Former Secretary of State and failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, without hyperbole or irony, seriously compared supporters of former President Donald Trump at an Ohio rally to Nazis in Germany before World War II.
During an interview Friday at The Texas Tribune Festival in Austin, Clinton was asked by interviewer Kara Swisher of New York Media’s Pivot Podcast about the stability of the American political system.
“You were secretary of state, you’ve seen failed democracies,” Swisher said. “Are you worried America is becoming one?”
Clinton then launched into a lengthy diatribe, treading the familiar ground of accusing Trump of being sympathetic to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Republicans’ “undermining of the rule of law.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI98TIm-r_I
“Look, I think that if Trump and his enablers had their way: that’s what would happen to us. Admiring Viktor Orbán in Hungary?” she said.
“Cozying up to Putin and being embarrassed, when he invaded Ukraine, that you couldn’t keep cozying up to him? You know, that is a repudiation of our values and of the kind of democratic principles that I think we used to believe everybody essentially took for granted right?”
She continued, regurgitating the false notion that the popular vote can or should bear any relevance in presidential elections under the U.S. Constitution.
“So yeah I do worry about the undermining of the rule of law. I worry about the tinkering and the efforts to, uh, make sure the Electoral College, no matter what the popular vote is, never goes against the Republican candidate.
Do you think most Americans see through Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy?
“I worry about the, and it’s no longer just the whiff of violence, but the appeals to violence that we saw on January 6,” she added, touching on the debunked narrative that Trump’s statements during his Jan. 6, 2021, Save America rally caused the Capitol incursion that day.
It was at this point that Clinton embarked on a disturbing variation of Godwin’s law — the idea that “the longer an internet argument goes on, the higher the probability becomes that something or someone will be compared to Adolf Hitler.”
She also undermined the credibility of her own argument.
“I remember as a young student, you know, trying to figure out, how do people get basically drawn in by Hitler. How did that happen? I’d watch newsreels and I’d see this guy standing up there ranting and raving, and people shouting and raising their arms. I thought, ‘What’s happened to these people?’
“You saw the rally in Ohio the other night, Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour, and you have these rows of young men with their arms raised. I thought, ‘What is going on?’ So there is a real pressure and I think I think it is fair to say we’re in a struggle between democracy and autocracy.”
According to Newsweek, retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, also compared Trump’s Ohio rally to a gathering in Nazi Germany.
“The crowd is similar to a Nuremberg rally 1936,” McCaffrey tweeted after the rally. “A lawless Trump in office in 2024 election would slide us into autocracy and deny our Constitutional safeguards. This is our greatest danger as a nation since 1860.”
Astonishing Trump language. The crowd is similar to a Nuremberg rally 1936. A lawless Trump in office in 2024 election would slide us into autocracy and deny our Constitutional safeguards. This is our greatest danger as a nation since 1860. VOTE. https://t.co/XVGK0yYKdv
— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) September 18, 2022
Trump’s Ohio rally ended with a rousing speech over a dramatic soundtrack. It was at this moment that some Trump supporters were recorded holding up their index fingers as the president spoke.
Trump’s rally in Youngstown, Ohio, ends with the dramatic music playing. Strange vibes. pic.twitter.com/wMQwAJ5QfU
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2022
Some like Clinton and McCaffrey have correlated this with the Nazi “Sieg heil” — or “hail victory” — salute.
Newsweek wrote that some observers suggested the salute was related to the QAnon follower motto “where we go one we go all” (studies show followers of the conspiracy theory movement make up only about 4 percent of Trump supporters). It also noted that “some speculated” that the salute “could represent Trump’s ‘America First’ movement.”
But whatever the origins of the action, and however much the mainstream media wants to play it up, the comparison of conservative Americans to Germans followers of Adolph Hitler is not only insulting and hypocritical, it’s deliberately deceitful.
If nothing else, the past few years have proven it’s the American left that’s more than willing to engage in political violence, it’s the left that believes in, and profits from, censorship of news and opinion. Whatever power anti-Semitism has in American politics, it’s wielded, and tolerated, on the left.
Those were all hallmarks of Hitler’s Nazis. And they’re hallmarks of the progressive left today.
Virtually any serious likening of American politics in the 21st century to the murderous evil of National Socialism in 1930s Germany is repulsive. But if Clinton, her party, and the mainstream media are determined to do it, they might want to look a little closer to home.
