This week’s shoot-up of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in San Antonio is just the latest in a series of such attacks. Last month a self-described antifa member with a rifle and incendiary devices tried to blow up an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington.
These attacks are occurring during a time when Democrat politicians and media personalities are continually comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, ICE officers to Nazi guards and border detention facilities to “concentration camps” where children are “locked in cages” and forced to “drink from toilets.”
Which raises a big question currently being debated: To what extent is such dishonest, defamatory – and frankly insane – rhetoric responsible for the ensuing violence that often occurs?
After the San Antonio attack, ICE spokesperson Nina Pruneda said this:
“Political rhetoric and misinformation that various politicians, media outlets and activist groups recklessly disseminate to the American people regarding the ICE mission only serve to further encourage these violent acts. ICE officers put their lives on the line each and every day to keep our communities safe. This disturbing public discourse shrouds our critical law enforcement function and unnecessarily puts our officers’ safety at risk.”
While some blame such vile rhetoric for politically motivated violence, others say the only one to blame is the perpetrator. Both obviously have a point. But I suggest we look at the question through a different prism.
Most people understand that the current super-heated rhetoric being dished out by Democratic Party presidential candidates and others just amounts to cynical political calculation – intended to help Democrats regain the White House and the Senate, and therefore the courts, next year.
Yet, there is a very clear, if sometimes unspoken, additional message inherent in such rhetoric. Stay with me here:
* Call the president names – “he’s a racist,” “a bigot” or “xenophobe” – and the unspoken but clear message is: “He’s a person of bad character, unworthy of being president, and must be defeated at the ballot box next year.”
* Call the president a criminal – “he colluded with the Russians,” “obstructed justice” or “cheated on his taxes” – and the unspoken but clear message is: “He is guilty of impeachable offences and must be removed from office by Congress, and then criminally prosecuted once he’s out of office.”
* But what about continually calling the president another Adolf Hitler, a genocidal monster who murdered 11 million people?
This utterly deranged comparison started back in 2016, when, as this writer reported, no fewer than five different Washington Post writers likened Trump to Hitler during the run-up to the election. Today, the drumbeat has grown ever more brazen and hardcore, with recent examples including CNN host Don Lemon comparing Trump to Hitler on-air and Democrat presidential candidate “Beto” O’Rourke hysterically likening the Trump administration to “the Third Reich.”
Watch Beto O’Rourke compare Donald Trump’s presidency to Hitler’s Third Reich:
Now, ask yourself honestly: If you were a German citizen living in Germany during the Third Reich, what would be the only truly moral response to Adolf Hitler?
We all know the answer.
There were at least 16 different plots to assassinate Hitler, including most famously “Operation Valkyrie” (the so-called “20 July Plot”), which was made into a blockbuster movie starring Tom Cruise as the heroic German army officer, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. Even the revered Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged by German authorities for his alleged role in this particular plot. The people who attempted to assassinate Hitler – to slay a vicious criminal psychopath, to stop a genocide, to end a terrible war – are rightly regarded, to this very day, all over the world, as patriots and heroes.
That, whether consciously or not, is the actual message that today’s reckless pretenders – whether they are pretend journalists desperately vying for ratings or pretend statesmen desperately vying to become leader of the free world – are broadcasting every day.
So don’t be surprised by the continual stream of unhinged characters from the left who fancy themselves as heroes of “the Resistance,” attempting to carry out bombing missions on ICE facilities (which they see as Nazi concentration camps) or – God forbid – aspiring to become a modern-day Claus von Stauffenberg by turning their sights onto the president of the United States.
After all, they are constantly reassured, he’s Hitler.
