Gonna disagree here. Ryan is using the “Big Lie” that was coined by Goebells et al and I do not think that this is a Godwin violation. When a political figure can lie…and lie about highly consequential matters and continue to do so without fear after he has been repeatedly debunked, then you have a similar problem to what was experienced in the Weimar Republic. I do think we are in significant danger of an authoritarian populist movement taking power in this country, and arguments to the effect that it “can’t happen here” are dangerously naive. Ryan’s co-travellers want to highly restrict voting rights, permit the state to interfere in private sexual conduct and reproduction, declare Islam and other minority religions as illegal and not covered under the 1st amendment, and ossify the class barriers already in place. That is just for starters.

These people are radicals. They are Jacobins who want to tear down 100 years of social and political gain and make this a “Christian Republic” that will force their views on the rest of us at gun point. They are not fooling around. They have a wildly different notion of what it means to be an American and what our history is then anything you or I may have learned in school, and they think anybody without an “R” in the political party description is almost certainly a communist and a traitor. God knows they have a library from Ann Coulter, Glen Beck and a dozen others telling them that is a fact.

While bringing out a Nazi analogy may be tactically unsound…it actually does fit from time to time.