Did you know that “Nazi” is short for “National Socialist”? That means that Hitler and his henchmen were all socialists. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too. That means Bernie Sanders and his supporters are the same as Nazis … doesn’t it?

Anyone who has been on political Twitter in the past decade has seen a version of this syllogism. Conservatives, seeking to escape the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels tossed at them by leftist critics since the 1960s, have turned the tables. Books such as Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” have noted that many leading fascists, such as Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, started out as socialists, just as many early 20th-century “progressives” embraced eugenic ideas ultimately linked to Nazi racist genocide. This connection has become a silver bullet for voices on the right like Dinesh D’Souza and Candace Owens: Not only is the reviled left, embodied in 2020 by figures like Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren, a dangerous descendant of the Nazis, but anyone who opposes it can’t possibly have ties to the Nazis’ odious ideas.