Dear Judd And Kumail: You Have No Idea What A Nazi Really Was

By David Harsanyi           

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

In September 1941, the Germans took the city of Kiev. On Hitler’s command, the new military governor ordered the round-up of all Jews in the vicinity and marched them north of the city to a place called Babi Yar. There, Jews were stripped naked and taken into a ravine in groups of ten. Once at the bottom their fate became clear. Among the cries of children (many already separated from their parents), they were made to lie down atop others who had already been murdered. German soldiers then walked across the bodies in the large pit and meticulously shot every man, woman, child and baby in the head or neck. Then the next group would be brought down and it would happen all over again and again over a period of two days — until almost 34,000 people were no more.

Babi Yar was only the third largest massacre of Jews during the war. But the killing of children — Jewish and otherwise — started in 1939, when German medical professionals were reporting any child with disability to the authorities, and parents started handing them over to special “schools” where thousands were eliminated using drugs and starvation. All of this before the wholesale industrialized killing of humans was in full swing.

Now, if you really believed Donald Trump or Kirstjen Nielsen or Sarah Huckabee Sanders are keen on engaging or endorsing this sort of behavior one day, or anything close to it, you’re a depraved coward for not taking up arms and stopping them. And the only other possible reasons for you to constantly compare them to Nazis are that you’re tragically illiterate on basic history or a hopelessly unimaginative and dishonest partisan — or maybe both.

The word “Nazi” has lost meaning over decades of partisan abuse. Because though there may be thousands of fitting historic comparisons for people to employ, that’s almost always the one they land on. So when celebrities like Kumail Nanjiani or Judd Apatow use Holocaust analogies to smear Republicans, we should probably just ignore them. Neither, after all, have any special insight into these matters and their hysterics are risible. But the problem is that tens of thousands of people who follow them engage in this crime against reality. And that’s a problem.

It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.

Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.

If Nanjiani had studied the Holocaust in college he would know that the changes that brought fascism to Germany weren’t really gradual. The pseudo-scientific racial theories that dominated Hitler’s thinking weren’t new, but his rise was abrupt and violent, and could only happen in an environment of indecision and lawlessness. It only took Hitler a few months to gain absolute power after becoming chancellor. After that, war was certain, and happened relatively quickly. While perhaps those points are arguable, it is inarguable that the six million Jews (and tens of millions more) were killed more quickly than at any other humans in history.

Moreover, by 1934 — where, I guess, we’re supposed to be in this silly analogy — the German government had already begun adopting dozens of laws and policies on all levels of government that restricted the civil rights of the Jews. Those Jews, who were German citizens and hadn’t committed any crime, weren’t contemplating running for president or creating PACs or starting businesses or taking their grievances to a high court, they were being thrown out of schools and their vocations and avoiding state-sanctioned violence.

Today, no law exists that targets Hispanic Americans. Not even immigration laws. Hispanics, in fact, constitute nearly 20 percent of the nation’s population. From 1960 to now the Latino population in the United States has grown from 6.3 million to 56.5 million. Jews were already streaming out of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, or trying. Here, the opposite is happening. People from Central America sometimes risk their lives to come here for a reason, and it’s not because they are seeking more racial purity.

The president’s scaremongering over MS-13 is overdone, yes. Politicians have been saying dumb things about would-be immigrants and crime for decades. But it doesn’t mean criminality doesn’t exist, either. It does. Drug cartels south of our border are real and dangerous and the Mexican state can’t stop them. There are American victims of that incompetence and corruption. The Midwestern mom who voted for Trump because she’s concerned about gangs is not a future Brownshirt.

If there’s one thing we know about Russians, according to the scholar Judd Apatow, it’s that they have a great affinity for Nazis.

Well, Barack Obama killed American citizens abroad without any judicial process. Obama was wrong, and he also had many authoritarian instincts, but he wasn’t a Nazi, or anything close to one.

