If you read the news lately, you’d think it’s the 1930s all over again, and Nazis are the gravest threat the world faces in 2017. Case in point, the Prime Minister of Sweden:

Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven called for people to stand up against the growing threat of Nazism and white-power movements to protect democratic values. Fascist groups are moving forward their positions “step by step,” the premier said in a speech in Eskilstuna, Sweden, highlighting local demonstrations across the Nordic country as well as “Nazi groups, the Ku Klux Klan and white power protesters in Charlottesville.” “It may be easy to try to laugh away these angry men with big words, small hearts and closed fists,” he said. “But all fascist movements were small when they were founded and were able to quickly gain followers during difficult times.”

I’ve spent time in Gothenburg. I’ve been through Malmo. Hell, I’ve been to the Stockholm train station. Based on what I’ve seen with my own two eyes, I can state with metaphysical certainty that Nazis in Sweden are not the country’s biggest problem, let alone Nazis in Charlottesville,VA.

For this . . . person to say this in the immediate aftermath of a Islamist terror attack in Spain that killed 14 in a reprise of an Islamist terror attack in Stockholm in April that killed four (and targeted small children), and in the immediate aftermath of an Islamist terror attack in nearby southwestern Finland that killed two, and in the aftermath of other Islamist terror attacks in Europe and the US almost too numerous to list is loathsome and appalling.

All the more so because it is deliberately political. Lovfen and others like him–including the increasingly loathsome Angela Merkel–are hyperventilating about Nazis–including Nazis thousands of miles from anywhere that is their business to begin with–precisely to distract attention from the real danger lurking in their midst, and their responsibility for letting this danger metastasize.*

And it’s even more cynical than that, especially in the US. By setting up Nazis as the straw man to epitomize evil, the left is staking out its claim as being the main adversary of this looming menace, and laying the foundation to claim that anyone who opposes the left is pro-Nazi. We are seeing this daily in the US, and we are also seeing cowardly political putzes like Mitt Romney, Marco Rubio, John McCain and Lindsey Graham buy into this premise and validate a cynical strategy that will be used not just against them (which they actually well deserve) but against tens of millions of other Americans whom the left despises and wants to silence.

Given that Nazis in the United States, and even in Europe, are fringe figures, present in tiny numbers, made up exclusively of losers, hyping the Nazi menace actually trivializes the monstrousness of Nazism in the 1920s-1945.

If Nazis and white supremacists did not exist, the left would have to invent them. In a way they have. They are not completely a figment of the imagination, but the outsized role they are playing in current discourse is completely fantastical, and bears no relationship to reality. This is a calculated attempt to seize control of the political narrative and to silence vast numbers of people who oppose the identity politics of the left.

Ironic, isn’t it? The most ruthless practitioners of identity politics wildly exaggerate the danger posed by fringe groups obsessed with racial identity in order to silence those who are disgusted by identity politics. I think even Orwell would be agog.

*Lest you say that Europe’s Islamism crisis is thousands of miles away from anywhere that is an American’s business, I remind you that (a) the 9-11 plot was hatched in Hamburg, under the eyes of the German authorities, (b) Americans have died in many of the Islamist attacks in Europe, including in Barcelona last week, the attack in Paris in November, 2015, and the attack in Nice in July of last year–and that’s just off the top of my head, and (c) the foreign ISIS recruits that the US has spent billions killing in Iraq and Syria, and who have killed Americans engaged in that fight, come from Europe in large numbers.