Not to stun any readers, but I, a Jew, am not a fan of Nazis. But I do not take it at face value that all of my own contemporaries referred to as Nazis are that thing.

The U.S. has just seen not one, not two, but three secret-Nazi political scandals. Two involve Republicans. A third, a Democrat. According to lifestyle-writing guidelines, three make a trend.

But are there secret Nazis infiltrating the U.S. government? This is not so clear. Let’s look at what the stories themselves are all about.

Per Politico, a now-failed Trump administration nominee, Paul Ingrassia, unnerved his fellow Republicans in his chats, texting things like, “‘I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.’” A separate Politico article reports on Young Republican group chats that include such remarks as, “‘I love Hitler.’” Both exposés are rife with further examples of broadly offensive remarks made privately.

The most colourful story in our trio is the one involving a Democrat. Graham Platner, an oyster farmer in Maine running for the Senate with the support of Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, whose problematicness on the Jewish front is not, as the more observant among you might imagine, about the fact that oysters aren’t kosher. It’s that he has—well, had—a Nazi tattoo, acquired while intoxicated in Croatia, on leave from the Marines. He now has a goofy-looking tattoo that the Associated Press describes as “a Celtic knot with a dog-like creature splayed in the middle of it.”

Now I had not known that skull-and-crossbones he’d had previously indicated Nazism, but the more important thing is Platner’s own wishy-washiness—see the Jewish Insider coverage—about whether he knew what was tattooed on his own chest. It seems plausible someone wouldn’t have known what a tattoo meant when getting it, but if he was later referring to it as “my Totenkopf,” that suggests he at the very least caught on.

Everyone now accused of Nazism is frantically denying it. This is reassuring not because I necessarily believe each individual denial, but because it’s a clue that as bad as things........

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