The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of the most famous fables in literary history. The story has become a part of the English lexicon. People who cry wolf raise false alarms until they are no longer heeded when the event they falsely warned of comes to pass. Since 2016, the left has routinely cried wolf, substituting the Canis lupus for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
The political strategy for the left and the media wing of the Democratic Party has been to compare President Donald Trump to the German dictator and the Republicans to Nazis. No matter how foolish their presentations on CNN or MSNBC may be, prominent progressives keep showcasing their historical ignorance by trying to draw Trump-Hitler comparisons. But this has been the modus operandi on the left for a long time, trying to sketch parallels between Nazis and Republicans. This is the same group pushing for unity now that Joe Biden appears to be heading to the White House.
Hitler Captures Headlines in November 2020
Despite being dead for nearly 80 years, the German dictator captured the headlines in time for the 2020 U.S. presidential election, mainly because Democrats keep invoking his name in political discourse.
James Clyburn
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) spoke with CNN’s Chris Cuomo to discuss how he sees similarities between President Trump challenging the November 3 election in the federal courts to “what Hitler did in Germany.” Clyburn, who endorsed Joe Biden, warned that the United States is “teetering on” a dictatorship, echoing the sentiment of the left for the last four years.
“I’m beginning to see what happened in Germany back in the 1930s. How do you elect a president and all of a sudden give him the authority to be a dictator? That’s what we are teetering on here. That’s what Hitler did in Germany,” Rep. Clyburn said.
Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann, the so-called pit bull in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office during the Russia probe, tweeted a Trump-Hitler analogy: “For those people who say we should just appease Trump, how did that approach go for Neville Chamberlain?” asked Weissmann on Twitter.
CNN discredited itself once again by trying to liken the actions of Team Trump to Kristallnacht, a November 1938 pogrom that targeted synagogues and Jewish businesses. As commemorations of “The Night of Broken Glass” take place worldwide, CNN Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour postulated that there were similarities between Trump’s presidency and the tragic event due to a “modern-day assault” attacking “those same values.”
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine and frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC, pretty much stated that Trump is worse than Hitler. Dr. Lee said in a tweet, which was later deleted:
“Donald Trump is not an Adolf Hitler. At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. Even with the same pathology, there are varying degrees of competence.”
Even when Trump was just a candidate for the White House, the avalanche of Trump-is-Hitler arguments never ended. But is Trump Literally Hitler (TM)? The problem is that the left has utilized this reasoning for so long against any Republican that, much like being labeled a racist, the slander has lost any and all meaning. Comparing Hitler and Nazis to the right has become a national pastime for leftists in America.
Keith Ellison
Everyone I Don’t Like is Hitler
Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, had compared former President George W. Bush to Hitler, trying to find a connection between the infamous Reichstag fire and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Billionaire Democratic contributor George Soros claimed that Bush “displays the supremacist ideology of Nazi Germany.” During those years, it was common to repeatedly trivialize Hitler and the Nazis by likening the 43rd president to the socialist dictator.
Former Rep. William Clay (D-MS) asserted that President Ronald Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” CBS Correspondent Daniel Schorr tried to link Barry Goldwater to Nazis, while Democratic California Gov. Pat Brown stated that “the stench of fascism is in the air.”
If it is not Republican presidents or nominees the left targets, it is the party or prominent GOP figures. For example, Dick Harpootlian, then-Chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, compared Nikki Haley to Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress. Actor, singer, and activist Harry Belafonte dismissed the number of blacks in the Bush administration by noting that “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.”
Germany 1932: A Primer
But circling back to Clyburn’s disingenuous contention that Trump using the federal courts to question the legitimacy of the election is somehow Hitler-esque. Here is the thing: Nothing that is happening today is anything comparable to what transpired 90 years ago.
In the July 1932 German federal election, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party received 13.745 million votes, or 37.2% of the vote. This gave the Nazis 230 seats, a gain of 123, but it was not enough to secure a majority government. Germany was governed by a fragmented parliament, which eventually resulted in President Paul von Hindenburg reluctantly appointing Hitler as chancellor of Germany. He soon abolished the democratic system and implemented a one-party state, becoming a dictator.
Has President Trump abolished elections, made himself president for life, and eviscerated his opposition? In the case of the 2020 election chaos, Trump and his legal team are using the judicial process to present their case of widespread voter fraud. Whether the president wins his argument or not is a different story. For now, the two situations have nothing to do with each other, suggesting that the left needs to study German history and quit thinking all their opponents are the spawn of Hitler.
The Boy Who Cried Hitler
It has been averred that if everyone is Hitler, then nobody is Hitler. Comparing a president or a governor in the United States to the madman from Austria trivializes the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, as well as the millions more who lost their lives across Europe. Unless an administration is advocating the systematic slaughter of an ethnic group and tossing them into gas chambers, it might be time to tone down the asinine rhetoric. Will the next Republican nominee or president also be Hitler? It sounds like the premise of a 1960s shlock feature film, a la They Saved Hitler’s Brain.
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