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It's Saturday. It's a Saturday show and it's summer. So stay cool out there, which of course implies you were cool to begin with.

Maybe you were. Most just listeners are. I'm just talking pure demographics and market research.

We're going to take you back to 2017. I did an interview with Tom Nichols of the Atlantic.

When we talked about why Vladimir Putin was entirely against Ukraine joining NATO.

A lot of NATO talk in the air now. A lot of NATO talk in the air then.

A lot of NATO talk on the show this week. When I talked about the country of Sweden joining NATO and I wondered,

wait, weren't those guys Nazis? I did have an interaction with a listener who said, you know, my dad lives in Sweden and the Sweden Democrats aren't really Nazis.

Sure, they might have or that party might have years ago, 20 years ago, had roots within the Nazi party or far right nationalists.

But now parties in Europe, if they are very concerned about immigration, get called Nazi.

I want to excuse anyone for being far right extremists and I absolutely will not weigh in on the internal politics of Sweden.

But actually what I was trying to do with the where they Nazis, it wasn't a spiel, it was the thing that started the show.

But what I was trying to do was to open the possibility of two questions that what is NATO doing letting in Nazis or maybe the amount of Nazism contained within these quote unquote far right Sweden Democrats was slightly different.

And I'm not going to cop out and say the truth might be somewhere in between, but I do think both of those things were going on.

The current governing coalition includes far right elements that if you trace their DNA or just maybe even more than lightly scratch some of their leaders will show some overlap with far right elements that were Nazis.

Maybe we were being too facile a year ago when we said far right neo-Nazis formed government in Sweden.

But maybe we're being not facile enough when we don't raise the issue once more when they join NATO like we'd like them to.

Anyway all stuff to ponder as we ponder NATO and Nazis and Ukraine on this hot summer day. Enjoy.

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