Memo to Leftists: Worse than the Nazis is never a good sales pitch for gun control.
The gaslighting of the Harcourt paper on Nazi gun control wasn’t enough to deny their links to the left.
The far-left ruling class has always been in a quandary, they’ve obsessed incessantly over disarming the people, just like the Nazis and every other authoritarian leftist on the planet. Because you can’t control people unless you control their ability to defend themselves. But that directly ties them to Hitler and even worse eviscerates the ‘Nazis were far-right’ lie. Leftists aren’t about to give up their cherished dreams of civilian disarmament, so what can they do?
Their only option is to gaslight and deny Nazi gun control. They’ve done this in many forms over the years but one of the worst has been the 2004 academic paper entitled:
On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars
By Bernard Harcourt, a professor studying Social Justice and Human Rights (no bias there..) at Columbia University. The home of the recent antisemitic riots... peaceful protests.
We’re not supposed to notice that the Nazis acted just like the USSR, Red China, Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, and now Brazil in confiscating guns from their political enemies. It was the natural ‘progression’ of the Nazis attaining power, just as it is for every leftist on the planet. They all followed the same formula: control, register, and then confiscate guns. All for the ‘safety’ of the people of course.
We’re not supposed to notice that the left is following the same formula, but with the example of the Harcourt paper, they are in effect arguing that they are worse than the Nazis when it comes to depriving the people of their common-sense human rights. Is that supposed to make us feel better about their gun-grabbing obsession?
So, how does the far-left invert reality? Making down seem like up and left seem like ‘right’?
The Harcourt paper is a perfect illustration of the basic elements of the left’s gaslighting genre: a one-line editorial disguised as a headline, ‘Burying the lede’ in BS, and the scam of pushing opinions instead of facts from “Leading experts.”
One-line editorial disguised as a headline that pushes a lie without evidence
The one-line editorial is the most important part of the gaslighting genre. Very much like a fake story headline graphic in a prop newspaper in a movie or TV show – it’s the only thing meant to convey information, and the rest is just gibberish.
Keep in mind that in the case of the Harcourt paper, it is written in an academic environment, so the use of polemic language is probably a bit muted. Nevertheless, the one-line editorial has the attention-grabbing phrase: ‘Exploding the Gun Culture Wars,’ which seems to carry the promise of settling the debate with a distinctive ring of finality.
Except that the paper doesn’t explode the gun culture war as promised, but you wouldn’t know that until you’ve waded through 20-odd pages (depending on the copy you’re reading) of the author tediously and skeptically retelling the same point over and over. This tactic is known as ‘Burying the Lede’. In the case of these gaslighting genre pieces, they add BS for good measure.
‘Burying the lede’ in BS
This is the definition of the idiom Burying the lede:
In journalism, to open a news article with secondary or superfluous information, thus relegating the central premise (the lead, which usually occupies this position) to a later part. "Lead" in this sense is sometimes written as "lede."
The purpose of this is to give a certain false impression from the one-line editorial and first few paragraphs and then discourage the reader from dealing with the rest of the text. This is so they just get the intended impression of the story from the one-line editorial or sub-headline.
In the case of the Harcourt paper, the author goes into excruciating detail on tangential subjects no one cares about. It’s only after arduous reading most of the piece that the author finally gets to the point that he should have put on page one – but that would have ‘exploded’ (to coin a phrase) the whole point of the paper:
Nevertheless, if one reads the Nazi gun laws closely and compares them to earlier German gun legislation, as a straightforward exercise in statutory interpretation, several conclusions become clear. First, the Nazi regime reenacted in 1938 strict gun control laws and regulations that required licensing and reporting for the acquisition, transfer, or carrying of handguns, and for dealing and manufacturing in firearms and ammunition.
In this respect, the Nazis had in place stringent gun regulation, including strict reporting requirements. Second, the Nazi gun laws of 1938 specifically banned Jewish persons from obtaining a license to manufacture firearms or ammunition. In this respect, the Nazi gun laws were more restrictive than those under the Weimar Republic.
In other words, the Nazis enacted strict gun control on certain people – but we knew that already, before the gaslighting effort. On the same subject matter, The Federalist noted:
In Breslau in 1933, Jews were ordered to “surrender [their] weapons forthwith to the police authorities” on the basis that “Jewish citizens have allegedly used their weapons for unlawful attacks on members of the Nazi organization and the police.” This was a regular occurrence all over Germany until the Waffengesetz of 1938, which effectively banned Jewish firearm ownership in all of Germany (though this had been something of a reality for a while, as in 1935 the Gestapo had ordered no weapons permits to be issued to Jews without the approval of the Gestapo itself).
Again, notwithstanding all the strawmen that are designed to deflect from this obvious truth, even the Harcourt paper admits the obvious – but buries these facts – and gives other leftists free rein in making claims about The Hitler gun control lie in another classic case of a one-line editorial disguised as a headline that pushes a lie without evidence.
The “Leading expert” opinion scam.
Finally, any good piece of gaslighting wouldn’t be complete without the opinions that stand in for facts from what we are told are “Leading experts.” What is a “Leading expert” you ask? Well, an “expert” is anyone the left agrees with, and – shocker – they’re usually leftists. The folks that are leading in this agreement are – you guessed it – leftists.
In the case of the Harcourt paper, the author asserts that Nazis loosened laws for political allies. In other words, they had a two-tiered justice system – as the far-left ruling class is imposing on us now. Someone should tell him that the left’s following in the footsteps of the Nazis in another realm isn’t a good look for them.
One final note: Being worse than the Nazis is not a good selling point for gun control.
One thing you need to consider in all the machinations in the Harcourt paper and other leftist gaslighting efforts is that they are effectively trying to convince us that everything is okay because they’re worse than the Nazis on gun control. Well, Isn’t that their selling point?
Today’s authoritarian leftists are making the Nazis look like amateurs – and they seem to be proud of that fact. Do leftists think that’s a selling point for their authoritarianism?