If you believe that child separation is inhumane, that’s a complete reasonable argument. I do, too. There has to be a way to enforce border laws and keep families together. But as Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, also not a Nazi, explained, there was a necessity to detain some children because there is a humanitarian crisis at the border. Our own confused laws and lax border security precipitated some of these problem. During World War II, the Nazis kidnapped around 400,000 Aryan-looking children from parents across Europe. We don’t “kidnap” children. Most of the children we hold come to the border unaccompanied. During World War II, FDR forced 100,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps. We have detainment centers where children are temporarily held because a court says the state can’t house these kids with adults for their own protection. This needs to be fixed. It’s not proto Nazism.

More importantly, the American constitutional system — one that is meant to limit the power of the state over the individual — restricts the power of presidents who praise Iranian governments that threaten second Holocausts or North Korean regimes that run Stalinist death camps. Here, those wronged have standing to go to court, and do. Even our most authoritarian presidents — someone like Woodrow Wilson, who jailed political opponents — were in many ways limited by the constitutional process. We may have forgotten this over the past eight years, but the president doesn’t “rule” us. That’s something that those who spent eight years defending executive fiat might want to start thinking about. Bad things happen when principles dictating process are replaced by the vagaries of our emotions.

The truth is that our political debate and legal wrangling around the morality of things like the temporary child separation of illegal immigrants or abortion policy are only signs that we’re not like the Nazis, at all. Not yet. Outside a few dozen White Power yahoos – ones the media can’t get enough of even though in the real world they couldn’t pull together a beer putsch in Hicksville — there is no political space for fascists.

So please get another historical event to exploit because not only are you belittling the horrors of one of the great crimes against humanity, you also sound ridiculous.

The Supreme Court Gets the ‘Travel Ban’ Case Right

National Review Online

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

In sustaining President Trump’s so-called travel ban, the Supreme Court has vindicated “the authority of the Presidency itself,” not the sometimes overheated campaign rhetoric of the incumbent president, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote today for the narrow majority.

On the merits, Trump v. Hawaii was a straightforward case. The proclamation issued by the president in September 2017 (the last refinement of earlier iterations) was not actually a “ban” on travel. It placed restrictions on the nationals of eight countries that present extraordinary challenges for visa vetting because their governments are either dysfunctional or hostile to the United States — Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia (the last added when Iraq was removed from the original list).

Aliens have no constitutional right to enter the United States and, as the Court’s majority observed, the admission and exclusion of foreign nationals is a “fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” In that connection, Congress has enacted section 1182(f) of federal immigration law (Title 8 of the U.S. Code), which vests broad authority in the president to suspend the entry of classes of aliens — which includes setting conditions and time-frames on such suspensions — if the president unilaterally concludes that their admission “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Quite apart from the fact that Trump was thus acting at the apex of his authority (in an area of core presidential responsibility with sweeping statutory support), the travel restrictions were imposed only after an exhaustive process in which executive agencies responsible for visa-issuance decisions evaluated every country in the world for compliance with U.S. needs for information-sharing and risk-assessment. The majority noted that the twelve-page proclamation was more detailed with factual findings than any ever issued under the statute. The restrictions imposed were not based on nationality per se, much less religion, but on inadequacies in addressing risks. There was, in addition, a proviso that the “conditional restrictions” would remain in force only as long as the cited countries failed to address the problems identified. And, indeed, the chief justice pointed out that three countries — Iraq, Sudan, and Chad — have been removed from the list.

Under long-standing precedent, the judiciary may not second-guess the denial of a visa, even if an American citizen claims derivative harm from it, if the executive branch offers a “facially legitimate and bona fide” reason. This, coupled with the manifest care taken by the administration to tailor the travel restrictions narrowly, should have been cause for the courts to stay their hand. The lower courts did not do so, however, because of Donald Trump’s purple prose on the hustings and in the early days of his presidency, in which sensible concerns about border security and jihadist terrorism were framed in terms that could be construed as anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim. Clearly, as the barely controlled rage of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent attests, that is why what should have been an easy decision turned into a 5–4 cliffhanger.

As the majority correctly countered, though, the judiciary’s role in a democratic society is not to police political bombast or substitute its judgment for that of the voters and the political branches. There is no special jurisprudence of Trump, no judicially legislated exemption that denies this duly elected president the legitimate constitutional and statutory powers of his office. Federal judges do not have to like the president, but their allegiance is supposed to be to the law, not to the Resistance.

