The Death of Critical Thinking: How the Internet Smears Dissent with Swastikas

By CJ Strachan

It’s 2025, and apparently, quoting your opponent is now a form of ideological self-immolation.

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh is the latest victim of a ludicrous yet increasingly common smear campaign. In the midst of a heated debate on X (formerly Twitter), Walsh reshared a tweet — not to endorse it, but to refute it. The post, made by someone he was arguing against, allegedly contained a “hidden” swastika in the background image. The mob’s conclusion? Walsh must be a Nazi sympathiser.

This is the standard of reasoning we’ve now reached: if you quote someone’s tweet to criticise it, and that tweet contains a watermark or background element you didn’t notice, you’re a fascist. Forget intent. Forget context. The algorithm has spoken, and its disciples are hungry for heretics.

Guilt by Algorithm

Social media was supposed to democratise information. Instead, it has created a digital panopticon where meaning is stripped from words, and guilt is assigned by proximity. Resharing a tweet — something any journalist, commentator, or polemicist might do to respond or refute — is now treated as moral endorsement.

This is guilt by algorithm: a logic-free zone where association trumps intention and screenshots are weaponised without nuance. If the original post contains a symbol, phrase, or image that can be construed as offensive, you’re no longer debating ideas — you’re being judged for your liturgical purity.

The Hollowing Out of Language

Let’s be clear: calling someone a Nazi is one of the gravest charges you can make in political discourse. Or at least, it used to be. Today, the word has been hollowed out by overuse and misapplication. It no longer signals genocide, militarism, or racial supremacism; it now means “I dislike your opinion, and I want to silence you.”

The result is that serious terms are becoming meaningless. When every opponent is a fascist, nobody is. When every retweet is an endorsement, conversation dies. And when dissent becomes blasphemy, we are no longer citizens in a democracy but subjects in an ideological theocracy.

The Neo-Inquisitors

This new inquisitorial class operates with the same certainty and cruelty as their medieval forebears. Their power lies not in law, but in fear. Once accused, there is no defence. Evidence doesn’t matter. You retweeted the image, therefore you must believe in it. Your denial is just more proof of guilt.

It is a perverse echo of the Star Chamber: secret accusations, public shaming, reputational execution. The difference is that today’s inquisitors don’t wear robes; they wear bios with pronouns and hashtags, and they hunt not witches, but wrongthinkers.

The Danger of False Alarms

Here’s the real tragedy: this grotesque inflation of language makes it harder to fight genuine hate. If every conservative commentator is a Nazi, what do we call the actual ones? If a sarcastic retweet can trigger a firestorm, how do we marshal outrage when someone commits a real atrocity?

It is moral vandalism. By crying “Nazi” at every shadow, the mob renders the term impotent. The boy who cried wolf didn’t just bore the villagers — he doomed them.

The Collapse of Critical Thinking

What’s equally alarming is how few people seem capable of applying basic critical thinking to these situations. We live in an age where information is abundant, yet wisdom is scarce. Social media platforms have become accelerants for emotional reaction, not careful reasoning.

But now, as we teeter on the cusp of a world saturated with artificial intelligence — machines that can mimic, fabricate, and amplify ideas with unprecedented speed — the ability to think clearly, analyse context, and question assumptions becomes not just useful, but essential.

That so many people can be whipped into moral panic over a reshared tweet with a barely visible symbol should worry us deeply. If we can’t distinguish engagement from endorsement, or accident from intent, what hope do we have in a world where AI can generate perfect fakes and simulate controversy on demand?

A Call for Sanity

We need to return to a culture where context matters, where quoting someone doesn’t mean endorsing them, and where the presumption of bad faith isn’t our default setting. If resharing an opponent’s argument to debunk it makes you guilty of their crimes, then Socrates would never have survived Twitter.

This isn’t about Matt Walsh. It’s about all of us. Because if a digital witch trial can be conjured from a reshared image, it means none of us are safe.

And that, more than any pixelated swastika, should chill us to the bone.