The Washington Post has joined the ranks of the notorious tools of tyranny. The recent publication of an editorial cartoon depicting members of Congress who support President Trump through legal recourse as vermin was reminiscent of the German press during the rise and reign of the Nazi regime. The Post crossed a line Sunday.
An essential element of implementation of the Democrat’s radical Left agenda is coercion. People simply do not want the government to ration, limit, or take away their rights. Historically, propagandists for the authoritarian regimes that always result from Leftist policies dehumanize “enemies” of the regime.
Editorial cartoons are meant to be incendiary, provocative, and to convey meaning within the limits of images without narrative. Using images of vermin to dehumanize people has long been a trope of publishers who want to incite animus and hatred against certain groups of people.
The Hitler-era press routinely depicted Jews as worms or rats to convey that Jews were less than human. Their purpose was to buttress the despicable arguments that Nazi’s used as justification for the genocide against the Jews.
When popular media outlets embrace the idea that certain people are not even human beings, they also embrace the consequences that follow. They, the media, are essentially softening up the public to accept the totalitarian measures, including violence, that invariably follows.
The combination of a hard-Left regime and propaganda that supports the policies of that regime can be incendiary. Adherents of the regime lose their inhibitions and moral convictions against harming their fellowman, precisely because they have been told that their political rivals are subhuman enemies.
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In the particular cartoon referred to, the propagandist depicts members of Congress as rats. Apparently, one is a rat for signing on to an effort to get a legal review of allegations of misconduct in the recent presidential election.
In Nazi Germany, Jews were depicted as beneath human beings, but in the world of Biden-Harris, it is supporters of President Trump.
The Left and its propagandists that castigated Donald J. Trump, his family, his staff and employees, his supporters across the Country and in Congress, are preaching unity. ‘Come into our fold,' they say.
At the same time that they urge Republicans to “get over the election,” they make lists of everyone who supported the president with a goal of canceling their careers, their lives, and criminalizing that support.
While advocating to simply let the presidential transition go forward, they continue the practice of ad hominem attacks on any who supported or continues to support President Trump—Hillary’s “deplorables” to Biden-Harris campaign manager’s, Jen O’Malley Dillon, “f---ers” comment.
WaPo and its fellow travelers on the Left must surely have forgotten how they treated then-candidate Trump, the Trump team during the transition, and the president’s entire four years as president. They resisted; they spied and abused our laws, and took every opportunity to try to delegitimize his presidency. No attack against him, his family, or supporters was out of bounds.
So, on the one hand, it is no surprise that The Washington Post would happily publish a piece that dehumanizes Trump supporters. On the other hand, it is worrisome that it would facilitate the rise of the mechanism for violence against opponents of the rising totalitarian Left.
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