WaPo Runs Cartoon Depicting Republican Lawmakers in Totally Sick Way
Nothing says “free press” like partisan propaganda.
But that’s what the dominant newspaper of the United States capital city rolled out Sunday in the form of a nearly full-page editorial cartoon depicting the GOP as vermin under the helpful headline “All the Republican rats.”
And if that propaganda has disturbing echoes of one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous pieces of Jew-hating agitprop, who would expect an editor at The Washington Post to notice?
WaPo prints cartoon straight from anti-semitic Nazi propaganda.
Dehumanizes @realDonaldTrump supporters as rats. pic.twitter.com/qLRYb435UT
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) December 20, 2020
The scurrilous drawing, by Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, uses a summary to describe the American men and women it portrays as mankind’s most loathsome scavenger: “All of the state attorneys general and U.S. Congress members who collaborated with President Trump in his attempt to subvert the Constitution stay in office.”
It includes some better-known names, like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose crime was apparently appealing to the United States Supreme Court to rule on how several swing states must conduct their presidential elections.
It includes less familiar names who should be better known, like Rep. Trent Kelly of Mississippi, a man who was just re-elected in Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District by almost 70 percent of his voters, who clearly appreciated being represented by a former prosecutor and Army National Guard major general whose record, according to Military.com, includes two Bronze Stars and a Combat Action Badge.
It includes Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a man who gave an eye in the service of his country as a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan.
Clearly, these are American men who deserve to be labeled as verminous scum by the worthies at The Washington Post.
What Paxton, Kelly and more than 100 other Republicans have done to earn themselves the opprobrium of the capital city newspaper was defend President Donald Trump, a man who has spent more than four years infuriating the political establishment by his implacable determination to “Make America Great Again.”
As Telnaes and the Post higher-ups had to know, the use of “rats” as a metaphor is not particularly new to this century or the last one or the one before that. Humanity as a whole has a healthy distaste for the animals with a history of plaguing mankind even in peace, and growing fat on the flesh of fallen soldiers in war.
But few examples of the rat-as-enemy theme are as well known as the Nazi propaganda film “The Eternal Jew,” the 1940 monstrosity that liked the Jews of Europe to rats both polluting and feeding off Western civilization.
In other words, it’s an ugly image Telnaes and her newspaper opted for, with an uglier past.
Almost as disturbing was a great deal of the response to the cartoon on social media, where, according to the Daily Caller, the cartoon was The Post’s top-read opinion piece on the Saturday before it appeared in print.
Many, many of the commenters were openly supportive of the repulsive imagery in a “what’s the big deal?” kind of way.
Nazis ate breakfast. I doubt this means we can’t eat breakfast.
If they used something which did not symbolize the regime/party such as the Swastika then I am not sure what the concern is.
— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) December 20, 2020
Considering the fact that conservative Americans have been compared to “fascists” and “Nazis” on a regular basis since before Trump won the 2016 election just for the thought crime of disagreeing with liberal socialism, a Nazi comparison shrugged off so cavalierly is something to see.
Fortunately for the sake of the republic, there were plenty of others who saw very clearly what was wrong.
What we should remember: The first step toward eliminating a group of people is to convince everyone else that those people are not human. Beyond that point, mass murder becomes just another task.
— Apostic (@AposticMark) December 20, 2020
It’s the top of the slippery slope to sanctioning violence against the group who have been demonised
— peter o donovan (@peterodonovan7) December 20, 2020
It is the first phase of the fascists and genociders; dehumanize their political and ideological adversaries; to later subdue and kill them and they will not have a feeling of guilt for that; It happened in Rwanda when the media told Tutsi cockroaches
— alvaro mejias (@mejiasae) December 20, 2020
And then, of course, there was the logical question:
How do legal challenges to contested election results constitute “subversion of the Constitution”? pic.twitter.com/dogp865A3A
— Joseph Bevilacqua (@joebev49) December 20, 2020
As has been true since the beginning of the Trump presidency, literally nothing related to the still-contested election has taken place outside the constitutional order.
Trump and his team have been pursuing legal remedies for what they see as a stolen election. Trump’s millions of supporters have vented on social media, or demonstrated in the streets, but have maintained a respect for the law and their country that the summer of “mostly peaceful protest” proved is utterly lost on the left.
Yet The Washington Post sees fit to attack, smearing the president, his party and, by extension, millions of fellow Americans with one of the basest insults known, and one with a deadly history besides.
This is the newspaper that proclaims “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead. It’s catchy, but it’s not true.
What is true, however, is that journalism dies in the service of the state. The lickspittle media that disgraced the profession for eight years when they “covered” the Obamas by covering up Obama scandals, and chased the phantoms of endless, manufactured scandals in antipathy toward the Trump administration are swinging back into action in anticipation of a power shift in the White House.
Pure partisan propaganda never left during the Trump years, but if this cartoon is any sign, it’s going to be getting uglier than ever.
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