Godwin's Law

1990Internet adage / debate ruleclassic

Also known as: Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies

Godwin's Law is a 1990 internet adage by attorney Mike Godwin stating that as online discussions grow longer, the probability of a Hitler or Nazi comparison approaches one.

Godwin's Law is an internet adage coined by attorney Mike Godwin in 1990 stating that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one"4. Originally formulated as a "natural law of Usenet," it became one of the internet's most widely recognized rules of online discourse, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 20123. The law was deliberately designed as a counter-meme to discourage lazy Hitler comparisons that trivialized the Holocaust7.

internet lawsmemetics memesdebate memesmeta internet memesusenet origin memes

TL;DR

Godwin's Law is an internet adage coined by attorney Mike Godwin in 1990 stating that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".

Overview

Godwin's Law is a simple observation about online arguments: give any discussion enough time and someone will inevitably compare something or someone to Hitler or the Nazis. The "law" is framed pseudo-scientifically, mimicking mathematical probability. In practice, it functions as both a descriptor of online behavior and a rhetorical tool. When someone drops the Nazi comparison in a thread, other participants often invoke Godwin's Law to signal that the discussion has jumped the shark2.

A common tradition holds that whoever makes the Nazi comparison first has lost the argument, though Godwin himself rejects this interpretation as an oversimplification4. The law was never meant to be a conversation-stopper. It was designed to make people think twice before reaching for the laziest possible rhetorical weapon7.

Mike Godwin, an American attorney who later served as counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, coined the law in 19902. He formulated it after observing the pattern of gratuitous Nazi comparisons spreading across Usenet newsgroups, the Well, and various BBS communities7.

In his own words from a 1994 Wired article, Godwin described his creation as an experiment in memetic engineering. He had decided that "the Nazi-comparison meme had gotten out of hand" and set out to build a counter-meme7. The resulting formulation: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one"4.

Godwin deliberately framed the law to sound like a mathematical or scientific principle, but its purpose was rhetorical and pedagogical4. He wanted people "who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust"4. The observation itself was originated by Richard Sexton, but Godwin popularized it and gave it the form that stuck2.

He seeded the law into Usenet newsgroups wherever he spotted a lazy Nazi reference. Other users began citing it independently, and the counter-meme replicated on its own7. Know Your Meme researchers identified Godwin's 1994 Wired piece as one of the earliest uses of the word "meme" to describe viral media and the spread of ideas through internet communication3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Usenet
Key People
Mike Godwin, Richard Sexton
Date
1990
Year
1990

Mike Godwin, an American attorney who later served as counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, coined the law in 1990. He formulated it after observing the pattern of gratuitous Nazi comparisons spreading across Usenet newsgroups, the Well, and various BBS communities.

In his own words from a 1994 Wired article, Godwin described his creation as an experiment in memetic engineering. He had decided that "the Nazi-comparison meme had gotten out of hand" and set out to build a counter-meme. The resulting formulation: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".

Godwin deliberately framed the law to sound like a mathematical or scientific principle, but its purpose was rhetorical and pedagogical. He wanted people "who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust". The observation itself was originated by Richard Sexton, but Godwin popularized it and gave it the form that stuck.

He seeded the law into Usenet newsgroups wherever he spotted a lazy Nazi reference. Other users began citing it independently, and the counter-meme replicated on its own. Know Your Meme researchers identified Godwin's 1994 Wired piece as one of the earliest uses of the word "meme" to describe viral media and the spread of ideas through internet communication.

How It Spread

After its initial seeding on Usenet, the law spread organically across early internet discussion spaces. The Usenet community formalized a corollary as "Usenet Rule #4," which stated that any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis would cause a thread to end quickly. A tradition developed in many groups that once someone invoked a Nazi comparison, the thread was over and that person had lost.

As threaded discussion moved from Usenet to web forums, chat rooms, comment sections, and wikis in the 2000s, Godwin's Law traveled with it. The rule proved surprisingly durable because the behavior it described never went away. Any platform with arguments had someone ready to play the Hitler card.

