THE GERMAN-AMERICAN BUND CHAPTER IN WALT KELLY'S SWAMP.

His long-ago Pogo comic strip included a character called Deacon Mushrat who wore the clerical garb of an English vicar and spoke in the stylings of John Knox.  Walt Kelly liked that Olde English lettering enough that the whole gang sang the strip's signature Christmas song right out of that hymnal.

But let somebody on Our President's social media team use Olde English lettering in an homage to Abraham Lincoln and Outside the Beltway contributor Steven Taylor lets his Trump derangement loose.

While I will allow that occasionally over-the-top and even distasteful jokes fly out of the mouths and off the keyboards of people, especially young people, no one goes around vomiting a torrent of racist terms by accident. And praising Hitler and using Nazi-inspired terms is not youthful indiscretion.

I spent decades teaching people this age. I have sons in their twenties. Anyone pretending that college-age kids lack agency or somehow don’t know what they are doing is insane.

This stuff is not harmless, and this is just more evidence that we are in a bad place as a country, and national leadership is not only not worried about it, they are helping foster it.

Nobody goes around conflating Olde English with Fraktur by accident, either.  Did echoes of National Socialist terminology, either deliberate or coincidental, emerge as a consequence of too much scolding from Student Affairs types?