It was a whole thing for a while, liberals getting irate with liberals for throwing around the “Nazi” label too casually. I got emails from people telling me to cool down the rhetoric, and I did. I shouldn’t have.

The University of Pennsylvania has been asked to give the Trump administration a list of Jewish faculty.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is demanding the university turn over names and personal information about Jewish members of the Penn community as part of the administration’s stated goal to combat antisemitism on campuses. But some Jewish faculty and staff have condemned the government’s demand as “a visceral threat to the safety of those who would find themselves identified because compiling and turning over to the government ‘lists of Jews’ conjures a terrifying history”, according to a press release put out by the groups’ lawyers.

Huh. What “terrifying history” would that be, I wonder. I also wonder who specifically is behind this initiative to construct lists of Jews. Stephen? Is that you?

You might be thinking that this is just one example, that the similarity to the Nazi agenda is coincidental, and that the intent of the list is entirely benign, to protect Jewish people. Sure. Keep telling yourselves that. Americans have been blind to this sort of thing for decades, it’s traditional.

But have you looked at @DHSgov on Twitter? I know most of you don’t bother with that far right propaganda site anymore, but right now it’s full of Nazi shit.

In this context, one might think the White House would be bending over backward to make the goals of its immigration policy appear as benign as possible: If you want to persuade voters to accept ICE’s radical methods, you’d presumably want to assure them that it has mainstream objectives.

Instead, the administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan.

Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline, “​​One People, One Realm, One Leader.” Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”

This post is, on its face, evocative of white nationalism. The United States is a multiethnic society. To say that it has only “one heritage” is to suggest that only one of its ethnic groups is truly American.

But the remarks are even more sinister when the Nazi allusion is taken into account. And this echo is almost certainly not coincidental. Under Trump, the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referenced white nationalist memes and works.

On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted, “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.

Last August, DHS shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase, “Which way, American man?” — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?” which argues that “Race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves…and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”

In October, the US Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” plays — specifically, the lines “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.”

Other Trump administration posts have suggested that its immigration policy aims to return the United States to its condition in 1943 (it is hard to see what specifically this could reference beyond the nation’s racial composition at that time) and implored ICE recruits to “Defend your culture!”

Meanwhile, last fall, Vance refused to condemn a group of Republican activists who had praised Hitler and disparaged Black people as “monkeys” in their private group chat.

We have put Nazis in positions of power to run the whole goddamn country. They call themselves “MAGA”, but don’t be fooled. They’re Nazis. Nazis through and through. And what do we do with Nazis?