Whoever Yells ‘Fascist’ First Loses

 The shrill rhetoric of the Democrats and the corporate media is good news for Trump.

Two weeks before the 1972 election, in which Democratic Senator George McGovern challenged Republican President Richard Nixon, the former appeared on ABC’s “Issues and Answers” where reporter Frank Reynolds asked, “You have likened President Nixon to Adolf Hitler. You have implied President Nixon is barbaric in his conduct of the war and you have repeatedly used personal attacks in your campaign against the President. How do you reconcile this with your views that issues should be rationally discussed and that harsh rhetoric is counterproductive?”

When Harris and Clinton talk like this, they are not merely defaming Trump. They are purposely slandering the former president’s supporters.

Reynolds went on to suggest that the public was not enthusiastic about the tone of McGovern’s campaign: “There is a good amount of public opinion that you have used some of the most strident language of any Presidential campaign ever.” Inevitably, McGovern denied comparing Nixon to Hitler. “I have said that the dropping of several million tons of bombs on the civilian population of Indochina is the most barbaric thing that has happened since World War II, since the Nazis were in power and I believe that, I don’t retract that for one minute.” The voters were unconvinced by this answer or much of anything else about McGovern’s campaign. At couple of weeks later, Nixon won more than 60 percent of the popular vote, soundly defeating McGovern in a 49-state Electoral College landslide.

There’s a lesson in this for the Democratic Party and the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris if they have eyes to see it. It appears, however, that Harris and her surrogates suffer from some sort of learning disability where incendiary rhetoric is concerned. Last week, for example, Harris actually called former President Donald Trump a “fascist” during a CNN town hall and Hillary Clinton appeared on the same network to accuse him of deliberately emulating a 1939 pro-Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden.

One other thing that you’ll see next week, Kaitlan, is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939. I write about this in my book. President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists, in America, were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So, I don’t think we can ignore it. Now, it may be a leap for some people, and a lot of others may think, I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to say that. But please, open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country.

The irony is that such rhetoric is far more dangerous than any political rally. It is this kind of language that causes attempts on Trump’s life by unbalanced individuals like Thomas Crooks and Ryan Routh. Moreover, when Harris and Clinton talk like this, they are not merely defaming Trump. They are purposely slandering the former president’s supporters. It is no coincidence that Clinton devotes so much verbiage to “neo-Nazis, fascists, in America, lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany.” She was clearly equating MAGA gatherings with Nuremberg rallies.

And lest you think this was just random hyperbole that spontaneously occurred to Clinton, consider what Kamala Harris’s running mate told a Nevada crowd Sunday morning: “Donald Trump’s got this big rally going at Madison Square Garden. There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden. And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.” The deployment of such inflammatory rhetoric is part of a desperate strategy to “other” Donald Trump and his voters. Yet, as Bret Stephens writes in the New York Times, this is unjust and ineffective:

The politics of name-calling, which happens every time Trump’s voters are told they are racists, misogynists, weird, phobic, low-information or, most recently, supporters of a fascist — and, by implication, fascists themselves. Aside from being gratuitous and self-defeating — what kind of voter is going to be won over by being called a name? — it’s also mostly wrong. Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly are people who think the Biden-Harris years have been bad for them and the country. Maybe liberals should try to engage the argument without belittling the person.

This is good advice, but it’s difficult to follow when you’re losing. And, make no mistake, the Trump campaign has what George H.W. Bush used to call “the big mo.” The Harris campaign began with a lot of money, very favorable coverage in the corporate media, all the benefits of incumbency and a bump in the polls. Yet, somehow, neither she nor her advisors have been able to exploit these advantages. Consequently, the cascading themes of her campaign have descended from “joy” to dark warnings about the dangerous authoritarian tendencies of the Bad Orange Man. Yet Trump is clearly edging past Harris in the home stretch.

Meanwhile, this closing paragraph is being written an hour after the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden began, and the Nazis are conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, this is a genuinely joyful — and diverse — gathering of patriotic Americans. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe stepped up to the dais and joked, “Hillary Clinton said that this is a Nazi rally here today. Can you believe that? For the most anti-war president of my entire lifetime, and she calls him Hitler.” This exemplifies that venerable truism: “In any political debate, the first person to yell ‘fascist’ has admitted defeat.” This is good news for Trump.

https://spectator.org/whoever-yells-fascist-first-loses/