There’s an odd reality-distorting field that surrounds supporters of Donald Trump’s Republican campaign for President. They’re able to make wildly divergent claims of truth without fretting about the contradictions.
So it is with their rants about “political correctness”. They claim to be against political correctness, but approve of Donald Trump’s efforts to completely censor large parts of the Internet, and to sue people for libel just for disagreeing with him.
Then there’s their allergic reaction to comparisons between Trump and Hitler. They accuse liberals of being “politically correct” for asking that women, African-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims not be barraged with slurs. Then they turn around and declare their own speech laws, insisting that no one should be allowed to compare Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.
A Trump fan named Bob Parker took a trip down this weird, twisted avenue of right wing justification today. He was engaged in a debate on Twitter with Horace Bloom, author of the book Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler: Making A Serious Comparison. Parker was defending Donald Trump, insisting that it’s just not fair to compare Trump to Hitler. That’s when he posted this message:
“You are trying to compare him to the modern day boogieman,” Parker said, then wrote that, “Hitler wasn’t even as bad as Hitler.”
Whoah. Let’s break this down.
First of all, Adolf Hitler is not a modern day boogieman. A boogieman is a mythical monster that does not exist. A boogieman is make believe – something that people just make up to frighten other people.
Adolf Hitler was not a boogieman. He existed. He was real. Bob Parker is out of touch with the facts for suggesting otherwise.
Secondly, Parker is just plain wrong in his claims that Adolf Hitler wasn’t as bad as people say he was. He committed mass murder, and torture, and launched nearly the entire world into a war that had no point but to support Hitler’s outrageously racist claims of Aryan superiority.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how very bad Adolf Hitler was. He set up prisons in which prisoners were starved to death, and used as guinea pigs for extremely painfu unnecessary medical experiments.
Bob Parker is arguing that there’s a version of Adolf Hitler that we all have in our heads that’s just too judgmental, too negative… kind of like the justifications we’re hearing now that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge Donald Trump’s outreach efforts to gain the support of white supremacists.
Merely by defending Donald Trump while suggesting that Adolf Hitler was only a mythical character who wasn”t really all that bad, BobParker has unintentionally shown us why comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler are important to consider. He’s gone even farther, though. Looking into the @RealBobParker Twitter account, we see that Bob Parker has been in contact with David Duke, and has been promoting materials related to a dodgeball event called Ballocaust at Tooele High School in Utah, where students forwarded messages such as “Your team about to fall harder than Anne Frank.”
Bob Parker’s tweet to David Duke:
This is the kind of person who is telling Americans that it’s not justified to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Update: A NeoNazi supporter of Donald Trump has now responded to Horace Bloom, telling him that it’s “time to oven some Jews”. This is the ugly bigotry that Donald Trump’s rage has made legitimate within Republican circles.
