America Isn’t Fascist – Our Rhetoric Is Just Unhinged

If you’ve been paying attention to public discourse lately, you’ve probably noticed something strange. America is routinely described as a fascist state. Trump supporters are casually labeled Nazis. Immigration enforcement is compared to Kristallnacht. Border detention facilities are called concentration camps. Children of illegal immigrants are said to be living through a modern Holocaust. These claims are no longer confined to fringe voices.

It is often well known, seemingly intelligent people making these claims – and the claims are so obviously false, if you have two brain cells to rub together, you are left staring at the TV in disbelief when Natalie Portman or Jimmy Kimmel break into crocodile tears over deportation of their “neighbors.”

So why do people keep saying things that are so obviously false?

The short answer is simple: exaggeration works. The longer answer is more troubling.

Ordinary language no longer carries enough emotional force. Calling something unfair doesn’t mobilize crowds. Calling it fascism does (even though that is a bit threadbare these days). Saying a policy is flawed invites debate. Saying it’s genocide shuts debate down instantly. This is moral inflation. Like currency debasement, every claim must be more extreme than the last to retain impact. Once you’ve labeled something “Nazi,” there’s nowhere left to go except apocalypse. When everything is catastrophic, nothing is.

Notice the pattern: Trump becomes Hitler. ICE becomes the Gestapo. Detention centers become Auschwitz. These aren’t arguments. They’re emotional shortcuts. Instead of proving their case with facts, people borrow the moral weight of history. If you can make your opponent resemble a Nazi, you don’t have to explain anything else. It’s rhetorical judo: hijacking universally condemned events to avoid defending your actual position.

Anti-hyperbole works as well. When a talking head on a cable channel says something is presented “without evidence” or is “baseless” when it never has even been investigated is a way to play something up by playing it down. It draws attention.

Philosophically, over exaggeration is a classic false equivalence. Linguistically, it is destroying meaning, but psychologically, it is still incredibly effective.

In today’s media ecosystem, exaggeration isn’t punished, it is rewarded. Outrage gets clicks. Extremes get airtime and eyeballs. Nuance disappears. For many public figures, dramatic claims function as status signals: look how morally serious I am, look how urgently I care, look how enlightened I am compared to you. Calm realism doesn’t go viral. Apocalyptic rhetoric does. So, people compete, consciously or not, to sound more alarmed, more righteous, more historically grave.

There’s also a deeper psychological layer at work. Modern life produces enormous anxiety in some or complete fatigue in others (I’m in the latter category): cultural upheaval, economic uncertainty, institutional decay, demographic change. Most people don’t know how to process that complexity, so the mind reaches for simple narratives with clear villains. There must be fascists. There must be Nazis. There must be camps where vague discomfort becomes moral clarity where fear morphs into purpose. This is how protest becomes identity and outrage stops being a reaction and becomes a lifestyle.

Western societies once understood gradation: bad, worse, catastrophic. Now everything jumps straight to catastrophic. A border policy becomes genocide. A political rival becomes Hitler and a legal detention facility becomes Auschwitz. That only happens when emotional reasoning replaces analytical reasoning.

Once that shift occurs, proportionality disappears and there is nothing left but high decibel yelling, and with the decibel levels increasing, the next guy must yell even louder to get attention and things begin to spiral into a maelstrom of ridiculousness.

What we’re witnessing isn’t political debate anymore. It is an overacted, William Shatner level, theatrical performance. People aren’t trying to persuade, they’re signaling. They aren’t arguing about policy, they’re staging morality plays. They aren’t making distinctions, they’re assigning roles: heroes and villains, saints and monsters. This is what happens when reason leaves the room.

It explains why the claims from some completely ignorant, isolated Hollywood starlet sound increasingly ridiculous. They aren’t designed to be accurate. They’re designed to generate emotional submission.

Here’s the philosophical bottom line: exaggeration becomes necessary when truth alone is insufficient to support the narrative. Or more simply, when reality doesn’t cooperate, people (like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap fame) turn up the volume to 11.

That should concern all of us because hysteria is contagious and outrage is not an argument.