JEFF DUNETZ: The Democrats Who Call Trump Nazi And The Reporters Who Don’t Confront Them.

What is it with those Trump-hating politicians? If they disagree with a Trump policy, say so and explain why. Why do they insist on cheapening the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, those who survived the Holocaust torture, and the Jews who mourn the victims’ pain every day? In the rare cases when a Republican makes a similar disgusting statement, the media would be all over them like cheese on pizza. But when a Democrat spews that hatred, there’s nothing but crickets.

It used to be a basic rule of American politics never to speak of the Holocaust or any of its related terms, such as Nazis or Hitler, for political warfare. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

Anyone who says Trump, his supporters, or other Republicans is Hitler or a Nazi doesn’t care about minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust. Any reporter who doesn’t challenge that disgusting statement is just as bad.

QED: NY Times: ‘Chilling Parallels’ Between Third Reich and Trump’s Second Term.

David Segal, a feature writer for the New York Times, interviewed German-born novelist Daniel Kehlmann, who “sees chilling parallels between what happened [under Hitler] and what has unfolded since Trump’s second inauguration.”

The “Republican president = Hitler” smear has been a tired and offensive liberal trope since the Reagan Administration, unworthy of appearing in a once-prestigious newspaper. The Times headline writer wasn’t subtle:

In a Nazi-Era Filmmaker’s Compromises, a Novelist Finds Reasons to Fear

Daniel Kehlmann wrote ‘The Director’ only to realize how loudly the moral quandaries faced by G.W. Pabst would resonate today.

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At the end, Kehlmann cited his own paranoia to prove himself right that American had become a dangerously intolerant place under Trump.

“Immediately I’m thinking, can it be bad for me to say something like this to The New York Times? Which, I think, proves my point.”

How so? What’s going to happen to you? As Tom Wolfe in “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America” about a panel he was on at Princeton in 1965 when LBJ was in the White House and the topic began to focus on – see if this rings a bell – “the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck.”

I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called ‘The New Life Out There’ for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history.

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Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was [Günter] Grass, speaking in English.

“For the past hour I have my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

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