Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Trump's a Hitler? Just chill, Jill

At the Emmy Awards this past Sunday night, Jill Soloway, creator of the TV show Transparent, made the imbecilic, exquisitely PC linkage, an action for which Jonathan S. Tobin, who is not exactly a huge Trump fan, has no patience:
As painfully obvious as it may be, it must still be pointed out that the “everyone I don’t like is Hitler” meme trivializes the Holocaust. It is possible for a public figure to say troubling things without being a Nazi. The sort of reasoning that depicts every instance of intolerance as the first step toward genocide undermines any sense of its uniqueness. In that sense, the promiscuous analogizing of the murder of six million Jews actually desensitizes the culture to the attempted extermination of a people. The only proper analogies to Hitler are instances of mass murder, not name-calling or proposing to build a wall along a border...
Furthermore:
To deny that there is any comparison between Trump’s vulgar pronouncements and Hitler is not to excuse the former reality star. But what those who chortled along with Hillary [when she called some Trump supporters "a basket of deplorables"] or cheer Hollywood Hitler analogies need to understand is that once you declare the other side in a political debate to be that far beyond the pale, you’re left with nowhere else to go. There’s plenty that’s wrong with much of what Trump says and what he purports to stand for, but the only proper response to Hitler and his supporters is war, not a political debate. Using the Hitler analogy is a way to shut down discussion, not a way to win a democratic election. All the left accomplishes by using this kind of rhetoric is to demonstrate their contempt for much of their audience. That is the sort of thing that will make a lot of the country more rather than less inclined to demonstrate their mutual contempt by voting for Trump.

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