The grotesque banalization of Hitler and Hitlerism proceeds apace. The American Left’s discourse is replete with comparisons of President Donald J. Trump to Adolf Hitler and constant evocations of a dangerous “fascist” threat to democracy supposedly coming from an altogether illiberal Right. Kamala Harris labeled Trump a fascist and Nazi sympathizer in a CNN town hall meeting in October, and she and the mainstream media continued to pile on until the November election.
When Trump held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, a little over a week before the election, many Democrats, and the increasingly hysterical talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, compared that rally to a meeting of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund in that same venue in 1939. Completely disregarding the impressively multiracial character of the MAGA supporters gathered to hear Trump, as well as the large contingent of Orthodox and Hassidic Jews also in attendance, the media incessantly identified Trump with Hitler and “fascism.” Not only was the deep-seated evil that was National Socialism trivialized beyond recognition, and not only was fascism crudely (and absurdly) identified with any opposition to a hard Left agenda, but crucial distinctions between fascism, National Socialism, and democratic conservatism were elided in a deeply misleading manner.
This drumbeat continues to this day. The Trump/fascism/Nazism elision is commonplace in leftist discourse. An article in the Harvard Political Review from January attempts to give scholarly cover to this type of defamation: “Trump Rhetoric Echoes Hitler.” The author takes it for granted that Trump is a racist anti-Semite, and that he hates immigrants tout court. The fact he has built a large and varied multiracial political coalition is passed over in silence, as is his warm relationship with Israel. Trump, it is said, “is unfit to serve as the president of a nation founded upon the celebration of racial, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity.” While it is true that the Founders loathed chattel slavery and declared that “all men are created equal,” dogmatic multiculturalism was not their vision of American self-government.
Just the other day Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, bemoaned the fact that the country was in the process of being “stolen by fascists and Nazis.” Even though a storm of criticism was directed his way, Walz has since refused to apologize. He even had the chutzpah to say he did not have Republicans in mind.
Examples of this reductio ad Hitlerum, as Leo Strauss once suggestively called it, are legion and are likely to continue for a very long time to come, thus compounding the damage. As Dennis Prager (himself Jewish) argued in an insightful syndicated column published on election day, immense moral and civic damage has been done to our country by leftists insisting on “calling Donald Trump a fascist and a Nazi and declaring him ‘Hitler.’” Prager points out that “if Trump is Hitler, then Hitler was Trump. Hitler was nothing worse than a German version of Trump—not the instigator of World War II and the creator of the Holocaust; just a German Donald Trump.”
Don’t overthink it; last month when CBS’s Margaret Brennan absurdly claimed to Marco Rubio that JD Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide,” Mark Steyn responded, “I did not think it was possible to despise the ‘mainstream’ media more than I already did. In a society thoroughly moronized by Brain-Dead Brennan and her ilk, Hitler is the sole remaining historical figure anybody’s heard of. And they can’t even get that right. ‘Weaponising’ free speech? What does that even mean? In Germany, tweets get you gaoled but rape is just part of your ‘cultural tradition’. And CBS News knows which side it’s on.”