I despair — I really do despair. Over the past several years, I’ve tried again and again to point out the sheer unadulterated idiocy of the left’s obsession with Hitler. And yet, here we go again. A demonstrably innocent gesture by Elon Musk has become the latest in a very long line of “this must be Hitler” leftist fantasies — fantasies driven by the inability of the average so-called “progressive” to actually engage substantively with conservative positions across the entire range of public policy. Instead, they default to ad hominem mud-slinging, and, for far too long, the comparison to Hitler has been the stickiest mud in their arsenal of slander.

I’m no longer patient enough to itemize all the ways in which calling someone “Hitler” fails even the most elementary tests of historical relevance. Nor am I particularly interested in parsing the various forms of what the Nazis were pleased to call “the German greeting.” (RELATED: Democrats Conjure the Resurrection of Hitler (Again))

During the years when I was professionally engaged in the study of Nazism, I must have seen hundreds of photos of these salutes, including many performed by Nazi luminaries such as Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, and, of course, Hitler himself, and I find the comparison absurd, as do other thoughtful observers. One might as well find the Nazi salute in the celebratory “first down” gesture routinely performed by NFL players.

But more absurd is the apparently unquenchable need to label anyone opposed to the left’s agenda as in any way, shape, or form a “Nazi,” or even the more generic “fascist.” If we must indulge in such tired labels, then they’re more appropriately applied to the current crop of “progressives,” including the media figures so quick to condemn the new Trump administration. (RELATED: Weimar America: The Threat Is on the Left)

Gleichschaltung

One of the most telling elements of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany was a process the Nazis labeled as “Gleichschaltung.” This is actually an engineering term, loosely translated as “coordination” or “synchronization.” In Nazi parlance, the period immediately following the Nazi takeover and lasting over the next several years was the time in which German society was “gleichgeschaltet.” The verb is important because this was an active process, one in which all of the various institutions of German society — economic, cultural, political — were coordinated in the service of Nazi objectives. (Sound familiar.)

Note well that during this phase the institutions were not so much destroyed as simply aligned with Nazi purposes — the more thoroughgoing institutional transformation happened only later, and largely for the purpose of waging “total war.” Do not — I repeat, do not — misunderstand me. This process of alignment represented a systematic perversion of all that was good in German society. It was in no way benign — quite the contrary. But it also, and despite much Nazi revolutionary rhetoric, left the shell of German institutions intact, while hollowing them out from the inside.

Thus, for example, Germany’s great universities continued to exist, but Jewish professors and students were first marginalized and then removed. Nazi students dominated the campuses, a process that had begun even before Hitler gained power — students were among the earliest and most fanatical supporters of Nazism. (RELATED: Columbia University Turmoil Recalls the Hitler Youth)

In the 1920s, Germany had led the world in the new entertainment arts, and even after forcing so many of the greats into exile, the German version of Hollywood maintained — under Goebbels — an impressive technical capability, although one bent to the service of promoting Nazi “culture.” And this was fed by enthusiastic producers, directors, actors, and actresses, all of them eager to show their support for the “new Germany.” Leni Riefenstahl might have been the most talented, but the idea that Nazism found no purchase in the German entertainment industry is far from the truth. (RELATED: So, You Want to Talk Hitler?)

The same could well be said of the other media, radio, print journalism, and publishing. After World War II, much of the output from these sources was expunged, made not just unavailable, but flushed down the memory hole. That we can say “good riddance” shouldn’t allow us to forget just how huge this was, and how enthusiastically it was pursued by its practitioners. The same, sadly, could certainly be said of the German churches, with the notable exception of some Christians such as Bonhoeffer and Niemoller.

And on and on. German corporations aligned themselves willingly with the new regime’s objectives, not just in terms of production, but also in terms of values. So, too, across government, not just the central government, but also that of the several states and the many localities. Those who wanted to get on board prospered, those who didn’t, by and large, simply kept their mouths shut, grimaced at the daily bombardment Nazi propaganda, and tried, quietly, to get on with their lives.

I never encountered a Nazi-era phrase quite directly translatable as “allyship,” but the concept was everywhere, the day-to-day expression of what it meant to live in a world “aligned” with Nazism.

