Mike Nelson

Graham Platner’s victory this week in Maine’s Democratic Senate primary would have been a stunning achievement for a political newcomer under any circumstances.

For decades, Nazism and the anti-Semitism underlying it have marked zero on the Kelvin scale of villainy—the metric against which all other forms of evil are compared. This is so well understood that we now have cultural phenomena such as Godwin’s Law, the theory that online debates inevitably lead to Nazi comparisons, and the “everything I don’t like is Hitler” meme.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves.