I saw the image above posted in a Note by my wonderful and insightful fellow SubStacker
and got a kick out of it. I started to compose a response to it in the comments and found myself prattling on for several paragraphs. So, rather than posting a superfluously and obnoxiously long comment, I thought I’d write my thoughts in another incredibly obnoxious essay. Thank you Pallavi for the inspiration, you should all go & Subscribe to her right now. Go on, I’ll wait!The meme that sparked my interest made me laugh and the comment I was about to post would have started with a line akin to…
‘Hahaha. Correct, this is basically Left Wing politics in the social media age in a nutshell’.
This, I believe, is true. There is room for debate, of course, as it by no means is worthy of being deemed axiomatic. But I, like many, view this as a truism, so I won’t spend too long justifying it.
Many have lamented the egregious use of terms like ‘Far Right’, ‘Fascist and ‘Nazi’ being levied at YouTube film critics who disliked a project that heavily messaged a subservience to hard Left identity politics. Often these allegations were accompanied by the word ‘bigot’. This is not exclusive to the domain of The Critical Drinker of course, as seemingly in every walk of life, someone is calling someone else these terms in response to legitimate criticism of art, politics, culture, etc. Douglas Murray wrote about this phenomena expertly here:
The media in the US and the American Left spent years calling Donald Trump all of these terms; not to mention extending these allegations towards his supporters, those who had the audacity to exercise their democratic rights and vote for him. Some even went as far as to overtly call hm Hitler on live television or mock up images of him as a dictator, invoking imagery from Right Wing authoritarian regimes from history.
In the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, this rhetoric was obviously exposed as dangerous. In the context of history, in retrospect, if someone had successfully attempted to assassinate Hitler before he rose to power, we would naturally see it as a good thing. Millions of lives might have been spared.
So if someone had become convinced that Trump WAS tantamount to Hitler, then it would logically follow that killing him would be not just be justifiable, but morally right.
That’s why these extreme comparisons are careless, irresponsible and dangerous when they are broadcast by public figures with a large profile via outlets with a wide reach.
But I have also noticed that Right Wing commentators are starting to do the same thing in the opposite direction too. I recommend
’s article on what he calls ‘Woke Right’ for a comprehensive look at how they have started to adopt the tactics of their sworn enemy.They have seemingly done this a lot recently, whilst simultaneously and conveniently forgetting the sage advice found in the book that many of them claim to be sacred to them; ‘Two wrongs do not make a right’.
Often, they are starting to call everyone on the Left ‘Communist’ and such. Or calling the Prime Minister ‘Keir Stalin’, ‘Keir Jung Un’ or (my favourite) ‘Keir StarMao’, etc. Or they are making mock ups of Kamala Harris dressed in historical Communist dictator uniforms or invoking Stalinist imagery.
Full disclosure, I make these kind of jokes among my friends all the time (in both directions) and here on SubStack Notes.
I will joke that Trump is a Fascist dictator in waiting or that he is going to need to raise a lot of money to pay for all the concentration camps that he is going to have to build.
Conversely, I constantly make jokes about how I’m gonna end up in a Gulag for restacking an ex-Muslim’s SubStack, or how George Orwell’s 1984 seems to be playing out daily on the streets of Britain.
But these are jokes in the domain of casual conversation and should be received as such. I think when this kind of rhetoric is pronounced loudly on wide reaching platforms by influential public figures with wide audiences is desperately ill-advised.
President Biden said in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on Trump's life that there was a need to ‘turn down the temperature’ of political discourse in the USA. Whether he honestly meant it is open to debate of course, as is whether or not the Democratic Party is practising what it preaches.
But regardless of how much authenticity existed in his statement, President Biden was correct. We all need to cool our jets with this kind of stuff.
If you are on the Left, not everyone you disagree with is a Nazi.
If you are on the Right, not everyone you disagree with is a Communist.
If you’re in the middle like me, then God help you.
We need to find a way past this binary, tribalistic thinking, and rediscover the capacity for nuanced discourse. If we don’t, then there is no simpler way to put this… We are all truly fucked.
Thanks for reading,
The Common Centrist
I agree in principle, but I see this time as different. The parallels with early 1940s Germany have been alarming me since 2016 and the signals have only gotten clearer. I agree we shouldn't demonize the other side, but when actual demons are involved, it's a call to arms. The Left started with cultural war with their disdain, but the Right answered with hate and blatant lies. There's a very clear moral evaluation to be had here.
When will people learn 😩