On October 9, 2009, the r/GodwinsLaw subreddit launched, describing itself as "the place to highlight those who belittle horror of the most reprehensible figures in history by comparing them to people and things they simply don't like". In 2012, Godwin's Law was formally added to the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

PBS Ideas Channel covered the law in a July 2015 video titled "Three Laws of The Internet Explained!" which pulled in over 230,000 views. QI: Quite Interesting uploaded "What Is Godwin's Law?" in January 2017, earning more than 52,000 views. In March 2017, a TIL post on Reddit quoting the law received over 1,800 upvotes and 190 comments.

The law received a major real-world stress test in January 2017 when Donald Trump tweeted "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" in response to intelligence leaks. Twitter users immediately declared he had triggered Godwin's Law. Then in August 2017, following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where actual neo-Nazi groups marched, Godwin himself weighed in on Twitter: "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you". The tweet picked up more than 20,000 retweets and 48,000 likes in under a week, and was covered by the Washington Post, the Telegraph, HuffPost, Esquire, and other outlets.

Platforms

RedditTwitterTikTokInstagram

Timeline

1990

Godwin's Law first appears online

1990

Gains traction on social media

1991

Reaches peak popularity

1992-01-01

Godwin's Law reached mainstream popularity and media coverage

1993-01-01

Brands and companies started using Godwin's Law in marketing

1995-01-01

Godwin's Law entered the broader pop culture conversation

2025-01-01

Godwin's Law is still actively used and shared across platforms

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Godwin's Law typically gets invoked in two ways:

As an observation: When someone in an online argument compares their opponent (or their opponent's position) to Hitler or the Nazis, another participant points out that Godwin's Law has been fulfilled. This usually signals that the discussion has run its course.

As a preemptive warning: Sometimes users cite Godwin's Law early in a heated thread as a half-joking reminder that someone will inevitably go there, encouraging participants to argue more carefully.

The common convention holds that whichever side first invokes the Nazi comparison has effectively lost the debate, though this interpretation is disputed by Godwin himself. It's worth knowing that the law was only meant to apply to frivolous comparisons. When the discussion actually involves fascism, authoritarianism, or Neo-Nazi movements, making the comparison is fair game.

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Godwin's Law achieved what few internet in-jokes manage: recognition by mainstream institutions. Its 2012 entry into the Oxford English Dictionary placed it alongside formal English vocabulary. It has been cited in news coverage by CNN, the Washington Post, the Telegraph, HuffPost, Esquire, and dozens of other outlets.

The law played a direct role in political discourse during the Trump era. When Trump tweeted "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" in January 2017, commentators across social media and news outlets called it a Godwin's Law violation. Godwin's August 2017 tweet endorsing Nazi comparisons for the Charlottesville marchers generated mainstream coverage and reignited debate about when the law does and doesn't apply.

Godwin's 1994 Wired article is notable beyond the law itself. Know Your Meme researchers flagged it as one of the earliest known uses of the word "meme" to describe the spread of ideas through internet communications, predating the term's widespread adoption by over a decade.

In academia, the law has been referenced in discussions of online argumentation, logical fallacies, and memetics. A 2021 Harvard study examined whether the pattern holds statistically on Reddit and found it did not reach significant frequency, though this did nothing to reduce its cultural footprint.

Full History

Godwin's creation of the law was rooted in genuine moral concern, not just internet humor. He found the casual deployment of Holocaust comparisons in Usenet debates about gun control, censorship, or abortion to be both logically bankrupt and deeply offensive to the victims of actual Nazi atrocities. As he wrote in Wired: "The millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope".

The concept of the underlying logical fallacy predates Godwin's formulation. University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss coined the term "reductio ad Hitlerum" in 1951, describing the tendency to dismiss any idea simply because Hitler also held it. Strauss wrote that "a view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler". Godwin's Law can be understood as the internet-age expression of this older observation about lazy argumentation.

