In the internet world, there is a truth universally acknowledged that all arguments end up referencing Hitler or Nazis eventually, and at that point, the person who makes the reference loses the argument. It is known as Godwin’s Law, but it is variously called Argumentum ad Hitlerum or Argumentum ad Nazium (our particular favorite), and is a modern day logical fallacy.

Essentially, it means this: Nothing that isn’t actual genocide should be likened to genocide. That means we can call what happened in Bosnia or Rwanda or Armenia, or what happened to the Native Americans by European-Americans Nazi-like, but we really can’t call anything else that. President George W. Bush was not a Hitler, for instance, nor is President Barack Obama a Nazi. To make those comparisons lessens and cheapens what happened at Auschwitz and Wounded Knee, Sarajevo and Van and Kigali.

Right? So now, it seems, we need another thing like Godwin’s Law for a flurry of likening everything from food stamps to immigration reform to slavery. Real, human slavery, the kind we perpetuated on millions of human beings from our earliest beginnings as a nation until the end of the Civil War, and whose ramifications we are still dealing with,150 years later, in towns like Ferguson, Mo.

The comparisons are beyond ignorant, and Ray Richardson, who first uttered this nonsense, should be forced to spend a single day in shackles so he knows what he’s talking about. Among those he considers the “new plantation” are the Roman Catholic Diocese, Equal Justice Partners, the NAACP and, of course, the Maine People’s Alliance, calling them “profiteers of poverty.”

But Richardson is a conservative radio shock-jock of sorts, although he has ties to some in government, including Gov. Paul LePage. His views are what his right-wing listeners are willing to pay for, and his advertisers are willing to fund.

More insidiously, he is being supported in this delusion by Republicans who aren’t normally roaming the far outlands, including state Representative Amy Volk of Scarborough, who shared Richardson’s column on Facebook, writing that she agreed with most of what he wrote (except for the part where he said these organizations hated the people they were helping). Volk wrote that “robbing people of dignity is more dangerous than letting them fend for themselves.”

There is nothing particularly dignified about elderly folks eating cat food to survive, or families being forced into homeless shelters, sometimes separated from their children, in order to have roofs over their heads. There’s nothing dignified about a hungry child at all, really. Some things are just a lot less dignified than getting a plastic card and being able to buy food for their family, even if the well-heeled Richardson fan behind the “welfare” mother in line at the grocery store gives her the hairy eyeball for buying real orange juice instead of “juice drink” with her government benefits.

Statements about the inherent “dignity” of poverty, always seem come from people who have never been poor a day in their lives and have no earthly idea what they are talking about, bless their hearts. Hopefully, they never will.

But comparing those helping people in poverty to slave owners is a very special kind of stupid, and one that can’t be explained away by simple ignorance. It also can’t be ignored. Ray Richardson and those who read the same playbook need to be called out, over and over. Food stamp advocates are not the Charleston slave markets, and those who are running soup kitchens and food pantries aren’t the Florida Parish plantations in Louisiana, where most new slaves died of disease, starvation and abuse within a year of arrival. Those who are advocating for equal justice for the poor certainly aren’t the equal of Chief Justice Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision in 1857.

Let’s call Richardson’s diatribe what it is. An appeal to ignorance.