The Media Research Center’s Alex Christy grumbled in a Jan. 28 post:
The Tuesday edition of MSNBC’s Morning Joe was equal parts outrageous and unintentionally hilarious as political analyst Anand Giridharadas mused that Trump Administration immigration enforcement operations are akin to “Gestapo raids” in “East Germany.”
[…]First of all, the Gestapo was the Nazi secret police while the East German communists had the Stasi. Second of all, if enforcing the law is Gestapo or Stasi-like behavior, what does that make non-immigration police activity? Meanwhile, those who are in the country legally should have nothing to worry about.
Intern Matthew Seck similarly complained that Juan Williams made a similar comparison in a June 9 post:
Williams claimed that ICE agents wearing masks to protect their identities is similar to a “Gestapo-type authority.” Ironically, this type of comparison was exactly the reason these agents wear a mask in the first place.
The fear mongering claim that ICE agents who do their job to deport illegal immigrants were the same as Hitler’s secret police force, who rounded up Jews and threw them into concentration camps where they were gassed and burned to death, was a radical and out of touch idea that creates a dangerous narrative.
These agents were being doxxed by radical X accounts and even by members of the government, for example Nashville’s Mayor Freddie O’Connell whose office “accidently” leaked the names of ICE and DHS agents. These doxxing attacks created an unsafe environment for ICE agents and their families.
Mark Finkelstein joined in as well in a June 16 post: “In May, the national media couldn’t seem to locate Walz ranting in a commencement speech at the University of Minnesota Law School that ‘Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets.'” Tim Graham repeated the complaint about Walz in his June 20 column, adding:
You can put “Hitler” in the search engine at PolitiFact and you won’t find them ever doing a fact check that says “Trump is not a carbon copy of Hitler” or “our immigration law enforcement personnel are not the Gestapo.”
A July 19 post by Mark Finkelstein groused that commentator Garrett Graff “analogizing ICE agents to Hitler’s Gestapo. So Trump’s ICE is a masked monster, unleashing Gestapo-like agents! Yup, just the kind of fair ‘n balanced expert right up CNN’s alley! No one ‘fact checks it. Daniel Dale’s on vacation.'”
This is all richly hypocritical coming from an organization that has repeatedly smeared as “brownshirts” — like the Gestapo, a Nazi police force — anyone who fights lies and misinformation online as well as critics of Elon Musk. Those libelous smears have continued:
- A Sept. 17 post by Joseph Vazquez lashed out at “the ‘digital brownshirts’ at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose entire modus operandi is pressuring Big Tech to censor views that don’t comport with leftist narratives on climate change, COVID-19 and other things.”
- An Oct. 22 post by Luis Cornelio gushed that “MRC President Brent Bozell branded CCDH a ‘Digital brownshirt,’ referencing the Nazi Party’s paramilitary force from the 1920s.”
- A Nov. 8 post by Tom Olohan cheered that “The chickens are coming home to roost for the “digital brownshirts” at the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)” because it was facing subpoenas from right-wingers in Congress, repeating that Bozell first applied the term to the group.
It has never been explained, by Graham or any other MRC employee, why “Gestapo” is beyond the pale but “brownshirts” is a perfectly acceptable and not at all ignorant, or why CCDH employees shouldn’t have to worry about getting doxxed by MRC employees. Call it a double standard.