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The Unthinkable Consequences Of Donald Trump’s Racist Attack On A Judge (thinkprogress.org)

Although I don’t feel like it a lot of the time, I’m not older than the Internet; the Internet became widely known in the early 1990s, but it was first developed in the 1960s. One of the “rules” of the Internet that came into being before I first got Internet access in 1994 is a somewhat-famous bit of wisdom called Godwin’s Law, which became so commonplace that it’s now in the Oxford English Dictionary. Godwin’s Law states that the longer an Internet debate goes on, the more likely it is that one or more of the participants will introduce Hitler or Nazi analogies into their arguments; however, many people believe that a related corollary to the law, that whoever first introduces a Hitler or Nazi analogy into a debate automatically loses, is the actual text of Godwin’s Law. To be clear, it’s that corollary that I want to talk about in this blog, even though it’s not the by-the-book definition of the law.

Being that I was so young at the time — right on the cusp of the generation that first got Internet access when we were in high school — I got schooled in Godwin’s Law fairly quickly, and I probably deserved it for making wild and inappropriate Hitler and Nazi comparisons. Those are the things of teenage angst (and my generation had angst coming out of all our orifices), and they remain so to this day. Your parents may be jerks if they don’t let you smoke in your room, or vape, or get a tattoo, but that doesn’t make them “just like Hitler.” Ignoring how offencive it is to compare these things to the biggest genocide in world history, those kinds of grand comparisons fail a basic smell test.

There’s a lot to be said about bad Hitler and Nazi comparisons — photoshopping a toothbrush mustache on a politician you don’t like is nearly as prevalent as Rule 34 stuff — but there’s a danger in becoming so averse to making those kinds of comparisons that we don’t make them when there is a good, logical reason to do so. From the early days of Godwin’s Law, people have pointed out the problem of how to debate topics involving Hitler or Nazis if any mention of them is an automatic concession to the other person’s argument. Sometimes it feels like it’s not even fair to refer to Adolf Hitler as Hitler because, well, it’s unfair to the guy. I mean, sure, he was Hitler, but still, it wasn’t like he was Hitler, right?

One example of the problems inherent in Godwin’s Law came up a couple of years ago, when leaflets in a part of the Ukraine that was being controlled by pro-Russian troops went around demanding that all Jews register with the occupying force. The leaflets were denounced and denied by everyone who stood to benefit from them, but the incident raised a very real problem: If we’re timid in comparing actions to those of Hitler and Nazi Germany, even when the comparison is logically valid, then that could make it much easier for really bad people to do really bad things without running into the immediate and vocal opposition that any sane society would raise to such propositions in a heartbeat.

It wasn’t like Donald Trump came into this past week polling well with Hispanic-Americans — quite the opposite, in fact — and considering that his campaign-opening “murderers and rapists” speech is still resonating far and wide in America, it’s not hard to see why. When Trump claimed kast week that a judge presiding over one of the lawsuits around Trump University should recuse himself because his Hispanic heritage allegedly made him biased against Trump, though, that escalated his racial demagoguery to levels unseen in any major party presidential nominee (or presumptive nominee) in my lifetime, and it calls into question whether or not it should now be fair to compare Trump to some of the more extreme leaders of recent world history.

Trump’s comments are despicable enough, but they also fail on their surface from a purely logical standpoint. If we’re to take Trump’s reasoning as fundamentally solid, then the very next thing I should do is to declare that all judges everywhere are sleazy, venal, corrupt, baby-slaughtering, goat-raping frauds. That would then free me up to do whatever I wanted and break every law on the book, because then whenever I got caught doing anything, from jaywalking to mass murder, I could claim that all the judges I come before have to recuse themselves because my previous claims about judges — published for the whole world to see, right here on seanshannon.org — make them prejudiced against me.

I would never do that, of course. Not only am I not dumb enough to think that such flimsy “logic” would stand ten seconds in any court of law, but I’m just not that much of an asshole to think that I’m above the law. Remember, though, that Trump openly campaigns on committing international war crimes and his followers have a history of assaulting anti-Trump protesters. It often feels like Trump’s apparent belief that “the rules” don’t apply to him is one of his main drawing points, inspiring his followers to think that their frustrations about whatever they don’t like are justification for them to act like assholes as well. (Having said that, the recent violence that anti-Trump protesters have perpetrated against Trump supporters is, make no mistake about it, just as indefencible.)

With every day that passes, it feels more and more like this is becoming a country where many of us, whether because of the colour of our skin, or the religious symbols we wear, or how we express our gender, are at risk of being assaulted on the street, or in a grocery store, by people who have been conditioned to believe that our mere existence poses a threat not just to them personally, but to the country as a whole. By raising the stakes with increasingly vile rhetoric, Trump continues to foment a tide of hate that was already too big to start with, and is now boiling over far too often for the good of this country and its citizens.

Therefore, I would like to propose that we suspend Godwin’s Law for the remainder of this election cycle. Even if Trump has not yet said anything that merits a comparison to Hitler or Nazis — and that’s a big if, given Trump’s racial demagoguery — it feels like it’s only a matter of time before he breaks through that barrier. I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton’s (and I’m damn sure not voting for her), but even though I haven’t seen any comparison of her to Hitler or Nazis that I consider even remotely valid, I can’t rule out that possibility either.

It’s not like our political rhetoric hasn’t already descended to new lows, and bad comparisons to Hitler and Nazis will always be out there no matter what “rules of the Internet” we make. Maybe we should try to hear out what may be some good comparisons, if only as an experiment for this election, and see what happens, but I’m just suggesting that. I’m not about to insist that we all forget Godwin’s Law for the next five months without letting people decide on their own. I’m no Hitler, after all.

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