Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence

The last loonies on tech's woke island are getting desperate. It used to be that a wide variety of baseless accusations of racism, misogyny, or white supremacy could inflict grave social and professional consequences for the accused, but that's no longer true. So now they've had to up the ante, and that's why everyone is suddenly a nazi to these people.

Because if you can't intimidate people into silence and compliance with the woke orthodoxies by threatening their job or their social circle, you might be able to threaten them with actual violence or worse. That's what the "nazi" accusation is there to convey: That violence has been authorized.

The slogan has been around for a while: Punch a nazi. It has a sorta quaint, winking phrasing, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe it wasn't actually meant as a real threat. But I think that theory has gone out the window. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk.

This is a natural consequence of all the lost terrain. The DEI bureaucracies in tech have been decimated or dismantled. The tone-setting social media, X, can no longer be wielded for narrative control (and Bluesky keeps shrinking from purity purges). And finally, the American administration went from blue to red in 2024.

Lost terrain means lost leverage. Which means the usual threats have stopped working because they relied on that institutional and broad social leverage to be effective. And these loonies know that.

The threat of violence, however, is evergreen. It's the final resort of a movement that has lost a political and philosophical path to victory in the public square. It's sad, it's pathetic, but you're not wrong to be worried when political assassinations are justified and exalted in reference to the "nazi" threat.

But that's just all the more reason you can't give in, you can't give up. The defeat of wokeism in the workplace should give you comfort. These people are not invincible. The wheels have been falling off their political project for years now. You can and should say "no" when they come with the "nazi" nonsense too.