# Reductio ad Hitlerum

*Also called: Playing the Nazi card*

- **Cluster:** Attacks on the source — Judging the speaker instead of the argument
- **Page:** https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/reductio-ad-hitlerum/
- **In Arabic:** https://fallacy.wiki/ar/fallacy/reductio-ad-hitlerum.md
- **Licence:** CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

## What it is

Treating a view as refuted because a notorious figure or regime shared it.

## In the wild

> A tyrant was a vegetarian, so vegetarianism is suspect.

## How to answer it

Point out that villains also breathed air. Shared trait is not shared reasoning.

## Origin and naming

Coined by political philosopher Leo Strauss in 1953, playing on 'reductio ad absurdum'. His point: a view is not refuted by naming a monster who agreed with it. The coinage is a joke with teeth — the further the comparison drifts from the actual reasoning, the more it is decoration posing as refutation.

## More places it shows up

- A zoning proposal to reduce traffic is dismissed at the town meeting because 'authoritarian regimes loved manipulating traffic flow too.'
- A boss's proposal for a daily standup is shot down in a message thread with: 'Dictators love morning roll calls.'
- A school uniform policy is mocked on social media with a photo of a historical tyrant in a pressed shirt and the caption 'he liked order too.'
- A suggestion to add bicycle lanes to a main road is answered with 'you know who else redesigned the roads,' and the discussion ends there.

## How to spot it

- Notice when the rebuttal is a name rather than a reason — and the name is always the same one.
- Notice when the comparison is chosen for maximum shock, not for any structural similarity.
- Notice when the speaker cannot say what the two positions actually share beyond the shared supporter.

## Nearby

- [Guilt by association](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/guilt-by-association.md)
- [Genetic fallacy](https://fallacy.wiki/fallacy/genetic.md)

## Read more

- [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum)
- [Logically Fallacious](https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Reductio-ad-Hitlerum)

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From fallacy.wiki — a bilingual field guide to 91 logical fallacies, published by phi holdings. Licensed CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse freely with attribution to fallacy.wiki.