When words like “Nazi” and “Hitler” get used to describe everything from bureaucratic enforcement to genocide, it creates a dangerous moral distortion.

On one side, those words historically mean organized extermination, mass shootings, and people disappearing into graves. On the other, they are often used today to mean cruelty, unfairness, or the violation of social justice norms. Those are not the same claim, but they are treated as if they were.

That gap matters because of how it affects behavior. If someone is being accused of being equivalent to genocidal killers, and they know they are not lining people up and shooting them, then a strange logic can take over: anything short of mass murder starts to feel morally irrelevant.

There appears to be a wide zone of “still not Nazi” territory where increasingly harsh actions feel justified, because the ultimate accusation has already been made.

At the same time, if even small acts of enforcement or inconvenience are described as “disappearances,” “kidnapping,” or “literal Nazism,” then language loses its ability to distinguish between levels of harm. Everything becomes maximal, even when the reality is not.

That mismatch creates a feedback loop. One side believes it is calling out injustice and cruelty. The other hears itself being accused of genocide and responds by hardening, not softening, because the accusation has already gone as far as it can go. When moral language stops grading severity, it stops restraining power.

In a world where real people are being arrested, detained, and sometimes killed, that collapse of meaning is not just rhetorical. It shapes how far force is pushed, and how little incentive there is to pull back.