I don’t want to spend the rest of my Saturday on this, but this is important to me, and I hope to get past “Someone is wrong on the Internet”.
Talking about one of the worst genocides in the history of our species, which happened less than a century ago, isn’t using it as a prop. RIght now, at this moment, when someone who embraces the exact sort of nationalism, xenophobia, bigotry, and appeals to fear and hatred as the man who lead the Holocaust is dangerously close to power – and not just him, but the people who feel empowered, emboldened, and welcomed into the mainstream of society by him – we have a moral duty to talk about it. Because if we are to ensure that it never happens again, we have to shine the brightest and clearest light possible onto the anyone who would even consider allowing it.
We all know that Donald Trump isn’t going to put people into camps and murder them, and I understand that for someone who feels strongly about the horrors of the Holocaust, bringing up Hitler’s rise and what he did to millions of people can seem like I’m trivializing that, or as you say, “using it as a prop.”
It’s impossible to talk about Hitler and the Nazis without people thinking about the Holocaust. As far as I can recall, I’ve never said “Trump is going to unleash another Holocaust.” What I have said, and what I will continue to say, is that he is a fascist who has no respect for the press, the Constitution, the marginalized and the vulnerable in our society. He began his political life by spreading his ludicrous Birther conspiracy, and he began his campaign this year by attacking immigrants, specifically Mexicans. He’s attacked Muslims, African Americans, and women. He’s incited violence against anyone who disagrees with him. He’s embraced and refused to disavow very loud and very public support from neo-Nazis, members of the KKK, and other white nationalists. He put the editor of Breitbart in charge of his campaign.
And I could go on and on like this, but my point is: he is doing many of the same things that Hitler did in the 1930s during his rise to power. Don’t take my word for it, listen to people who lived through WWII (including Holocaust survivors) and they’ll tell you that they haven’t seen or heard anyone in American politics who reminds them of Hitler until Trump, not even Goldwater or Wallace. The fact that Donald Trump is this close to the presidency should be appalling, sickening, and terrifying to all good and decent people, and we should all be working as hard as we can to stop him, and defeat him and his ideas in a landslide that unambiguously repudiates him and everything he stands for.
So I’m not going to stop talking about Donald Trump’s embrace of neo-Nazis, or how things he does echo things Adolf Hitler did, because I don’t want someone like that to have the amount of power that the American president has. I don’t want the people who follow and support men like them to be close to power, and I’m not going to be silenced by someone on the Internet who has decided what I can and can’t talk about, when I’m deeply afraid and upset by what’s happening in my country.
I think it’s admirable that Mr. Wheaton is being so articulate.