For the eight years that Barack Obama was in the White House, we listened to an endless parade of right-wing critics compare him to Hitler and regularly equate the Democrats and the progressive movement with Nazis. Now that President Trump is in office, right-wing activists are aghast that anyone would dare to compare the president to Hitler, with E.W. Jackson using his radio program yesterday to warn that doing so is a direct threat to lives of Trump’s supporters and an effort to start a civil war.
“They’re calling us supporters of Hitler because they say that Donald Trump is like Hitler, which is one of the most preposterous things I have ever heard in my life,” Jackson complained. “You have got to have BBs for brains to say something like that, you really do. You really do. You’ve got to be a nutcase.”
“To say that President Trump is to be likened to Hitler is to say that all of those who voted for him—and I’m one of them, I voted for him—are so evil that we support Adolf Hitler,” he added. “If you support Donald Trump and Donald Trump is Hitler, then that means you support Hitler. If you support Donald Trump and Donald Trump is a rabid racist, then that means you’re a rabid racist. If you support Donald Trump and Donald Trump is the epitome of evil, that means that you are the epitome of evil … Are these people trying to precipitate a civil war? Are they trying to stir people up to commit violence against the president, against those of us who support him?”
“If you really believe that Donald Trump is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler and those of us who support him are the equivalent of the followers of Hitler, do we need to be killed too?” Jackson asked. “Is that what the implication is? That we should die, that we should be murdered? I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or overly-dramatic, but when you use that kind of analogy, you use that kind of imagery, you’ve got to play it out to its logical conclusion.”
Jackson, of course, has a long history of demonizing his political opponents, asserting that they are in league with Satan, declaring that Democrats are promoting an Antichrist agenda because they are “anti-Christian, anti-Bible, anti-family, anti-life, and anti-God,” and saying that gays and lesbians are “perverted,” “degenerate,” “spiritually darkened” and “frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally” who will never be satisfied until they drag the entire nation to hell with them.
Jackson defended his own use of such dehumanizing rhetoric during his broadcast on the grounds that Obama and those like him “are so godless in their policies and are so anti-Christian and anti-biblical … that they pave the way for the coming of the Antichrist.”
So, in Jackson’s view, likening Trump to Hitler is an outrageous smear that puts conservatives in fear for their lives, but repeatedly asserting that Democrats are literally in league with Satan and are paving the way for the Antichrist is perfectly acceptable.
