Jerry Seinfeld’s old joke about the Chinese “really hangin’ in there” with the chopsticks, more than 1,500 years after the advent of the fork, applies well to the Democrats and their liberal lapdogs in the media: They are really hanging in there with the Nazi card.
The latest effort came in the embittered response by Democrats to the rousing speech our newly elected Vice President JD Vance delivered to stunned European leaders at the 61st Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Vance warned the crowd that Russia and China are less worrisome than “the threat from within,” as governments in the United Kingdom and across Europe rein in free speech and punish their citizens for posting supposed hate speech on X and other platforms.
This was a courageous defense of the God-given, First Amendment-guaranteed human right to freedom of speech that is the bedrock of the United States. Yet Democrats acted as if our vice president had burped in church.
“The mood … was one of absolute shock,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), who was in the audience, told MSNBC’s Ari Melber. Americans who were present were “embarrassed,” he said, adding, “And what’s most dangerous about this is what one Republican adviser told me after the speech. … He said to me, ‘Seth, if you listen, listen carefully. It’s actually much deeper and darker.’ He was talking about ‘the enemy within.’ This is some of the same language that Hitler used to justify the Holocaust.”
In fact, the specific sound bite, “the enemy within,” is sometimes associated with the Holocaust but was also used by the discredited demagogue Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s to perpetrate the Red Scare. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. released a book with the same title in 1960, using it to describe organized crime and the Teamsters.
Unembarrassed by this bad-faith attack, Moulton went for the JD jugular: “Just after the speech, Vice President Vance went to the old Nazi Party headquarters in Munich to meet with the leader of the modern-day neo-Nazi Party in Germany. So what was bad at Munich could actually get worse. This is a very, very dangerous administration.”
The truth is much more mundane: Vance met with the leader of the Alternative for Germany party at the Westin Grand hotel. The German government has labeled this opposition party as a “suspected extremist” organization, but the Biden administration demonized MAGA in a similar vein, leaving one to guess that this extremism may be greatly exaggerated.
The Democrats and their media acolytes were similarly feckless in trying to play the Nazi card against Department of Government Efficiency leader Elon Musk, accusing him of offering up a “Heil Hitler!” salute onstage at a Trump rally after the inauguration. Cue contrived controversy from the media (see CNN anchor Erin Burnett) and dimwit Democrats such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Musk wore a medallion around his neck for over a year in honor of the Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. He met twice with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and called for the annihilation of the terrorist group. Musk has said he is pro-Jewish, with a Jewish name (in Hebrew, “Elon” means “oak tree”).
MARCO RUBIO DEFENDS JD VANCE’S LECTURE ON FREE SPEECH
Thus, Musk responded to this fake flap with derision, posting on X: “It was astonishing how insanely hard legacy media tried to cancel me for saying ‘my heart goes out to you’ and moving my hand from my heart to the audience. In the end, this deception will just be another nail in the coffin of legacy media.”
Score that 1-0 for Musk. In the rough and tumble on social media, Musk gives as good as he gets. Playing the Nazi card against Team Trump is losing all of its power. The Democrats, oddly, have yet to learn this.
Dennis Kneale is the host of the podcast What’s Bugging Me on Ricochet and author of The Leadership Genius of Elon Musk, just out from HarperCollins.
