We do not need help understanding why rhetoric like that is ugly.

My issue with comments like this is that they substitute moral sorting for understanding. Their main effect is to provoke disgust, identify the villain, and let readers affirm that they are on the right side. That emotional reaction is sincere.

It also shrinks the debate space for real understanding and real debate, because once a thread is framed that way, disagreement starts to look like sympathy and nuance starts to look like evasion. The tribalism kicks in and polarization continues.

The more useful discussion is what exactly is being signaled here, why it is being signaled now, who it is meant to reach, what norms it is testing, and what response that calls for.

Sorry, hard disagree. Bad faith entirely precludes debate because debate is about updating and improving a position through exchanges of views, and that starts with the ability and willingness to budge from said position in the first place.

Which incidentally means that there is by definition no debating tenants of a position that can't survive one minute of good faith review. They're not there to debate. They're there to drown out and silence a truth about material reality that they're upset about.

There is no debate. He’s a Nazi and Nazis are bad. There’s nothing to debate.