It wouldn’t be an election year without Democrats gesturing frantically at their Republican opponents and shrieking “OMG, OMG literally Hitler!” The Democrats have taken Godwin’s Law and abused it until it is in tatters, and still, they are comparing former President Donald Trump to the infamous leader of Nazi Germany. In the case of the Harris campaign for president, it seems that this is 1) their closing move, and 2) the only thing they have left to put on the table; everything else has blown up in their faces.
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It’s all very tiresome.
What’s worse, it turns out it’s been SOP for Democrats since, well, shortly after old Adolf met his richly deserved end. In a Washington Examiner op-ed on Thursday, Christopher Tremoglie described how this has been going on for 60 years – and he has examples.
Let’s start with former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) and his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964. Over 50 years before Trump decided to run for president, celebrities, journalists, politicians, and other politicos warned that the GOP presidential nominee was an extreme fascist who would cause considerable harm to the country. Goldwater, who served as a pilot during World War II, was likened to Nazis and fascists for promoting conservatism during his presidential campaign.
For example, the then-Democratic governor of California, Edmund Gerland “Pat” Brown, remarked about Goldwater’s acceptance speech, claiming it “had the stench of fascism. All we needed to hear was Heil Hitler.”
Barry Goldwater – and honestly, couldn’t we use a few more Barry Goldwaters today? Barry Goldwater was an honest-to-gosh war hero, flying a cargo plane in Asia over “The Hump,” a highly dangerous route by which supplies were flown into China from India, going through mountains and deep canyons in Burma and western China.
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It doesn’t stop with Senator Goldwater, Tremoglie wrote:
The despicable comments continued the following election in 1968. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Democratic nominee for president, remarked about the election, “If the British had not fought in 1940, Hitler would have been in London, and if Democrats do not fight in 1968, Nixon will be in the White House.”
Former President Richard Nixon won the election, but the Hitler, Nazi, and fascist comparisons never stopped. For example, in 1970, a political poster featured an image of Adolf Hitler, wearing a Nazi armband, holding a mask of Nixon.
Nixon had his issues, but being a fascist wasn’t among them.
Not even Ronald Reagan was immune:
Rep. William Clay (D-MO) stated that Reagan wanted to “replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.”
The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were comparable to the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”
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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.)
Of course, the problem is that most Democrats (and plenty of other folks) toss around the sobriquets “fascist” and “Nazi” just like they do “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,” or “transphobe,” that is, as a synonym for “doody-head.”
They don’t know what fascism is. Fascism is a governing and economic system with overbearing central authority, in which the means of production are technically in private ownership, but the outputs of the means of production are dictated by that central government.
Democrats, of course, rarely trouble themselves with facts.
This endless crying of “Nazi! Nazi!” probably won’t end any time soon. The Republicans could nominate a ham sandwich, and Democrats would screech about the sandwich’s fascist predilections, especially if the sandwich is made with white bread. And the comparison is absurd on its face. No American politician is advocating for rounding up innocent civilians and murdering them, literally in carload lots. No American politician is advocating for invading Canada to gain “breathing room” for American citizens. No American politician is plotting to conduct night and day air attacks on Cuba. No American politician can be sanely compared to Hitler and his evil minions, not that this stops Democrats from making this perfectly absurd assertion.
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At least the wholesale shouts of “Nazi!” tells us who to ignore, as in invoking Hitler, they identify themselves as people who need not be taken seriously.