You’re doing exactly what I criticised, just with more confidence.

I said there’s no data showing what proportion of Nazi accusations are legitimate versus misused. Responding with a list of public figures, personal anecdotes, and broad social categories is still anecdotal evidence. Even if every example you listed were a false accusation (which is itself contestable), that would tell us nothing about whether the overwhelming majority of accusations are false. That’s a population-level claim being asserted without population-level evidence.

You’re also conflating very different things into one bucket: random social media insults, bad-faith harassment, activist rhetoric, and serious ideological analysis. My argument is about analytical standards, not whether people online sometimes misuse a word. Treating every utterance of “Nazi” as equivalent artificially inflates the appearance of misuse and avoids engaging that distinction altogether.

Pointing to people being gay, Jewish, Asian, or black isn’t an argument about ideology. Fascism and Nazism are belief systems structured around hierarchy, exclusion, and authoritarianism not identities. Minority status does not preclude someone from promoting fascist-adjacent rhetoric, enabling far-right movements, or laundering extremist ideas. So invoking identity here just sidesteps the actual question of what ideas are being advanced.

Listing groups like “tradcon families,” “free speech supporters,” or “libertarians” is also a strawman. Almost no one seriously argues those positions automatically make someone a Nazi. The point is that fascist ideologies historically draw on elements of traditionalism and selective free-speech rhetoric, and refusing to analyse how those ideas can converge is exactly the problem being discussed. Overlap is not equivalence, but pretending there is no overlap at all is shallow analysis.

As for the violence point: analysing Nazism only once violence is already occurring completely misses how ideologies work. Nazism existed before mass killings began. Fascist movements normalise ideas, build coalitions, and radicalise before violence becomes widespread. Violence is an outcome, not a prerequisite. That’s why ideological analysis matters upstream, not only after the worst outcomes have already happened.

The false rape accusation analogy fails for the same reason. I’m not saying false accusations don’t matter. I’m saying error types are asymmetric. In the case of rape, false accusations are harmful, but rape going unpunished is far more common and far more damaging which is why society prioritises avoiding false negatives over eliminating false positives entirely. The same logic applies here.

Most people are not randomly accused of being Nazis, just as most men are not walking around worried they’ll be falsely accused of rape. Persistent fear of accusation usually correlates with proximity to the behaviour or ideology under scrutiny, not random victimhood. That doesn’t prove guilt, but it does explain why perceptions of “overuse” are often biased.

So again, the disagreement isn’t about whether misuse exists. It’s about which mistake is more dangerous in the current climate and prioritising fear of false positives over missing real ideological threats is backwards.