Reichsparteitag (“imperial party congresses) in Nuremberg, Germany in 1938. Tom Morello is right. If you’re with Nazis and you don’t call them out, you might be a Nazi. Photo by Imagno/Getty Images.

Nazis were in the news again this week… every week, it seems.

When we want to show how bad someone is, we compare them to Nazis. The new Indiana Jones movie, “Han Solo’s Last Crusading Crystal Ark of the Oakland Raiders,” went back to using Nazis as the bad guys because the Soviets weren’t evil enough in the last film.

Think about that, former ’80s kids: The Soviets weren’t evil enough. Joseph Stalin killed 20 million of his own people and he’s still can’t topple Adolph Hitler as the worst of the worst. That’s not to say Nazis don’t deserve it. Especially now, as certain people are showing their short memories – or inability to read – as fascism creeps back into public consciousness.

Of course Nazis are bad. Did we not laugh when Jake and Elwood ran the Illinois Nazis off the bridge in “The Blues Brothers?” We saluted Edward Norton’s redemption in “American History X.” We loved Col. Hogan outwitting the bumbling Nazis in “Hogan’s Heroes.”

Bad example. Making Nazis funny goofballs was perhaps the worst decision in television history (outside of “Cop Rock”).

For the record, I loved “Cop Rock.”

But this is how weird things are getting in the U.S. This week, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine was ripped for posting an anti-Nazi quote online. Morello tweeted Wednesday, “German saying: If 9 people sit down at a table with 1 Nazi without protest, there are 10 Nazis at the table.”

pic.twitter.com/wvrReXYkYk

— Tom Morello (@tmorello) June 1, 2023

Pretty clear, I think. Maybe not applicable to every possible situation, but we get the idea. Hanging around Nazis without making a point of saying they suck out loud make us question your character. Being friendly with them makes you a colluder.

This isn’t an alien concept. Four guys get into a car, one guy pulls a gun and shoots someone on the sidewalk. All four get arrested – especially in certain neighborhoods. Guilt by association is legal and actively practiced in the U.S.

Nevertheless, according to the New York Post, people ripped Morello up and down. He was so ironically accused of “fascism” and “intolerance.” Some people went as far as to say lovers of democracy and equality should be able to sit down with Nazis: to convert them, to reason with them, to educate them.

How lovely … no, sorry, it’s not. The Nazis had their chance. They blew it, and our grandfathers came home with PTSD to prove how important it was to stop them.

Maybe that communication happens in a perfect world. Not in the one in which Hitler killed at least 10 million Jews, homosexuals, developmentally disabled, Romano gypsies, liberals and the educated … anyone who didn’t live up to his belief of the ideal human race.

Of course, people need to communicate. But calling Tom Morello a “fascist” for being anti-fascist is … kind of par for the course in 2023, when confused conservatives are boycotting Chick-fil-A for daring to bring its human resource department into the post-1960s 20th Century.

Real fascism is creeping back out of its filthy hole. They don’t call themselves Nazis, or even fascists, but they are, at the very least, leaning toward the latter by demonizing immigrants, homosexuals, non-white Americans, trans people … anyone who’s different.

People who take history courses and still read books see the similarities, which is why this anti-education push in so many conservative states is so alarming. Nazis banned and burned books, by the way. The third “Indiana Jones” movie said so …

We’re forgetting what these philosophies mean, and those who do remember World War II are leaving us hoping they did enough to educate the world that the Holocaust, for example, should never happen again.

Meanwhile, half of our country may vote for a guy who thought separating babies and small children from their mothers at the border for months, or even years, was good policy.

This country needs a serious lesson about fascism, and apparently having a would-be fascist as commander-in-chief for four years didn’t get the job done. Let’s not bandy semantics. Ask your grandparents or great grandparents, if they’re still around, if that’s OK.

It’s not. And at least Tom Morello knows that.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.