The Hitler Police

Chalk one up for the algorithms.

The other day, YouTube offered me this reel, courtesy of Reason TV, of libertarian columnist/personality Kat Timpf positing the dissonance in the people who called Trump variations of ‘literally Hitler’ expressing a desire to empower the government to regulate speech, including hate speech.

What those people actually believe, I surmise, is that they want their government to restrict the speech of people they don’t like. As in, a Trump or other GOP administration should have no power to do anything, but a Biden or other Democratic administration should get to do whatever it wants, including speech policing.

They believe this, from what I gather, without shame at the hypocrisy. Unfortunately, as we all know, you can't swing a dead cat around the political sandbox without hitting a bucketful of hypocrites. Double standards, whataboutisms, logical contortions to protect one’s own while condemning one’s foes for identical actions, The Joy Behar Rule… you know it all.

Normally, naming AH in any debate or opinion is almost certain to derail that debate or opinion, because Argumentum ad Hitlerum is not only hackneyed, it subordinates rationality to emotion, and good luck making a rational point thereafter. As the Indiana Chapter of Moms For Liberty recently found out, quoting AH when complaining about indoctrination tactics in education kills the vibe. No matter that

He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.

mirrors

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

The latter, expressed by a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, doesn’t elicit any of the outrage that the former does, solely based on provenance. In logic and argument terminology, this qualifies as a genetic fallacy.

In today’s case, however, “they started it” is not only a schoolyard rule of etiquette, it can also be found in legal rules of evidence (i.e. “opening the door”). The authoritarians, in classic projection (as in, if you want to understand people’s deep-set inclinations, look at what they accuse their counterparts of doing), likened Trump to Hitler (after, in case you forgot, likening George W. Bush to Hitler.

Meanwhile, who is it that coerced Big Tech to censor unfavorable news? Who is it that spawned cancel culture and destroyed free discourse in education? Who created the concept of “hate speech” as a criminal act?

Which administration sought to create a Disinformation Governance Board? As memes and T-shirts across the Internet remind us, 1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

Social media, via Quora and other “canary in a coal mine” sources, show me an alarming trend away from liberty and the rights protected by the Constitution. People don’t like free speech when it proves inconvenient or politically disadvantageous, and have shown less and less hesitance in calling for its quashing.

To them, a reminder: Any rule you set up to give you advantage is a rule that can and will be used against you when the political pendulum swings the other way.

I reiterate: “when.” Not “if.”

I was recently reminded of the Right’s attempt at triangulating its way to a permanent electoral majority during the GWBush years. “Compassionate Conservatism,” an amalgam of Democrat-Lite welfare state and evangelical politics, was supposed to cement GOP power for years. We all know how that turned out. Government got bigger, and the Democrats won the WH anyway.

As for Adolf and his Geheime Staatspolizei (aka the Gestapo), we can be accused of Reductio ad Hitlerum in warning of a similar emergence in domestic politics, and we do risk derailing the argument, but “they started it.” Just as it’s easier to correct course before a divergence has had a chance to grow huge, it behooves us to look at where the path we are on will take us well before we get there.

Trusting the government to regulate speech we don't like, whether it be unsavory statements, “disinformation” (which is usually about opinions rather than facts), or “air time” given to other viewpoints, is about as stupid a thing as I can imagine. It will not end well, even if the trusters get exactly the government they want.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. — H. L. Mencken

Power seeks power. People who have power make it their first job to retain it, their second job to expand it, and their third job to apply it. Addictive as it is, it elicits the same escalation as other “habits.” As Saul Hudson and Jeffrey Dean Isbell wrote in Mr. Brownstone,

I used to do a little but a little wouldn't do, so the little got more and more.

The power to censor, once granted, will not stop where its grantors envision. It will grow, subsuming more and more topics and more and more people, until there is the State, and the people it controls.

Over the top? You might be inclined to think so, and I do ask myself that question when I blog, but everything is incremental, and today’s outrage is next year’s normal. The Overton Window, the frog in a pot, and Pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First They Came” poem aren’t merely theoretical musings.

Defending speech can take myriad forms. Pointing out the incoherence in demanding speech control after calling Bush and Trump “Hitler” is a pretty good one.