Moreover, the facially neutral proclamation refutes the claims of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant bias. The travel restrictions are not limited to Muslim-majority countries; they do not cover the vast majority or the world’s Muslims; the Muslim-majority countries that are cited were previously designated as problematic by Congress and prior administrations; and, as already noted, Muslim-majority countries have been removed from the list once the Trump administration judged them to have improved their compliance. Further, as the majority found, Congress did not intend, by barring discrimination based on nationality in the issuance of visas, to restrain the president’s power to limit the universe of admissible aliens. This claim is rebutted by both historical practice and common sense — as the Court explained, it would absurdly prevent the president from suspending entry from countries suffering epidemics, sponsoring terrorists, or on the brink of war with the United States.

Of course, it goes without saying that the president’s shoot-from-the-lip propensities make his tough job all the tougher. While the long impasse over clearly lawful travel restrictions was largely caused by judicial imperiousness, the president can’t seem to help giving his opposition plenty of ammunition. That translates into opportunities for his opponents to litigate to stall his policies. The Supreme Court got this one right, but only after a festival of idiocy lower down.

If Conservatives Set Aside Civility To Fight The Left’s Rude Provocation, We Will All Lose

By Georgi Boorman        

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Remember when Laura Ingraham tweeted about how David Hogg was “whining” after being rejected by a bunch of colleges, and the left, in a fit of outrage, immediately went after her show’s advertisers? I seem to recall folks on the right were pretty irritated at those pushy social justice warriors. But now that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant out of the owner’s “moral conviction,” some say it’s time to “go low” and “fight dirty.”

SkyMast, whose profile description says she’s been “resisting the siren call of Marxism for 23 years straight,” also tweeted: “These suppliers get to choose which side they come down on, sucks that they are forced into this position, but Red Hen pulled the trigger. Wars are messy and often times unfair. Such is life.”

Trying to blacklist other businesses who weren’t involved in this owner’s and his staff’s political stunt is not “evening the playing field,” or “making it a fair fight,” or “refusing to accept the terms of the debate” or any other hackneyed excuse members of the most resentful sector of the Right have offered. It is textbook bully behavior, leading to sad consequences like Red Hen co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson stepping down from a local volunteer board. Bullies are never fair. That’s why we call them bullies. And indeed, in responding as the left would, such actors aren’t refusing to accept the terms of debate, they’re signing their names to them with a flourish.

If you want to see what this “go low” mentality leads to, look no further Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters. To loud cheers, she suggested, “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

I don’t want to become that callous and divisive. I will never accept the premise that I must be a bully to win a culture war, and neither should you.

Yet it is jaw-dropping how quickly the right has weaponized the double standard to permit their side the same wrongs that have been inflicted on them. Seriously, are you really on board with telling socialists they can’t eat at your establishment, or buy your gift cards, or use your car wash? Would you rather not show them kindness and that you are not, in fact, a brainwashed bigoted monster incapable of hearing the other side or even being in the same room with them — which is how they very much would like to think of you?

Think this through. The left isn’t scared that conservatives will concede the rules of engagement. If they “roll over,” as the anti-SJWs would have it, fine by them. If they fight as the left does, then they’ve “lost the high ground” and their wholesome reputation, and they will be outnumbered and overrepresented in media, anyway. They will escalate and broaden the conflict, with the right merely lagging slightly their in-kind retaliations as they rationalize their behavior, until we really do find ourselves in a second Civil War.

And the devil would like nothing more than to see conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, lose all moral clarity in their desperation to MAGA. “Fight fire with fire” is one of the oldest lies in the book. Christians, at least, are called to do exactly the opposite in Romans 12: “Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all … if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Romans 1 makes pretty clear the Christians Paul was writing to were living in an oppressive and wicked culture. What Christians face today is not worse than what those early Christians went through. And yet still, they were called to live quietly and peacefully and to overcome evil with good, to bless those who persecute them, to “outdo one another in showing honor,” to “be patient in tribulation,” and to leave vengeance to God.

