I mean these are zealots, are Nazis. And this is exactly what the Nazis did: they disrupted rallies, they came in to shout people down, they intimidated, they smeared, they did all of this.
. . .
There is a difference between robust dialog, in context to a program and what these Nazis did.
. . .
these far-left Nazis, and that’s what they are ²

An atmosphere of such references can then be made to serve conservatism’s ends because, as National Review Editor Rich Lowry states it,

There’s no better way to distract from the merits of a question than the charge of racism.³

And Mr. Lowry’s stable of writers excels in doing just that:

This is America, and race still trumps everything.⁴

If the other side is Hitler, then almost anything is acceptable, because Hitler can’t win. But, unfortunately for the inventors of national crusades, you don’t get a lot of Hitlers. So Hitlers must be invented.⁵

Hitler can't win is now the prehensile justification for any uses the right might have for the state’s power. It was especially effective in targeting enemies of the Bush regime:

militant Islamists are akin to Nazis, who believed that Aryans were the master race;⁶

Islamic fundamentalism and Nazism are historically and intellectually linked.⁷

The same moral calculus inspires progressives to embrace Islamic Nazis in the Middle East ⁸

a messianic armed cult like Nazi Germany, which is the equivalent of Iran ⁹

Jew-haters, like the above mentioned Islamist successors to the Nazis, hate all that is and all who are decent and good.¹⁰

The growing crowds of Middle Easterners in Europe are now channeling the Nazis of the 1930s; they chant slogans not heard since the Third Reich.¹¹

These abundant ‘Arab-Moslem-Nazi’ associations (one sees them everywhere) are always traced to Haj Amin al-Husseini who, as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, maintained diplomatic and military alliances with the Third Reich. But the same can be said of even more significant non-Moslem heads of state, e.g.: Vidkun Quisling, Henri-Philippe Pétain, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Pius XII and Edward VIII. Nothing is proven by a given nation’s connection to the most important of its contemporary neighbors because all nations find such connections to be diplomatically expedient.

And these attributions to the Arab race are currently being repurposed to indict the ethnically remote inhabitants of Russia and North Korea. Moving closer to our subject, we note that associations with anti-Semitic regimes are also applied reflexively in anathematizing those who have yet to be persuaded by the National Review’s material philosophy . . .

Today’s hatred of Israel is feeding off the same poison that has nourished anti-Semitism throughout history — envy, resentment, and misunderstanding of economics.¹²

Anti-Semitism is essentially hatred of capitalism and excellence.¹³

Expressed under the gimlet editorial scrutiny of Mr. Lowry, this material philosophy is reduced to a sophomoric amplification of Conservatism's categorically unprovable assertions against the possibility of economic science:

In short, nobody can ever, ever, ever, ever, ever-to-the-32nd power ever know all of the factors that go into the price of anything. And yet, we get a price. And the price is a vast storehouse of knowledge no one person could ever possess
. . .
Why prices are a mystery isn’t a mystery. The why of prices — or at least all the whys of prices — are simply unknowable.¹⁴

Here Jonah Goldberg ¹⁵ replants the batty, time-worn axiom that the economy is not to be understood except in terms of one person possessing all knowledge of its operations. Thus Hayek's concept of the economy as a mind in itself is overturned by the merest snark.

Showing a great deal more respect for his readership, Mr. Lowry dispatches Kevin D. Williamson ¹⁶ to further insist that the science of complexity has long been settled in the matter of economics’ non-computability:

Around the same time as quantum theory was being developed, in the field of economics Ludwig von Mises was developing a complexity-based theory of his own, the famous socialist calculation problem — arguing that, without the information communicated by market prices, economic calculation is not inefficient but impossible . . . ¹⁷

This is merely chasing definitions around in a circle. Of course a plain reading of Mises would be that an understanding of how markets calculate prices is the sine qua non of economics. But nothing in Mises forbids the science of complexity from demonstrating controlled approaches to economic optimality — which it has been doing for decades — on the basis of plausible definitions of prices that nonetheless comprise the totality of economic information.¹⁸

Conservative conversations on these matters only commence after one agrees that their planted axiom of markets’ incomprehensibility is (once again) settled science. And from there it is but a step to confecting any rejection of their settlement into resurgent Nazism — outraged Austrianism's first refuge.

In fairness to Mr. Lowry and his scribes, charges of anti-Semitism in reaction to the disparagement of mainstream economics has a long academic pedigree. It goes back to the time when Adam Smith and David Hume were denounced as Scottish Jews for propounding their materialistic ‘science’ of humanity; and it abides today:

As long as Jews are identified with the market, self-interest, rationality and so on then anti-economics will be paired with anti-Semitism, as the general accusations against economics are those against Jews.¹⁹

Linking views you don’t like with Hitler is of course the ultimate political cheap shot. But as an economist, I don't mind buying cheap, especially if the quality is good.²⁰

Academic justification is available here because 1) traditional culture preserved its redoubts in university econ departments even while it abandoned other regions of the campus (your Marxists are in the English Department); 2) conservative economics are, as we have seen, presented as extensions of Judeo-Christian theology; while 3) the anti-economics referred-to in all this is amoral, post-enlightenment, and most suggestive of the value-neutral scientific advances characteristic of the Western tradition.

Irrespective of their demonstrated ability to control the one academic department they manifestly do care about, arbiters of traditional culture are nonetheless given to extravagant laments concerning their inability to remove a troublesome teacher from his classroom.²¹ This is merely disingenuous: wafting Nazi and racialist implications in the direction of culturally deficient scholars works every time it is tried by media traditionalists having national stature:

No responsible university invites irresponsible people to talk on campus. I mean waddya got? Nazi and Ku Klux Klansmen there every week?
. . .
Do you bring in the Klan? Do you bring in the Nazi Party? Do you bring in the crazies to address the student body on a regular basis?²²

It was by such associations that Dr. Bill O’Reilly terminated the academic career of Professor Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado. Professor Churchill himself has no Klan or Nazi affiliations. Nor did Professor Sami al Arian of the University of South Florida, whose career also succumbed to Dr. O’Reilly’s programming tactics.

Dr. O'Reilly's sensibilities toward arbitrary (but culturally lethal) accusations are, however, readily awakened when he is their object — as became the case when he was denounced as a sexual predator by his co-workers in 2017. Hereupon due notice was given to the incivility of his own style of public discourse:

Every allegation is a conviction.²³