You probably have heard of Godwin’s Law:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
We now have Flake’s Law:
The longer a #NeverTrump Republican keeps talking, the probability of a comparison of Trump to Stalin approaches one.
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake hates Donald Trump. He considers Trump unfit, unkempt, and uncouth. We get it. Like many #NeverTrump Republicans, particularly those with who appear on cable news, Flake’s uncontrollable rage at the betrayal of him by voters results in frequent rhetorical excesses.
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake also is so unpopular in Arizona that he is not running for reelection, because he would lose to any number of Republican challengers, and in a general election.
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake is a very frustrated man, betrayed by the voters he apparently holds in such low regard.
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake this morning in an interview on ABC News compared Donald Trump to Stalin.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve also said you’re going to be giving a series of speeches on President Trump and his relationship with the truth and his relationship with the press, including one that I believe is coming this week. We’ve gotten some excerpts of what you’re planning to say, taking on the president’s comments about calling the press the enemy of the people. And I just want to read a portion of what we’ve had.It’s a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase enemy of the people that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade it’s use. And of course, the president has it precisely backward. Despotism is the enemy of the people, the free press is the despot’s enemy.What are you trying to do with these speeches?FLAKE: Well, I — what I’m trying to say is, you know, you — you can talk about crowd size and this is pretty innocuous if there’s a falsehood. But when you reflexively refer to the press as the enemy of the people or fake news, that has real damage. It has real damage to our standing in the world. And I noted how — how bad it is for a president to — to take what was popularized by Joseph Stalin, the enemy of the people, to refer to the press.And then now, today, you have authoritarians across the world using the term fake news to justify cracking down on their opposition or — or staunch legitimate debate. That’s nothing we should be proud of. And so I’m going to talk about how damaging that is. It’ll be I think on the same day, probably, Wednesday, that the president is giving out some fake news awards. And I — I just want — want the president to know that this has real consequences.
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake also plans on giving a speech on the Senate floor this week in which he will again compare Trump to Stalin:
Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, one of President Donald Trump’s harshest critics from within his own party, plans to give a speech on the Senate floor this week slamming the White House for its “unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press,” according to an excerpt of the speech provided to ABC News by Flake’s office.Flake will go so far as to compare the president to former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for his use of the phrase “enemy of the people.”“It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” Flake’s written speech says.“It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase ‘enemy of the people,’ that even [subsequent Soviet leader] Nikita Khrushchev forbad its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of ‘annihilating such individuals’ who disagreed with the supreme leader,” the senator’s speech says.The senator’s speech is referring to a tweet by Trump less than a month after he took office slamming the “FAKE NEWS media” as “the enemy of the American People!”
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake apparently believes that Donald Trump responding to a press that issues an unprecedented volume false news reports, considers its job to be to elect Democrats, and openly cheers for Trump to be removed from office, is just like Stalin, even though not a single reporter has been arrested or a single newspaper or media outlet shut, and Trump frequently has sit-down interviews and holds press conferences with the media.
Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake apparently believes that freedom of the press means freedom for the press from criticism.
In other news, tens of millions of victims of Stalinism could not be reached for comment on Republican Senator Jeff Flake’s comparison of Trump to Stalin. Because they were killed in the forced collectivization of the Ukraine, the forced deportation of entire nationalities like the Crimean Tatars, the enslavement of captive nations, the Gulag Archipelago system of prison camps, the Stalinist secret police purges of intellectuals, academics and anyone who criticized the regime, and other acts of repression that went far beyond calling the press names.
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