MRC — Which Loves To Smear People As ‘Digital Brownshirts’ — Complains About Nazi References

Alex Christy served up a little hypocritical outrage in an Oct. 31 post:

On October 7, the Jewish people suffered their greatest single-day loss of life since the Holocaust in a horrific massacre that should cause people to think twice before comparing someone or something to Hitler, the Nazis, or their crimes. Unfortunately, the news media only seem to apply that standard to one side.

Based on Godwin’s Law — which states the longer an internet conversation goes on, the likelihood that someone or something will be compared to Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party approaches one — NewsBusters analysts looked at all news programming on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC from October 26, 2022 through October 26, 2023, to compare how the media treats Nazi analogies on the right and left. (October 26 is Mike Godwin’s birthday.)

[…]

Joe Scarborough is tied for the media personality who is mostly likely to invoke a Nazi analogy. If Scarborough is the king of Nazi analogies on television, his queen is frequent MSNBC guest Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University professor billed as an expert on authoritarianism,

Of their combined 20 analogies, 18 were either about Donald Trump or the Republican Party in the general sense. One particularly ironic exception was Scarborough on May 8 lamenting a lack of gun control by comparing it to a challenge the U.S. has to overcome, like the Nazis. The other involved Scarborough going after Sen. Josh Hawley and Steve Bannon talking about disaffected males in his I’m-not-saying-I’m-just-saying way of speaking.

MSNBC presidential historian Michael Beschloss was a close third with nine Nazi analogies, all about Trump or Republicans.

[…]

In total, there were 192 Nazi analogies made by media personalities, guests, or political figures that were reported on. Of these,88 were attacks from the right, of which 80 (90.9 percent) were condemned during the segment. Of the uncondemned eight, three were recollections of how current Sen. J.D. Vance used to compare Trump to Hitler and another was Trump suggesting Hitler would support 2024 rival Gov. Ron DeSantis.

By contrast,104 were attacks from the left and only 29 (27.9 percent) of which were condemned during the segment. However, when one removes reports on statements made by Democratic-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on COVID-era mandates and vaccines, only 4 of 79 (5 percent) left-wing attacks were condemned.

Christy went on to claim that “Robert F. Kennedy’s history of anti-vaccine activism predates COVID, so his attacks were still considered to be from the left despite the media typically associating the issue with the right,” even though that anti-vaccine activism is largely a right-wing phenomenon and his employer aggressively and ironically promoted his presidential campaign when he was running as a Democrat in the hope that he might spoil President Biden’s re-election efforts, then effectively abandoned him when he moved to run as an independent candidate.

He also stated that the terms he analyzed were “Nazi,” “Nazism,” “Hitler,” “Gestapo,” and “Holocaust”; it’s also a given that he exempted his employer from scrutiny even though it too is a prolific hurler of Nazi analogies. The MRC’s favorite Nazi smear is the word “brownshirts,” which Christy conveniently didn’t cover. In 2023 alone, the MRC used it eight times to smear anyone who is trying to fight the spread of lies and misinformation on social media (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). For instance, in a May 3 post, Catherine Salgado raged against “eco-obsessed ‘digital brownshirts’ clamoring for Google to censor content that undercuts climate change alarmism” and approvingly quoted her boss, Brent Bozell, huffing that “Digital brownshirts are attacking conservative organizations for daring to have an honest debate on climate policy.” The MRC is so unashamed of the smear that “digital brownshirts” appears several times in the headline of the post.

The MRC is also not afraid to thow around the “Gestapo” smear. Mysterious sports blogger Jay Maxson was a regular spreader of it:

• A May 2021 post called critics of the Gadsden flag the “PC gestapo.”
• An August 2021 post complained about the “sports nickname gestapo.”
• A September 2021 post referred to sports governing bodies requiring athletes to get COVID vaccines a “vaccine gestapo.”
• A March 2022 post approvingly quoted Breitbart’s John Nolte calling tennis officials a “Woke Gestapo” for allegedly requriing Russian tennis player Daniil Medvedev to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine before being allowed to play.

Meanwhile, A March 2021 post by Veronica Hays called those who exposed old bigoted posts made by singer Camilla Cabello a “woke gestapo.” And Tim Graham whined in an August 2022 post that Republicans were criticized for calling the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago to retrieve stolen classifed documents a “Gestapo” move.

The MRC also enjoys likening people to Joseph Goebbels (which also wasn’t one of Christy’s analyzed terms). A May 2022 column by Cal Thomas falsely likened a proposed anti-disinformation offiice in the Department of Homeland Security to Goebbels’ “Nazi propaganda effort,” among other things. A Feb. 3 post by Nicholas Fondacaro approvingly noted that “The View” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin invoked it to attack Rep. Ilhan Omar’s “ridiculous suggestion that the U.S. and Israel were like Hamas and the Taliban, and how she used the same anti-Semitic tropes proliferated by Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels.”

Graham promoted Christy’s hypocritical work in his Nov. 1 podcast:

Alex’s study of a year of Nazi and Hitler analogies on TV found that not only did MSNBC “excel” in Nazi excess, but the top three abusers of the Nazi analogies were MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, and leftist historians Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Michael Beschloss. Overall, there were 192 Nazi analogies. Eighty-eight were attacks from the right, of which 80 (90.9 percent) were condemned.  

By contrast, 104 were attacks from the left and only 29 (27.9 percent) of which were condemned. But if you remove reports on statements made by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on COVID-era mandates and vaccines, only 4 of 79 (5 percent) left-wing attacks were condemned.

Christy joined Graham on the podcast to hype the study, but they did not discuss all times their co-workers went Godwin; however, he did unironically say: “The point of this is not to say my Nazi analogies are better than yours;it’s to say can we stop with this and apply one standard to it all.” That was followed by Graham unironically smearing Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler as “Herr Kessler,” which in the context of the discussion is effectively a Nazi reference.