Leo Strauss had Donne Trotter’s number. Strauss was the University of Chicago professor who coined the term reductio ad Hitlerum. It’s a rhetorical gambit also known as “playing the Nazi card.” In an ...

The great French free-market economist Frederic Bastiat (pictured above) was considered by many to be the master of the reductio ad absurdum approach that he used quite effectively to expose the ...

A specter haunts Europe—this time, not that of Communism, as the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto famously assert, but that of Adolf Hitler. Nearly three-quarters of a century after Hitler’s ...

When I was at the Register last week, I wrote a blog on Beatle Paul McCartney and global warming. He had compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers. I made a mistake. I wrote about it as a ...

In teaching logical fallacies as part of persuasion and public speaking courses, I sometimes refer to a half-serious one called "Reductio ad Hitlerum," or "playing the Hitler card." Debaters who use ...