DON’T BE STUPID, BE A SCHMARTY: Does Driving a Large, Gas-Powered Truck Make You a Gay Nazi? This Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Thinks So.

Journalists are the worst. Even the ones who don’t cover politics are often incapable of writing normal sentences without flaunting their sneering disdain for normal Americans. For instance, you might not believe us if we told you the Wall Street Journal‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic recently compared Americans who enjoy large trucks with gas-powered engines to Hermann Göring, the Nazi commander who founded the Gestapo and whose “martial flamboyance” fueled persistent rumors about his sexuality. But that’s exactly what he did.

The opening paragraphs of Dan Neil’s review of Ford’s gas-powered F-250 Super Duty must be seen to be believed. Even then, it’s absurd enough to make you wonder if an editor messed up by uploading the wrong text. Just a totally normal way to start a truck review:

Indeed, there are many examples of “behavior intended to signal elite social status.” In the modern context, few are more obvious than sneering at pickup trucks and the people who drive them. If your job is to write about cars, it’s certainly the most relevant option. Comparing people you don’t like to Nazis is another classic case. Most people would regard it as obnoxious preening, but such is the cost of asserting one’s moral righteousness.

When Rupert Murdoch announced Fox News in 1996, CNN’s Ted Turner compared Murdoch to Hitler, and followed up with an explanation, quoted by the Los Angeles Times [in October of 1996]: “‘The late Führer, the first thing he did, like all dictators, was take over the press and use it to further his agenda. Basically, that is what Rupert Murdoch does with his media.  .  .  .’ The Nazi analogy was too much for the Anti-Defamation League, which rebuked Turner for trivializing the Holocaust. Turner apologized, but that didn’t prevent him from likening Murdoch to ‘the late Führer’ a year later; or, in 2005, comparing the success of Fox News to the rise of Hitler.”

Now one of Murdoch’s newspapers is comparing its potential readers to Herman Goering, which in turn trivializes the Holocaust. Do multiple editors agree with Neil, or did they let his article go to print because they really, really hate him?