SPRINGTIME FOR KAMALA: Kamala Harris Quoted One Of Hitler’s Favorite Writers In Her Concession Speech.

Carlyle’s original quote was less exact: “The eternal stars shine out again, as soon as it is dark enough.” Regardless, according to the website Quote Investigator, in a published paper Beard himself attributed his own take on the aphorism directly to Carlyle: “In conclusion we may say, with Carlyle, when it grows dark enough we can see stars.”

Why does this matter? Well, if you poke around you’ll see that Carlyle was reviled for much of the 20th century as the illiberal “prophet of fascism.” Oh and then there’s this:

In his waning days, defeated and surrounded only by loyalists in his bunker, Hitler sought consolation from the literature he admired the most. According to many biographers, the following scene took place. Hitler turned to Goebbels, his trusted assistant, and asked for a final reading. The words he chose to hear before his death were from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great.

Now to be fair to Carlyle, like a lot of influential intellectuals, he was a lot more complex and nuanced than his critics make him out to be. He’s probably better known as the originator of the “great man of history” theory than for his supposed fascism, though a lot of people contentiously argue that the former leads to the latter. His reputation has been rehabbed somewhat since the mid-20th century when he was more reviled, but he’s exactly the kind of figure that woke academics extend almost no grace toward. (And that’s without even getting into his 19th century views on race.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is that, while Kamala Harris was graciously conceding her electoral loss to a man she had insincerely warned was dangerous fascist, she tried to soothe her supporter’s souls by, however inadvertently, quoting one of Hitler’s favorite historians. Absolute perfection.

It’s great to see the final episode of HBO’s Veep go out on such a brilliantly satiric note.