The word "Nazi" keeps coming up, mostly from the Alt-Left but occasionally from the Alt-Right as the two verbally smear each other in hopes that something ugly will stick.  The back-and-forth use of the term warrants clarification: which is right, or at least more right than the other?  Is either really Nazi, or is this all just a nasty name game?  And finally, does it matter?

Perhaps the best primer on Nazism remains Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, through which one can conclude how, astonishingly, the American left has followed in the Third Reich's footsteps, dragging America in its wake.  This is authoritatively put into perspective by Allen Bloom in his 1987 The Closing of the American Mind.

The similarities are striking.  Today's intolerant national socialist left appears to be consciously patterning itself on the intolerant official Nazis of the pre-WWII era.  Shirer notes that Nazi judges were virulently political, using the bench to reinforce Nazi policy and to fight anti-Nazi tendencies.  We saw echoes of this in Judge James Robart and then another judge halting the president's perfectly legal deportation orders.  Such judges do not justify their decisions in terms of law (as they should), but rather wax poetic about "other branches of government" and "social justice" and the like.

In today's universities we have women's studies, gay studies, black studies; the Third Reich anticipated all that with German physics, German  chemistry, German math.  The Nazi practice of shouting down opposition points of view, of destroying whole newspaper runs, of literally attacking opposition speakers finds a parallel on today's campuses, where the left has shut down so many conservative speakers.  The Castle Orders of the Third Reich, where selected children received an intensively political upbringing that emphasized their racial superiority, churned out graduates who industry complained were useless because they couldn't do anything and always had chips on their shoulders – remindful of today's grads in the studies ghettoes.

Hitler was race-obsessed in the very way BLM is race-obsessed; not only did he did want Germans separate from other peoples, but he also hated the very thought of populations mixing.  His Nazis hated Christianity and Jews even more than today's left hates Christianity and Jews.  The street fights between BLM and white nationalists reprise the thirties brawls between Brown Shirts and Communists in German streets.

Pageantry and propaganda enthralled an adoring public during the Third Reich, repeated today in our left-dominated TV and Hollywood age.  Sound bites and sex appeal grab attention, plant a quick thought, and then move swiftly to the next thing – often somebody ranting about Donald Trump.  In the Third Reich, Hitler and Goebbels would be doing the ranting.  You can hear that sort of thing today if you can endure Obama's pastor or Louis Farrakhan.

One shakes one's head that the éminence grise bankrolling much leftist activity in America is Jewish George Soros, who literally helped the original Nazis do their vile work against Jews. Soros pays thugs, rioters, and riot-organizers just as corporate sponsors paid Hitler's Brown Shirts.

Does any of this matter?  It does if we want America to be America.  The left is doing its level best to turn us into another Third Reich.  The patterns are there for anybody who has eyes to see.  Be clear about it: the left, not the right, is the root of Nazism and national socialist leftism.