The law's spread generated its own ecosystem of corollaries and exceptions. "Quirk's Exception" holds that deliberately invoking Godwin's Law to kill a thread rarely works. "Henderson's Law," named after Joel Henderson, observes that internet awareness of Godwin's Law has led people to cry foul at any Hitler comparison, no matter how accurate. Users also developed creative workarounds, like referencing "you know who else got rejected by an art school?" instead of naming Hitler directly, or substituting Stalin and Mao, though these transparent dodges fooled nobody.

One of the law's most fascinating quirks is that people began treating it as a real rule with enforceable penalties, rather than the descriptive observation Godwin intended. The "loser" tradition, where whoever mentions Nazis first loses the argument, was never part of Godwin's original formulation. He has repeatedly pushed back on this interpretation, arguing the law "should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter".

Sean Spicer's April 2017 press briefing offered a textbook case of what happens when someone violates the spirit of the law in real life. Attempting to criticize Syria's chemical weapons use, Spicer said that Hitler "didn't even sink to using chemical weapons," apparently forgetting the gas chambers. His attempted clarification made things worse, and CNN described it as "a blatant violation of Godwin's Law".

In a 2021 study, Harvard researchers tested whether the Nazi-comparison pattern actually held up statistically on Reddit. Their findings: it did not occur with "statistically meaningful frequency". The law, it turns out, may describe a memorable pattern more than a reliable probability. But its cultural power was never really about statistics.

Godwin continued to refine his position through the 2010s and 2020s. In a June 2018 Los Angeles Times opinion piece, he wrote that the law "still serves us as a tool to recognize specious comparisons to Nazism, but also, by contrast, to recognize comparisons that aren't". By December 2023, in an interview with Politico, he pointed to Donald Trump's use of terms like "vermin" and "poisoning the blood" as likely deliberate echoes of Nazi rhetoric, not coincidence. That same day, he published a Washington Post op-ed titled "Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you".

The law's journey from a Usenet counter-meme to an Oxford English Dictionary entry to a live political flashpoint over three decades makes it one of the internet's most enduring contributions to public discourse.

Fun Facts

Godwin explicitly described his law as "an experiment in memetics" in 1994, making it one of the earliest self-aware internet memes and one of the first times the word "meme" was used to describe viral internet content.

A 2021 Harvard study found that Nazi comparisons don't actually increase with thread length on Reddit at a statistically meaningful rate, suggesting the "law" describes a memorable pattern rather than a real probability.

The original Usenet community formalized their own version as "Usenet Rule #4" before Godwin's name became attached to the concept.

Godwin wrote a Washington Post op-ed in December 2023 actively encouraging comparisons between Donald Trump and Hitler, making the law's creator one of its most prominent exception-granters.

The word "reductio ad Hitlerum" describing the same fallacy was coined over 40 years earlier, in 1951, by University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss.

Derivatives & Variations

Reductio ad Hitlerum:

The formal logical fallacy describing the same behavior Godwin's Law targets, coined by Leo Strauss in 1951. Often cited alongside Godwin's Law in academic and rhetorical contexts[6].

Henderson's Law:

A corollary by Joel Henderson observing that awareness of Godwin's Law causes people to invoke it against any Nazi comparison, even valid ones[2].

Quirk's Exception:

The observation that deliberately triggering Godwin's Law to force-end a thread almost never works[2].

MAGA Corollary:

A later addition recognizing that when political figures appear to deliberately echo Nazi rhetoric, the comparison may be appropriate rather than a fallacy[4].

Pacific Theatre Corollary:

Coined by Fandom Wank, this describes the tendency of American commenters to invoke the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an alternative to Nazi comparisons[2].

Reverse Godwin's Law:

John Oliver's suggested principle that failing to address Nazism when the comparison is genuinely warranted means you lose the debate[2].