The Left’s “Synchronization” of America

One can dress it up with high-sounding sociological discussion, one can speak, for example, of such things as “shifts in the Overton window.” The left persistently tries to dismiss its ascension to cultural domination as an overblown, even paranoid concern on the part of cultural conservatives.

Each time they’re challenged, they attempt to shift the terms of the discussion — witness how the Democrats now dance around the cultural impact of illegal immigration or of the whole transgender phenomenon. After all, possession of victimhood status is vital to their self-justification. Interestingly, the Nazis indulged in much the same poor-me ideology — the other side of the “master race” coin was a claim that poor Germany was a martyr among nations after World War I.

The reality is that what we witnessed during the Biden years was nothing less than a form of radical leftist “Gleichschaltung” of American society.

We saw it in government, where DEI exploded across the workforce.

We saw it in our universities where radicalism — not least a Nazi-like anti-Semitism — turned campuses into hotbeds of hatred.

We saw it across industry, not just in such transcendent silliness as the Bud Light fiasco, but also at such once proudly conservative institutions as Harley-Davidson.

We have seen it in our churches, and are still seeing it, as witnessed by the recent appointment of the thoroughly egregious Cardinal McElroy as the Archbishop of Washington, D.C. — a gesture that can only be interpreted as Pope Francis wagging a pontifical middle finger in the face of Donald Trump. (RELATED: The Devil in D.C.)

It has been, quite literally, everywhere, from puff-piece treatments of Michelle Obama at our supermarket check-out lines to Jill Biden’s appearance on the cover of Vogue, even as a genuine beauty, Melania Trump, is subjected to cattiness of the most vicious sort. It has invaded our schools, right down to the kindergarten level, with picture books promoting the transgender phenomenon. It has been omnipresent in a way that Hitler and Goebbels only dreamed of achieving during their first years in power.

Moreover, this leftist “Gleichschaltung” has been enforced both rigorously and gleefully by those who’ve wielded power in the last four years. We saw this when service members, including some of our most dedicated warriors, were forcibly excluded in the name of COVID vaccination conformity. We saw it when mask-wearing conformity was imposed through both government edicts and the drumbeat of social media, even when its proponents acknowledged among themselves that it was all a sham. (RELATED: Dr. Anthony Fauci: What Exactly Did Biden Pardon?)

We saw this in the almost gleeful imposition of DEI across government, businesses, and colleges in the wake of the George Floyd “event,” which the left-wing radicals turned into a contemporary equivalent of 1933’s Reichstag fire. Blaming the Reichstag fire, falsely, on a feebleminded Dutch communist gave the Nazis license to impose their agenda; Floyd’s death was similarly turned into a foundation for the imposition of a radical left program in blue cities and states across America.

I could go on, but the meaning of the Biden years should be clear. Instead of restoring the promised “normalcy,” it unleashed a leftist Gleichschaltung across every aspect of American life. What under Clinton and then Obama had been an insistent but gradual subversion of the traditional American way of life became, with Biden’s supposed “mandate,” an unapologetic assault on every social norm, along with destruction, dictated by “Green New Deal” ideologues, of the national economy.

The left, the so-called “progressives” and their shills at CNN and MSNBC, can pretend that Elon’s wave of the hand portends the arrival of Nazism with the Trump inauguration. In fact, as the foregoing should demonstrate, it’s quite the opposite. They have been the proponents and the practitioners of a totalitarian regime, one that the American people arose to reject last Nov. 5. What made Trump’s inaugural address — and the plethora of actions that followed starting that same day — was the categorical and systematic rejection of this encroaching tyranny.

I wish that we could relegate “Nazi” to its place in history, and recognize, once and for all, its heuristic uselessness outside of its original historical context. When introduced in the discussion of contemporary politics, it’s nothing more than a cudgel wielded mindlessly by intellectual dunces. But in a world where Elon Musk gets slandered and the mainstream media stalwarts get a free pass for promoting hatred, we need to challenge the left’s appropriation of the term at every turn. Challenge it with reasoned argument, challenge it with ridicule and scorn, but challenge it at every turn until the day comes when we can ignore it — and them — forevermore.

Then, one can only hope, that Hitler can finally be laid to rest. It can’t come soon enough.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

Jimmy Fallon Saves Bastogne

Culture Eats Everything for Breakfast

To Terror No Sanction

Weimar America: The Threat Is on the Left

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.