The latest crazy example of the so-called reductio ad Hitlerum involves — surprise! — a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Katherine Timpf reports for National Review Online.
According to one University of Wisconsin professor, presidential candidate Scott Walker and mass-murdering dictator Adolf Hitler are so similar that it’s actually “terrifying.”
“My grandfather, a psychologist, just walked me through similarities between Walker and Hitler. There are so many-it’s terrifying,” educational-policies professor Sara Goldrick-Rab tweeted on July 1.
It’s pretty clear that Goldrick-Rab is not exactly Walker’s biggest fan. In fact, she also declared that the Wisconsin politician is most definitely a “fascist” in a tweet posted on July 3.
As crazy as they may seem, Goldrick-Rab defended her comments as totally reasonable in an e-mail to the College Fix:
“If you reread the tweet, you will see that I stated that an expert in the field — a psychoanalyst with decades of experience — compared the ‘psychological characteristics’ of the two individuals, and that I was struck by his analysis,” she stated. “There do appear to be commonalities.” (Although the grandfather in question may not be a licensed psychiatrist, the ethics guide of the American Psychiatric Association bars such an assessment.)