Frequently Asked Questions

Godwin's Law

1990Internet adage / debate ruleclassic

Also known as: Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies

Godwin's Law is a 1990 internet adage by attorney Mike Godwin stating that as online discussions grow longer, the probability of a Hitler or Nazi comparison approaches one.

Godwin's Law is an internet adage coined by attorney Mike Godwin in 1990 stating that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one". Originally formulated as a "natural law of Usenet," it became one of the internet's most widely recognized rules of online discourse, added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2012. The law was deliberately designed as a counter-meme to discourage lazy Hitler comparisons that trivialized the Holocaust.

internet laws memetics memes debate memes meta internet memes usenet origin memes

TL;DR

Godwin's Law is an internet adage coined by attorney Mike Godwin in 1990 stating that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".

Overview

Godwin's Law is a simple observation about online arguments: give any discussion enough time and someone will inevitably compare something or someone to Hitler or the Nazis. The "law" is framed pseudo-scientifically, mimicking mathematical probability. In practice, it functions as both a descriptor of online behavior and a rhetorical tool. When someone drops the Nazi comparison in a thread, other participants often invoke Godwin's Law to signal that the discussion has jumped the shark.

A common tradition holds that whoever makes the Nazi comparison first has lost the argument, though Godwin himself rejects this interpretation as an oversimplification. The law was never meant to be a conversation-stopper. It was designed to make people think twice before reaching for the laziest possible rhetorical weapon.

Mike Godwin, an American attorney who later served as counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, coined the law in 1990. He formulated it after observing the pattern of gratuitous Nazi comparisons spreading across Usenet newsgroups, the Well, and various BBS communities.

In his own words from a 1994 Wired article, Godwin described his creation as an experiment in memetic engineering. He had decided that "the Nazi-comparison meme had gotten out of hand" and set out to build a counter-meme. The resulting formulation: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".

Godwin deliberately framed the law to sound like a mathematical or scientific principle, but its purpose was rhetorical and pedagogical. He wanted people "who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust". The observation itself was originated by Richard Sexton, but Godwin popularized it and gave it the form that stuck.

He seeded the law into Usenet newsgroups wherever he spotted a lazy Nazi reference. Other users began citing it independently, and the counter-meme replicated on its own. Know Your Meme researchers identified Godwin's 1994 Wired piece as one of the earliest uses of the word "meme" to describe viral media and the spread of ideas through internet communication.

Origin & Background

Platform
Usenet
Key People
Mike Godwin, Richard Sexton
Date
1990
Year
1990

Mike Godwin, an American attorney who later served as counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, coined the law in 1990. He formulated it after observing the pattern of gratuitous Nazi comparisons spreading across Usenet newsgroups, the Well, and various BBS communities.

In his own words from a 1994 Wired article, Godwin described his creation as an experiment in memetic engineering. He had decided that "the Nazi-comparison meme had gotten out of hand" and set out to build a counter-meme. The resulting formulation: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one".

Godwin deliberately framed the law to sound like a mathematical or scientific principle, but its purpose was rhetorical and pedagogical. He wanted people "who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust". The observation itself was originated by Richard Sexton, but Godwin popularized it and gave it the form that stuck.

He seeded the law into Usenet newsgroups wherever he spotted a lazy Nazi reference. Other users began citing it independently, and the counter-meme replicated on its own. Know Your Meme researchers identified Godwin's 1994 Wired piece as one of the earliest uses of the word "meme" to describe viral media and the spread of ideas through internet communication.

How It Spread

After its initial seeding on Usenet, the law spread organically across early internet discussion spaces. The Usenet community formalized a corollary as "Usenet Rule #4," which stated that any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis would cause a thread to end quickly. A tradition developed in many groups that once someone invoked a Nazi comparison, the thread was over and that person had lost.

As threaded discussion moved from Usenet to web forums, chat rooms, comment sections, and wikis in the 2000s, Godwin's Law traveled with it. The rule proved surprisingly durable because the behavior it described never went away. Any platform with arguments had someone ready to play the Hitler card.

