Headline: A new epithet emerges for Parkland teens calling for more gun control: Nazis
If the shoe fits, or the armband: wear it.
For weeks, the Florida teenagers who became activists after the Parkland school shooting have been subjected to harsh treatment by many of those critical of their calls for more gun control.
Um yeah, if you throw your children into the middle of a political debate then they will be subject to criticism. They want to use these children as human shields. The idea is that these kids can say the danrdest things and only a monster would try to criticize them. That's why I have been calling this "Soros' children's crusade".
First, many of the activists were smeared falsely as “crisis actors” by conspiracy theorists and hoaxers on the Internet in the immediate wake of the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They continue to be lightning rods for some conservative media and politicians, despite some indications that they enjoy wide support nationally. Now, they are being likened to Nazis.
The Nazis enjoyed wide support nationally as well. This is where they lump legitimate critics with crazy "conspiracy theorists" to dismiss all critics, classic Operation Mockingbird.
Memes comparing the Parkland students to Nazis have circulated at the fringes for days, but on Tuesday, they seemed to find a wider audience.
Gosh, you strap on an armband and start sieg heiling and calling for the authoritarian removal of basic civil rights and people call you a Nazi, so unfair.
Alex Jones, the conservative host of Infowars known for spreading baseless conspiracy theories, depicted two of the most prominent students, Emma González and David Hogg, in a jarring video that spliced images and videos of them into what appeared to be Nazi footage.
Yeah, its his fault they are using the same tactics of going after the youth as the Nazis did. It's his fault there are so many similarities. The truth can be "jarring" I suppose. If it didn't ring true then it wouldn't be jarring would it?
González and other, unnamed, protesters from Saturday’s March for Our Lives, were edited into footage showing young people making Hitler salutes in Nazi Germany.
Jones’s staff also played a Hitler speech over video of Hogg speaking at the march. Jones said the images were meant to communicate the “truly frightening historical iconography that you cannot deny in these parallels of this youth march.”
“Authoritarianism is always about youth marches,” he said.
Mary Franson, a Republican state representative in Minnesota, also appeared to link the student activists with the Hitler Youth, in Facebook posts on Saturday that drew wide condemnation, according to local media reports.
After hundreds of thousands of people had marched in cities around the country, she shared posts critical of the students and their views on gun control that night, including one that quoted another person calling Hogg “Supreme Leader Hogg,” reports said. Then she shared a Hitler quote about how the views of youth in the Nazi movement were formed.
By "shared a Hitler quote" they mean "she linked to a page from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum", and by "then" they mean "in a separate post". Orwell would be impressed. Here is a excerpt from that page:
Shaping the Future: Indoctrinating Youth
"These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years . . . And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months . . . And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left . . . the Wehrmacht [armed forces] will take care of that."
-Adolf Hitler, 1938
From the 1920s onwards, the Nazi Party targeted German youth as a special audience for its propaganda messages. These messages emphasized that the Party was a movement of youth: dynamic, resilient, forward-looking, and hopeful. Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities.
-United States Holocaust Memorial Museam
No similarities there right?
The post was widely seen as a not-so-subtle commentary on the Parkland students. Franson later deleted the post and released a statement saying that she had not intended for the Hitler Youth post to be related to the others.
“I did not intend for one Facebook post about those who are pushing for gun control to be connected to another, separate post I shared from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about ‘Indoctrinating Youth’,” she said in an emailed statement. “I’ve deleted the post to clear up any confusion.”
"was widely seen" is a fun turn of phrase, I guess you could make that claim about anything, all you need is a few tweets of anyone saying whatever it is you want to say and then you don't have to take responsibility for saying it.
A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth
Joseph Goebbels
What's funny about this is they have Alex Jones pointing out similarities between these how these kids are being used and how authoritarians always use kids and some random state rep posts a link to youth indrcotrination and they assume it is about them, even after she says it is not, those things are unconscionable to the Washington Post, when the Washington Post regularly references Hitler in articles about the president!
These are real Washington Post headlines:
Trump’s Hitlerian disregard for the truth - Washington Post
The theory of political leadership that Donald Trump shares with Adolf Hitler
and here are 5 more times they compared Trump to Hitler