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It was a big week for Nazis here in the United States.
On Monday, Politico published a slew of leaked text messages from Paul Ingrassia, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, in which the attorney said he had a “Nazi streak.”
Ingrassia’s incendiary posts, culled from a Republican chat group, also denigrated black people, stated that “white people built this country” and said one should “never trust a Chinaman or Indian.”
When someone in the chat pushed back, telling Ingrassia he was coming across like a white nationalist, he replied, “Nah it’s fine . . . Don’t be a boomer . . . I don’t mind being a scumbag from time to time.”
On Tuesday, not to be outdone, Graham Platner, a far-left Democrat running for US Senate in Maine, admitted that the insignia of a Nazi SS division was tattooed on his chest.
He did so in an interview with Jon Lovett, a friendly progressive podcaster, who played footage of a shirtless Platner and asked him to explain.
“I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said, claiming he got the tattoo 20 years ago while “very inebriated” and had no idea it was a Nazi symbol.
Pro tip: If your actions have ever forced you to utter the words “I am not a secret Nazi,” you probably don’t belong in the US Senate.
Nazis to the left of me, Nazis to the right — here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
But while these two scandals occurred within hours of each other, the responses were quite different.
Republicans readily condemned Ingrassia’s comments, and by Tuesday night, he was out.
“He’s no longer being nominated,” a White House official said.
Compare that with the left’s reaction to Platner’s Nazi tattoo.
Sen. Bernie Sanders stood by him: “I personally think he is an excellent candidate,” he said. “I’m going to support him and look forward to him becoming the next senator in the state of Maine.”
Lovett, a former Obama staffer, expressed anger that Platner faced any criticism – mockingly suggesting, “Only perfect candidates off the Harvard Law conveyor belt pls.”
“I’ll take a candidate with a regrettable tattoo over one who has steadfastly supported a genocide,” former MSNBC host Krystal Ball wrote on X.
Apparently there’s room in the progressive movement for someone who honors the perpetrators of a real genocide, but not for those who dismiss complaints about a fictional one in Gaza.
The people who have chased Zionists out of the Democratic Party for a decade now want a tent big enough for the guy with the Nazi tattoo.
Of course, these are the same people who called Elon Musk a Nazi, who routinely equate Trump to Adolf Hitler and who accuse every conservative of being Nazi-adjacent.
For the progressive left, it turns out, everyone’s a Nazi except the man who displays Nazi symbols on his skin.
Watching the left circle the wagons should be a lesson to the right about how not to handle the Nazis in your midst — because not everyone agrees with condemning them.
A big split has developed among conservative pundits and influencers after Vice President JD Vance last week refused to condemn some Young Republicans who were caught posting racist and Hitler-praising texts — and immediately lost their jobs.
Vance and others say cancel culture is the left’s bag, so caving to leaked texts in liberal media is a mistake.
They are wrong.
You don’t condemn racism in your own ranks to curry favor with leftists.
You do it because it’s the right thing to do.
The left’s cancel culture wasn’t bad because racists were fired from their jobs; it was bad because people who weren’t racists were fired from their jobs.
You can’t build a functioning political coalition with people who admire Hitler, or with people who can’t countenance condemnation of those who do.
You need moderates to win elections, not edgelords who refuse to knock it off with the ugly “vice signaling” rhetoric.
The left falsely smeared Trump as a Nazi for a decade while he was running on policies that were firmly within the American mainstream.
They insisted that Trump’s voters were racists — a basket of deplorables.
But America saw through this nonsense: His base was anything but racist, and Trump pulled in record numbers of black, Jewish and Hispanic voters, too.
But now, some on the right seem to have swallowed the left’s hateful narrative.
They’ve apparently accepted the notion that Trump won by appealing to Nazis, or at least to those who prefer not to condemn them.
Folks: You don’t denounce racism and hatred to please the libs. You do it to protect your soul.
It’s not the other party you have to face in the mirror, but yourself and your God.
Batya Ungar-Sargon is the author of “Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women” and hosts “Batya” on NewsNation.
