimes you have to call a Nazi a Nazi. I’m fine with that. I’m fine with comparing Trump to Nazis because he was our deadliest president, and I’d argue that he still is.

More people, a million more Americans, died under Trump than in four years under any previous president. Only a third of that was due to the increasing population. I guess now that more people have died under Biden, but Trump set Biden up to fail. We only had one year of COVID under Trump, and we’ve had another three and a half years of COVID under Biden. But I would say Trump is more responsible for that than Biden.

Trump messed up the early response when we could have gotten a lid on it. If we’d had half the number of cases in the first year that we had, we wouldn’t have gotten all the variations because variations originate from millions of cases. So the fewer the cases, the fewer the variations and the more immunity people can build up. He politicized masks, he politicized the vaccine, so he set up America to have a lot more people die of COVID after he left office.

He is “America’s Hitler,” not only in terms of actions but in terms of demeanor, and he’s responsible for more U.S. citizens’ deaths than any other president, a million. He didn’t kill as many as Hitler, who was responsible for at least 30 million deaths across Europe. So Trump didn’t do that. We’ve been a lucky country to be isolated, separated from World War II. It didn’t come to our shores, so we didn’t suffer the huge casualties. Russia lost more than 10 million people in World War II. We’ve lost 410,000 Americans to battle.

That’s 4% of what Russia lost. But given that we’re a lucky, isolated country, Trump being responsible for the deaths of at least a million people who died of COVID, and not just here but in other countries because we’re a big country and we helped spread it to the rest of the world, he’s our deadliest president. So I’m fine with comparing him. Except it’s not a fair comparison because, before he went crazy, Hitler was reasonably smart, and Trump is a moron.

So yes, I’m fine with calling Trump “dumb Hitler.” How did we get on that topic again? You asked about YouTube arguments where the argument ends with somebody calling someone a Nazi. So, under Obama, people were talking about the end of history, that we’re done with racism and war. And no, it turned out not to be so. It was a legitimate criticism in the happy Obama days that calling somebody a Nazi was unfair and overkill, but things have changed.

And it’s no longer overkill.

Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org

Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com

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