Jesus said to “turn the other cheek,” and he rebuked Peter for cutting off the ear of one of the guards who came to take Jesus. That is our example of how to deal with persecution. SkyMast might call that “rolling over.” I call it following the only perfect example of how to be human that we have.

If you are a Christian, or even a Jew who follows the Golden Rule to love his neighbor as himself, you don’t have a choice but to take the high ground.

Just to be perfectly clear, trying to manipulate innocent distributors does not qualify as “overcoming evil with good.” The apostle Paul just gave us a pretty good idea of what “overcoming evil” looks like, and it’s basically the opposite of over-dramatizing political slights and certainly the opposite of stooping to this level of bullying.

Perhaps patronizing these liberal places and being exceedingly polite and kind to the staff might be the best way to live out Romans 12 in this circumstance, and even to “win.” Yes, you might be discovered as a conservative, or as a person of faith. And then you’ll pay the bill, politely leave, and check your momentary indignance in exchange for your coat.

Buying from people who might hate you is a kind and gracious act, and refusing to gerrymander your world into red and blue zones is exactly what the left doesn’t expect or want. They want us all to pick a side to do battle day in and day out. No breaks, no safe spaces. You heard Maxine Waters — Trump officials aren’t to be welcome anywhere or anytime. Will that be the anti-SJW standard for the next Democrat administration?

That sounds exhausting because it is. One can only live on outrage for so long before his soul starts to ache for real human connections. For family, for community. For friendly waves and smiles and jokes with strangers. Perpetual outrage has them burning the candle at both ends. Yes, they’ll mold new candles out of more naive and energetic college students, and that cycle of indoctrination needs to be broken. But the fact remains, 24/7 outrage is no way to live.

Conservatives don’t have the institutional advantage of the left. Having big families is not going to cut it in terms of molding the next generation — people who really adhere to conservative values of freedom, limited government and Judeo Christian principles will always be vastly outnumbered on the national level. So if you think you can burn with zeal and “own the libs” on social media day in and day out, harassing suppliers and following lists of where you will and will not shop or eat, and do that until you die … think again. If you think that’s the way the right will “win,” please reconsider.

Beyond inducing exhaustion and spiritual decay, “let’s fight dirty” members of the Right (the cultural right, at least) would have us hurtling toward the extinction of real conservatism in any meaningful political sense. In any sense that it makes a difference outside tiny red, rural pockets, at least. By mimicking the left’s bully tactics and promoting political segregation, conservatives risk alienating and losing access to the reasonable center and center left — the ones who are more misinformed than true believers in the supremacy of the state and the justice of redistribution.

This leaves them to stew in Marxist juices (running through universities and mainstream media outlets) and shill for their statist campaigns when small government advocates desperately need people to be willing to hear what they have to say so they can gather allies at crucial political junctures. The farther they are drawn into the left’s ideology, the harder it will be to reach them.

But more than slamming the doors and windows shut on potentially persuadable minds by antagonizing and refusing to rub shoulders with members of the other political tribe, “going low” jeopardizes conservatism itself. We have long maintained that strong families and communities are the bulwark against state intrusion. We have long maintained that open and peaceable civil discourse is necessary to keep a free republic alive. We believe (or used to) in reason and facts over frantic reactionism.

Fundamentally, we believe (or used to) in a civil society where we don’t have to get everyone to agree with us or to shut up or to keep to their kind, we just have to get along and let each other be. If we abandon community for red and blue districts, if we alienate our own relatives or neighbors for voting a certain way, if we engage in a decades long shouting match to drown out the other side instead of patiently hear them out and responding with facts and reason instead of eyeroll emojis, if we bully and manipulate innocent third parties to punish political acts or statements and force conformity, if we overlook serious moral defects purely for political expediency, then we lose more than our credibility. We lose any hope of conservatism impacting the larger culture or federal policies. Members of the broader “right” who insist on “winning” will have eroded the very foundations on which conservatism rests.

Conservatives, especially Christians, don’t have any option but to “go high.” Because when civility dies, so does conservatism.