XPost: la.general, talk.politics.mideast, alt.journalism.newspapers
XPost: atl.general

Last week, Lucasfilm severed ties with “The Mandalorian” actress
Gina Carano after a hyperbolic social-media post in which she
compared current political imperiousness and cancel culture in
the United States — and the treatment of “wrong-thinking”
Americans who hold views at odds with those of ruling class
elites — to the 1930s-era treatment of German Jewry by the Nazi
regime.

“Most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where
Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the
government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for
being Jews,” Carano wrote in her now-deleted post.

Let’s stipulate that Carano’s post was over the top. As bad as
cancel culture is in the United States in the year 2021, it is
both rhetorically inflammatory and dishonorable to the memories
of exterminated European Jews to compare the present plight of
American conservatives with Kristallnacht (to say nothing, of
course, of the Shoah itself). The mere fact that blue-checked
conservatives on Twitter often openly joke about being forcibly
deported to “the camps” reveals how unlikely such a scenario, in
reality, actually is.

But Carano deleted the post. And more broadly: Let those among
us who have not ever made a gratuitous and regrettable social-
media post cast the first stone.

Carano’s tale, in isolation, would be amusing but hardly
newsworthy. What makes this story affirmatively galling is how
it yet again evinces an ever-widening chasm between ruling-class
elites and the dissident “deplorables” over whom they deign to
rule.

As radio host and blogger, Erick Erickson, pointed out Thursday
morning, “The Mandalorian” star Pedro Pascal has a still-active
tweet from 2018, captioned with “#ThisIsAmerica” and juxtaposing
photos of concentration camp-bound Jews in prisoner clothing
with what appear to be illegal alien children detained behind
bars at the southern border (a practice largely begun by then-
President Barack Obama, actually).

Naturally, Carano was fired for her deleted post, but Pascal
will keep his job.

More generally, the American left has spent much of the past
four years hysterically comparing former President Donald Trump,
whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew and who is likely the most
aggressively pro-Jewish president in American history, to Adolf
Hitler. It would be trite, not to mention impossible, to
enumerate all the examples.

The armchair sloganeering and rote analogizing were truly
ubiquitous across CNN, MSNBC and the other bastions of
progressive media or cultural clout. It became old hat to
compare Antifa, properly understood as a domestic terror
organization, to the valiant American patriots who stormed the
beach of Normandy on D-Day, thus equating the Trump
administration with the Third Reich.

But even more egregious was then-President-elect Joe Biden’s
post-Capitol riot comparison of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and
Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels, a man who arguably has more Jewish blood on his hands
than anyone besides Hitler and Heinrich Himmler themselves.
Speaking two days after the Capitol riot, Biden expressly
invoked Goebbels’ name and accused Cruz and Hawley of helping to
spread the “big lie.” (Cruz, it should be noted, is by word and
deed likely the single most philo-Semitic and pro-Israel member
of either house of Congress.) The smear was quickly parroted by
other national Democratic leaders.

Biden’s slur was, in a nutshell, revolting. It is, or at least
ought to be, far beneath the dignity of the leader of the free
world to casually besmirch high-ranking political foes as
active, literal Nazis. But Biden’s remarkable Freudian slip
didn’t occur in a vacuum; rather, it was the natural culmination
of a years-long leftist campaign, which commenced in the pre-
Trump era but rapidly accelerated during the 45th president’s
tumultuous tenure, to equate conservatism with Nazism. Perhaps
some on the left earnestly believe this, and some believe it to
merely be tactically helpful. It is unclear.

What is clear is how deeply shameful the whole spectacle is. And
not just shameful, but deeply hypocritical. Just ask Gina
Carano, who was canceled for a post that was relatively subdued
compared with Biden’s slander. Conservatives might be forgiven
for wondering if Biden himself should be canceled next.

https://nypost.com/2021/02/14/leftists-cant-censure-nazi- analogies-after-four-years-of-making-them/
 

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