ROGER KIMBALL IN THE LONDON TELEGRAPH: Liberals are realizing that Trump will probably win. And they are terrified.
If this story had sound effects, the primary noise would be what the Gospel According to Matthew called “fletus et stridor dentium”: wailing and gnashing of teeth. Remember Godwin’s law? That’s the contention, named for the writer Mike Godwin, that the longer an internet conversation continues, the greater the chances are that someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. The Times writers go full Godwin right at the beginning of their desperate handwringing. “During a Veterans Day speech,” they wail, “Mr. Trump used language that echoed authoritarian leaders who rose to power in Germany and Italy in the 1930s . . .”
Wham: three short paragraphs and Donald Trump is already being compared to Hitler and Mussolini. Then come the “experts” to provide cover. We’re not just wacko name callers here. We’re The New York Times. Trump warned that:
“The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.”
Lincoln actually took a similar line when he noted in his Lyceum Address of 1838 that “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” But you are not allowed to mention Lincoln and Trump in the same sentence, except to trash Trump, so the Times calls on “experts” to do the dirty work. This “turn inward,” they write, “has sounded new alarms among experts on autocracy who have long worried about Mr. Trump’s praise for foreign dictators and disdain for democratic ideals. They said the former president’s increasingly intensive focus on perceived internal enemies was a hallmark of dangerous totalitarian leaders.”
Well, if “experts” say it, who are we to disagree?
Later on in the piece, Messrs Bender and Gold allow that “Some experts on authoritarianism said that while Mr Trump’s recent language has begun to more closely resemble that used by leaders like Hitler or Benito Mussolini, he does not quite mirror fascist leaders of the past.” Well, praise the Lord.
But how does Trump compare to Naomi Wolf fever swamp fantasies from September of 2008? Sarah ‘Evita’ Palin to Usher in Rovian Police State.
(That would be the same Evita whom AOC compared herself to in 2019 in a classic self-own. Exit quote: “Look just because she’s favorably comparing herself to the lady that Franco liked a lot who sheltered Mengele doesn’t mean… OK, I forgot where I was doing with this.”)