ROGER KIMBALL: Vance Derangement Syndrome.

The most reliable prop in anti-Republican — and a fortiori anti-Trump — rhetoric is comparison with the diminutive but excitable Austrian with the funny mustache and a weakness for leather. I once looked it up, and yes, every Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan has been described as “literally Hitler.” I had thought the argumentum reductio ad Hitlerum had worn out its welcome, partly because it was so absurd. Ronald Reagan? Mitt Romney? The Bushes?

Yet [Bret] Stephens has once again demonstrated that the Hitler wheeze, though tired, still has a bit of mileage in it. Responding to Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, Stephens began with a little cadenza on everyone’s favorite Hitler proxy, Joseph Goebbels. Yes, that’s right. Stephens suggested that warning the crowd of European globalists that untrammeled illegal migration was a threat, that free speech was inseparable from the fortunes of liberal democracy, and that Europe would have to start taking more responsibility for its own security made Vance a malignant patsy on the model of Neville Chamberlain.*

One silver lining of Stephens’s columns is that they tend to possess the virtue of clarity. You know where he stands. In this case, the title reads “Vance’s Munich Disgrace” and goes on to talk about the Vice President as a disgrace. His concluding words about Vance and his talk are “a disgrace.” In any given paragraph, you know where you stand.

I’d make jokes about newfound respect on the left for the man with the funny mustache, given the many issues they have in common these days (not least of which is how lefties on college campuses behaved after October 7th, their hatred of the Second Amendment, and their shared love of the Gleichschaltung). But we’re in Orwellian territory in 2025: Elon Musk is seen as Hitler because he wants to shrink government. CBS’s Margaret Brennan believes the Holocaust happened because of too much free speech in the Third Reich.

* Wait, wasn’t Neville Chamberlain was the eight-dimensional chess playing good guy in WWII? At least, that’s what Netflix was telling me in 2022. Conversely, Obama hated Churchill so much during his three terms in office that he actually uttered Chamberlain’s signature phrase “peace in our time” during his second inaugural address.