On October 9, 2009, the r/GodwinsLaw subreddit launched, describing itself as "the place to highlight those who belittle horror of the most reprehensible figures in history by comparing them to people and things they simply don't like". In 2012, Godwin's Law was formally added to the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

PBS Ideas Channel covered the law in a July 2015 video titled "Three Laws of The Internet Explained!" which pulled in over 230,000 views. QI: Quite Interesting uploaded "What Is Godwin's Law?" in January 2017, earning more than 52,000 views. In March 2017, a TIL post on Reddit quoting the law received over 1,800 upvotes and 190 comments.

The law received a major real-world stress test in January 2017 when Donald Trump tweeted "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" in response to intelligence leaks. Twitter users immediately declared he had triggered Godwin's Law. Then in August 2017, following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville where actual neo-Nazi groups marched, Godwin himself weighed in on Twitter: "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you". The tweet picked up more than 20,000 retweets and 48,000 likes in under a week, and was covered by the Washington Post, the Telegraph, HuffPost, Esquire, and other outlets.

Platforms

RedditTwitterTikTokInstagram

Timeline

1990

Godwin's Law first appears online

1990

Gains traction on social media

1991

Reaches peak popularity

1992-01-01

Godwin's Law reached mainstream popularity and media coverage

1993-01-01

Brands and companies started using Godwin's Law in marketing

1995-01-01

Godwin's Law entered the broader pop culture conversation

2025-01-01

Godwin's Law is still actively used and shared across platforms

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Godwin's Law typically gets invoked in two ways:

As an observation: When someone in an online argument compares their opponent (or their opponent's position) to Hitler or the Nazis, another participant points out that Godwin's Law has been fulfilled. This usually signals that the discussion has run its course.

As a preemptive warning: Sometimes users cite Godwin's Law early in a heated thread as a half-joking reminder that someone will inevitably go there, encouraging participants to argue more carefully.

The common convention holds that whichever side first invokes the Nazi comparison has effectively lost the debate, though this interpretation is disputed by Godwin himself. It's worth knowing that the law was only meant to apply to frivolous comparisons. When the discussion actually involves fascism, authoritarianism, or Neo-Nazi movements, making the comparison is fair game.

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Godwin's Law achieved what few internet in-jokes manage: recognition by mainstream institutions. Its 2012 entry into the Oxford English Dictionary placed it alongside formal English vocabulary. It has been cited in news coverage by CNN, the Washington Post, the Telegraph, HuffPost, Esquire, and dozens of other outlets.

The law played a direct role in political discourse during the Trump era. When Trump tweeted "Are we living in Nazi Germany?" in January 2017, commentators across social media and news outlets called it a Godwin's Law violation. Godwin's August 2017 tweet endorsing Nazi comparisons for the Charlottesville marchers generated mainstream coverage and reignited debate about when the law does and doesn't apply.

Godwin's 1994 Wired article is notable beyond the law itself. Know Your Meme researchers flagged it as one of the earliest known uses of the word "meme" to describe the spread of ideas through internet communications, predating the term's widespread adoption by over a decade.

In academia, the law has been referenced in discussions of online argumentation, logical fallacies, and memetics. A 2021 Harvard study examined whether the pattern holds statistically on Reddit and found it did not reach significant frequency, though this did nothing to reduce its cultural footprint.

Full History

Godwin's creation of the law was rooted in genuine moral concern, not just internet humor. He found the casual deployment of Holocaust comparisons in Usenet debates about gun control, censorship, or abortion to be both logically bankrupt and deeply offensive to the victims of actual Nazi atrocities. As he wrote in Wired: "The millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope".

The concept of the underlying logical fallacy predates Godwin's formulation. University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss coined the term "reductio ad Hitlerum" in 1951, describing the tendency to dismiss any idea simply because Hitler also held it. Strauss wrote that "a view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler". Godwin's Law can be understood as the internet-age expression of this older observation about lazy argumentation.

