Stella Morabito writes at the Federalist that a once-accepted standard of political discourse seems to have disappeared.
Well, “Godwin’s Law” disappeared rather quickly, didn’t it? Michael Godwin cultivated the popular notion that “whoever is the first to mention Hitler in an argument, loses the argument,” in a 1990s meme that grew in strength over the years, right up until Donald Trump was elected president.
Today? Well, President Trump and all our immigration officials are being called Nazis because they are enforcing U.S. immigration laws. Just ask MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, who compared them to Nazis because illegal immigrants (parents or not) are being separated from minors accompanying them during criminal processing at the border.
Many other commentators have noted that American citizen children are routinely separated from their parents by the U.S. justice system during criminal proceedings. No matter. Trump and border security are Nazis. You can also ask former CIA chief Michael Hayden, who tweeted out a photo of the Auschwitz death camp with the message: “Other governments have separated mothers and children.” …
… [T]he profound irony of Godwin’s law was that people engaged in the enforcement of political correctness through practices that look like those used by Nazis have used a made-up “law” to suppress the use of the term “Nazi.”
That changed when Donald Trump was elected. All of a sudden, by the early morning hours of Nov. 9, 2016, “Godwin’s Law” was tacitly but forcefully repealed by the anti-thought camp.