WATCH: Devin Nunes whines about Stephen Colbert mocking him — then calls it ‘dangerous for the country’: House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) lashed out at “the left” on Fox News Saturday after being mocked by CBS The Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Friday night. Colbert derided the Fresno Republican as a “failed clone of Steve Carrell” during a trip to DC investigate the dueling memos issued by Intel Chair …
.@DevinNunes: “We have a media that pretty much refuses to cover this issue at all. We have serious abuses that occurred in the FISA court against the Trump campaign.” #Cavuto pic.twitter.com/zvhMSu2LSd
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 3, 2018
During the interview, in response to a question about being mocked by Stephen Colbert, Nunes said,
“Yeah well, I think this is the danger that we have in this country, this is an example of it.”
Whoa, wait a minute…
When politicians start referring to comedians as “the danger we have in this country,” we should all be afraid.
We should all be very afraid.
Because if Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous quote was entirely accurate, it would have begun:
“First they came for the comedians, and I said nothing, because I thought it disrespectful and unpatriotic to ridicule the president.”
For Niemöller was, in the beginning, a conservative nationalist who supported Hitler’s rise to power, thinking he would make Germany great again. Only too late did he realise his error.
The silencing of criticism was an early goal in the Nazi playbook. Werner Willikens, state secretary in the Prussian Agriculture Ministry, in February 1934 declared it was “the duty of everybody to try to cooperate with the Führer.” (1)
Just four years later, in 1938, the Nazis had moved from simply declaring it was everyone’s duty to cooperate with the Fuhrer to creating “conditions of intimidation and repression for those who might dare to challenge official propaganda, when the only public opinion which existed was that of the regime’s agencies.” (2)
Only by making criticism unthinkable, unpatriotic, and even dangerous to the security of the country could the Nazis embark on what otherwise would have been nearly laughable national policies in the early 1930s.
And only the normalisation of this lack of criticism kept Hitler from being laughed off the stage as his speeches became more and more self-aggrandising and messianic.
If everyone else sees the luxurious wonder of the emperor’s new clothes, who are we to question their existence?
1. Spiegel Online: “The Fuhrer Myth: How Hitler Won Over the German People”
2. Ibid