The law's spread generated its own ecosystem of corollaries and exceptions. "Quirk's Exception" holds that deliberately invoking Godwin's Law to kill a thread rarely works. "Henderson's Law," named after Joel Henderson, observes that internet awareness of Godwin's Law has led people to cry foul at any Hitler comparison, no matter how accurate. Users also developed creative workarounds, like referencing "you know who else got rejected by an art school?" instead of naming Hitler directly, or substituting Stalin and Mao, though these transparent dodges fooled nobody.

One of the law's most fascinating quirks is that people began treating it as a real rule with enforceable penalties, rather than the descriptive observation Godwin intended. The "loser" tradition, where whoever mentions Nazis first loses the argument, was never part of Godwin's original formulation. He has repeatedly pushed back on this interpretation, arguing the law "should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter".

Sean Spicer's April 2017 press briefing offered a textbook case of what happens when someone violates the spirit of the law in real life. Attempting to criticize Syria's chemical weapons use, Spicer said that Hitler "didn't even sink to using chemical weapons," apparently forgetting the gas chambers. His attempted clarification made things worse, and CNN described it as "a blatant violation of Godwin's Law".

In a 2021 study, Harvard researchers tested whether the Nazi-comparison pattern actually held up statistically on Reddit. Their findings: it did not occur with "statistically meaningful frequency". The law, it turns out, may describe a memorable pattern more than a reliable probability. But its cultural power was never really about statistics.

Godwin continued to refine his position through the 2010s and 2020s. In a June 2018 Los Angeles Times opinion piece, he wrote that the law "still serves us as a tool to recognize specious comparisons to Nazism, but also, by contrast, to recognize comparisons that aren't". By December 2023, in an interview with Politico, he pointed to Donald Trump's use of terms like "vermin" and "poisoning the blood" as likely deliberate echoes of Nazi rhetoric, not coincidence. That same day, he published a Washington Post op-ed titled "Yes, it's okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don't let me stop you".

The law's journey from a Usenet counter-meme to an Oxford English Dictionary entry to a live political flashpoint over three decades makes it one of the internet's most enduring contributions to public discourse.

Fun Facts

Godwin explicitly described his law as "an experiment in memetics" in 1994, making it one of the earliest self-aware internet memes and one of the first times the word "meme" was used to describe viral internet content.

A 2021 Harvard study found that Nazi comparisons don't actually increase with thread length on Reddit at a statistically meaningful rate, suggesting the "law" describes a memorable pattern rather than a real probability.

The original Usenet community formalized their own version as "Usenet Rule #4" before Godwin's name became attached to the concept.

Godwin wrote a Washington Post op-ed in December 2023 actively encouraging comparisons between Donald Trump and Hitler, making the law's creator one of its most prominent exception-granters.

The word "reductio ad Hitlerum" describing the same fallacy was coined over 40 years earlier, in 1951, by University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss.

Derivatives & Variations

Reductio ad Hitlerum:

The formal logical fallacy describing the same behavior Godwin's Law targets, coined by Leo Strauss in 1951. Often cited alongside Godwin's Law in academic and rhetorical contexts[6].

Henderson's Law:

A corollary by Joel Henderson observing that awareness of Godwin's Law causes people to invoke it against any Nazi comparison, even valid ones[2].

Quirk's Exception:

The observation that deliberately triggering Godwin's Law to force-end a thread almost never works[2].

MAGA Corollary:

A later addition recognizing that when political figures appear to deliberately echo Nazi rhetoric, the comparison may be appropriate rather than a fallacy[4].

Pacific Theatre Corollary:

Coined by Fandom Wank, this describes the tendency of American commenters to invoke the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as an alternative to Nazi comparisons[2].

Reverse Godwin's Law:

John Oliver's suggested principle that failing to address Nazism when the comparison is genuinely warranted means you lose the debate[2].

Frequently Asked Questions