It's sort of fun to mock Elon Musk and Alice Weidel for calling Hitler a "Communist" as though they don't actually know anything at all about history, and I'm all for the judicious use of mockery as a tool for discouraging fascists from speaking up for fear of looking stupid.
It's also worth keeping in mind that this kind of obviously dumb, ahistorical bullshit is always a step toward normalizing said bullshit. It's not that they don't know anything about history, it's that they want to reconstruct history to their own advantage. They do it in a lot of ways, but this particular thing about Hitler is a long-standing project on the right and a good example of how it works. Dinesh D'Souza has been trying to convince anyone who would listen that Hitler was a leftist for a long time now, including through his 2017 book 'The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.' Even the 2008 book 'The Liberal Fascism' by NPR's favorite right-wing nerd Jonah Goldberg was a step in that direction. We've all mocked them for this same thing for years, and it's well deserved, but at this point, we're on track for this idea -- that Hitler was some kind of leftist, rather than someone who specifically sought to "liquidate" Communists and other leftists -- to become accepted historiography, and not just something your dumb uncle spits out at the bar after grandma's funeral.
In short: "we're not the Nazis, you're the Nazis" is not an incidental thing. It's not a slip of the tongue or just a mistake made by people who don't know better. They really want people to believe that, and they definitely have the means to make it sound like consensus knowledge. Mock them if that seems like a useful way to keep their bullshit in check, but take it seriously too.
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