Despite having to resort to ever more ludicrous examples and tenuous connections, the left can’t get over its addiction to comparing the Trump administration to the Nazis.
New York Times columnist Masha Gessen drew one of the most outrageous and disgusting comparisons to date in her Sunday article, “I Look at This Country and I See a Stranger.” Gessen not only suggested that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was justified but also displayed sympathy for the suspect in custody for the horrendous crime.
The article serves as Gessen’s lament about the supposed death of free speech in Trump’s America in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s all too short suspension for spreading demonstrable lies about Kirk’s alleged assassin.
“President Trump is remaking the country in his image: crude, harsh, gratuitously mean. The ongoing attack on civil society, which his administration plans to intensify in the name of Charlie Kirk, is a part of this program,” Gessen wrote. “Civil society makes life more livable. The administration’s message is that the work of civil society no longer belongs in this country.”
Gessen apparently believes that “civil society” includes letting hack late-night hosts spread falsehoods in service to their own partisan agenda with impunity, allowing vicious criminals to run rampant on America’s streets, and standing by as illegal aliens trample over our nation’s sovereign borders.
While a man lies dead, leaving his wife a widow and his children without a father, Gessen frets about how a possible crackdown could affect people who identify as transgender, since the alleged assassin was apparently concerned about “trans rights,” engraved his ammunition with expressions linked to transgender ideology, and was reportedly romantically involved with a man who believes he is a woman. It should be noted that Gessen also identifies as transgender.
“The government’s official policy is that we do not exist — and yet, somehow, we constitute a danger to the country,” Gessen writes. Transgender people do not exist; mentally ill people exist. And those mentally ill people do indeed constitute a danger to the country when they gun down innocent schoolchildren and conservative leaders who refuse to indulge their delusional fantasies.
Most of Gessen’s column fixates on the left’s sense of victimhood, handwringing about the supposed loss of free speech (to say nothing of what the right has endured for years) and the encroaching totalitarianism of the second Trump term. Overall, it’s territory that dozens, if not hundreds, of other leftist columnists have already rendered well-trod, and it would be a pretty boring column if not for the historical example Gessen chooses to trot out to scaremonger for her audience. The example is so nonsensical that the only person who would take it seriously is someone who has undergone Pavlovian conditioning to burst into a state of delirium anytime the word “Nazi” comes up on screen or exits the mouth of a leftist talking head.
Gessen wrote:
I have been thinking of historical, rather than fictional, antecedents, in particular the assassination in 1938 of a Nazi diplomat in Paris by a Polish-German Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan … Grynszpan’s family, rejected by both Germany and Poland, was stuck in borderland hell between those two countries, along with some 12,000 other people. Staying with an uncle in Paris, Grynszpan was unable to help them. He decided to kill someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones. If the information released by the Utah investigators so far proves accurate, Tyler Robinson might have felt a similar desperate fury.
“Grynszpan’s action served as a pretext for Kristallnacht, ‘the Night of Broken Glass,’ a two-day state-sponsored pogrom in Nazi Germany,” she continued. “During the course of it, authorities rounded up nearly 30,000 Jews, marking the first time the regime conducted mass arrests and put people in concentration camps because of who they were and not what they had ostensibly done.”
Now, Gessen’s basic account of what happened is true. Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish refugee, did assassinate a German diplomatic official in Paris as revenge for the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, and of his family in particular. The Nazis also used the assassination as an excuse to launch the wave of anti-Jewish terror, more infamously known as Kristallnacht.
But, she is trying to cynically and maliciously equate the historical example of Grynszpan’s assassination of the Nazi official to further her own partisan narrative on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Gessen tries to draw a link between the two assassinations to drum up sympathy for Kirk’s assassin. She calls Grynszpan’s killing of the Nazi official “an act of despair” targeting “someone he saw as a representative of the force that was immiserating his loved ones.” She then very clearly suggests that Kirk’s assassin may have been motivated by the same desperate urge to protect a loved one: presumably his trans-identifying romantic partner.
The very invocation of this historical event is clearly meant to equate conservatives with Nazis and left-wing radicals with persecuted Jews, thereby framing any violence from the left as a justified defensive reaction to tyranny. Gessen’s initial implication is that political violence is justified if a minority feels existentially threatened by the ruling political force. But then she spells it out quite clearly near the end of her piece: Kirk was no better than a Nazi official, and the person who killed him should be seen as a tragic figure.
“The comparison seems straightforward: The person who was murdered was a representative of a hateful ideology, the person thought to have killed him was a deluded young man who may have tried to oppose that hatred in the most destructive manner imaginable,” she wrote.
There is no widespread persecution of trans-identifying people or leftists to the same degree faced by German Jews in 1938. By the time Grynszpan assassinated the Nazi official in 1938, the Nuremberg Laws had already been in effect for three years. Those laws, created in 1935, changed the legal status of Jews and stripped them of many legal protections and their rights as German citizens, practically mandating the widespread persecution of Jews in German society. And Gessen’s hysteria that conservatives will use Kirk’s death to launch their own Kristallnacht-like retaliation against trans-identifying people or other leftists has no basis in fact.
Gessen’s desperate need for trans-identifying people to be a desperately victimized out-group and for conservatives to be a maniacal force searching for any excuse to launch a genocide belies the fact that the left has laid the groundwork for the violence we’re seeing against conservatives.
There have been no riots or eye-for-an-eye reprisals from the right in response to Kirk’s assassination — only the appropriate application of existing law to go after the domestic terrorists who foment this kind of violence and a peaceful memorial to celebrate the life and faith of Charlie Kirk.
But the facts, and the real history, don’t matter to Gessen or other leftists. They’re more than willing to twist historical facts and events, even if those events are tragic, to suit their own political goals. Leftists and their allies have preyed upon the public’s lack of historical knowledge for years, and now they’re using it to defend the horrendous act of political violence that ended Charlie Kirk’s life.
Georges Clemenceau, the French prime minister during the final years of World War I, famously said, “War is too important to be left to the generals.” Likewise, history is too important to be left to the leftist radicals who would use it to justify our destruction.