You might think the creator of inoffensive workcom strip Dilbert, Scott Adams, is just a normal guy. After all, his job is to draw three simple panels and make a joke about downsizing or Wally being a freeloader again. And you’d be wrong: He’s said so many crappy things about women, there’s a Tumblr that turns them into Dilbert strips. He doesn’t believe gravity is a “thing.” And now he thinks comparing Trump to Hitler is racist toward Germans:
Can we agree that calling the candidate with German ancestry “Hitler” is racist? It sure feels that way to me. I’m about half-German, same as Trump. And it feels like a racial insult to me. I’m not easily offended, but I don’t see any other way to interpret the incessant Hitler analogies directed at Trump. If he were female and Asian – with exactly the same policies – would we be comparing him to Hitler every five seconds?
Yeah, because if an Asian woman is pro-Hitler, there are no consequences whatsoever. Just ask Tila Tequila! Adams goes on to say that he’s not defending Trump’s policies, before proceeding to do precisely that by, for example, insisting that if you think Trump is racist toward Mexicans and the Arab peoples of the world, you must be racist yourself:
You might THINK Trump has said some ethnically insensitive things during this campaign, but that’s an illusion. He has railed against illegal aliens (regardless of ethnicity) and proposed a ban on Muslim immigration. I remind you that Islam is comprised of all types of ethnicities. Iranians are mostly non-Arabs, just to name one ethnic distinction.
Adams’ reasoning is garbage, and saying that comparing Trump to Hitler is racist is just plain dumb. If you spend any time on the internet, you’ll discover every politician, left and right, is compared to Hitler at some point. People were comparing Trump to Hitler well before John Oliver brought up his German ancestry. But he’s not wrong that comparing Trump and Hitler is a very silly and facile thing, historically speaking. Hitler’s rise to power started in World War I, the end result of constructing a political apparatus and personal army, while lying to the media about what was really going on before using that to take over a government weakened from within, by economic and diplomatic decisions that inflamed both anti-Semitic and nationalist sentiment.
Trump, on the other hand, is a game-show host who likes having his ego stroked. There’s much that’s wrong with Trump, as a candidate, and both his failure to reject the more violent and racist of his supporters and the failure of his more reasonable supporters to abandon him for that is a profoundly disturbing thing that will linger well after Trump himself goes back to selling his name to anybody who will cut him a check. But if nothing else, unlike Hitler, we get to tell Trump what we think of him, good or ill, at the ballot box.
(Via The Dilbert Blog)