Would you kill Baby Hitler?
This isn’t actually a question about Hitler, it’s a question about you. Would you commit atrocities if handed a knife and furnished a reason? Do you believe that the ends justify the means?
For the last 60 years, Democrats and the media have declared every Republican running for president to be Literally Hitler, or a fascist, by which they mean Hitler.
From Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, it’s been 60 years of Hitler. The re-election of Donald Trump indicates that the strategy isn’t working anymore.
Keep in mind: Both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are 60. For every moment the Democrat standard bearers have been alive, their party has painted Republicans as a threat to democracy itself—to America, itself.
Is it any wonder they believe it? Is it any wonder they say it? What else could they think?
But as we learned in the parable of the boy who cried wolf, the threat doesn’t just have to be real. It has to feel real, too.
After too many false alarms, people stop rising to the occasion.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer learned this the hard way. The Harris campaign co-chair urged Democrats to repeat the line that worked so well for her in 2022: Abortion is on the ballot.
Problem is, it wasn’t. Because of Whitmer’s success two years ago, women and even teenage girls in Michigan have access to limitless abortion.
No matter how many women cried crocodile tears in TV ads, it wasn’t true that abortion was on the ballot in 2024. Worse, it didn’t feel true.
After 60 years of pressing the Hitler button, and it working, Democrats kept jamming it in 2024, but they got nothing. The media pulled every lever of influence it had, but the levers were jammed.
After 50 years of claiming abortion access is on the ballot, the Dobbs decision forced Democrats in Michigan and elsewhere to put it there. That these matters have been decided makes abortion less potent as an issue, not more.
An honest media would have said so. The media we have repeated the Hitler slur and said, “Yasss Kween,” on abortion.
The Democrat-media alliance is the couple that gets fat, gets pregnant, has an abortion, and files for bankruptcy. Some people only bring the worst out of each other.
This alliance has existed for 90 years, since FDR took office. But in the last 15 years, the arrangement has been formalized.
Under Barack Obama, things changed. If America was proud of itself after electing its first black president, the media sought extra credit.
Opposition to Obama was painted as racist, as old white men meanly presenting obstacles to the success of America’s first black president.
Obstacles and fights are the nature of politics. Features of our system. But under the oppressed-oppressor dynamic, the mean old white men were making life hard for the brother, and wasn’t that too bad?
The Obama years were the roots of the media’s “we’re all in this together” mentality. Back then, the project was the success of the first black president. It worked.
It worked so well that Democrats got overconfident. They decided to stack history upon history by following Obama with Hillary Clinton.
This was the second project.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to Clinton’s coronation. Trump came down an escalator.
Once he was elected, he called journalists “fake news.” This put reporters back in a familiar role: The aggrieved, with a tear rolling down one cheek. Victims.
And for a while, it worked. This was their star moment. Political reporters would not just do journalism. They would perform it.
CNN’s Jim Acosta was king of that mountain for a time, under Trump. There isn’t one now. Toggling between lapdog to Democrats and watchdog for Republicans creates bad habits.
After four years of reporting on Joe Biden’s ice cream choices, the watchdogs in Washington have grown lazy.
Advocacy and path-clearing are not the natural roles of a journalist. Those natural roles are muckraking, exposing wrongdoing, weighing claims against facts. That’s when journalism is at its best.
Faced with a second term of Trump, Democrats and the media cried Hitler. It didn’t work. No one was listening, nobody believed them.
The Democrat-media marriage is a failure. Together, they are less than the sum of their parts. It’s time for a divorce.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
