Hate is hate, according to the Second Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, who participated in a live interview in front of a left-leaning audience at SXSW earlier this week.
Now to be fair, none of you have a clue who this guy really is or what he thinks, and certainly, the 2nd spouse is not usually a go-to for policy advice. The last Veep spouse was Karen Pence, who kept a pretty low profile and focused on her day job as a teacher and usually only served in an official capacity in appearances with her husband at state dinners or speeches, or with then-First Lady Melania Trump for some military charity work. But Karen Pence wasn’t there to set policy. In fact, the last Second Spouse to even have the credentials to talk policy, though rarely did, is Lynne Cheney, who ran the National Endowment for the Humanities in Ronald Reagan’s administration, and was a senior fellow in education and culture at the American Enterprise Institute. She could have a conversation about policy and be taken seriously as a player.
Emhoff was a keynoter at SXSW this week, and sat down on stage with former Biden administration official and now-MSNBC host Symone Sanders. Among the many pearls of wisdom he offered, this clip surfaced.
Now I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that any time you compare anything or anyone to Hitler or Hitler-era Germany, you’ve got a weak case to make, number one, and you’re insidiously minimizing the singular evil that was Nazi Germany and their final solution that resulted in the extermination of millions of Jews in Europe. There simply is no comparison. None. Godwin’s law was not formulated in 1990 by author and attorney Mike Godwin with a subclause in it that says, “but if you’re a Democrat talking about conservatives, any Nazi or Hitler analogy is totally appropriate.” Emhoff, who is Jewish, ought to know better.
I freely admit it. I do hate what the left is doing to our kids with their creeping woke agenda. Hate is a strong word and a strong emotion. But it accurately reflects how millions of parents across the country feel when they see pornography disguised as education being introduced to their children as young as 5 behind their backs. And when they begin to push back and say that’s not acceptable, doing so in the forums afforded by our democratic republic – school board meetings and/or elections, they get investigated by the FBI as potential domestic terrorists and lumped in with those who committed unspeakable evil against millions in 1940’s Germany.
These parents protesting books and other educational materials with graphically illustrated sexual acts and stories sitting on library shelves in middle schools are not calling for the extermination of anyone on the left. They just aren’t. They’re wanting to stop the madness and remove from positions of authority those who deem it to be appropriate material for small kids.
Now I don’t for a moment believe Mr. Emhoff is engaging in anything here other than intellectual laziness. If you can’t make an argument for your position, demonize your opponents and call them Hitler. That seems to be the Democratic Party way. If he truly wanted to defend his position, he would have brought some of the books being allegedly banned, and read aloud from them to show why they’re not really a big deal. And to repeat a secret lost on the left, none of these books are banned. Banned means you can’t get them anywhere – bookstores, online, etc. That’s not the case with any of these books. You can purchase any of them, anywhere you wish, even in Florida. They’re just not deemed appropriate for middle school children, much in the way that an AR-15 operating manual probably isn’t appropriate reading material for a first grader. You know what’s also probably not appropriate? Showing Goodfellas to 1st graders to fill time when it’s too rainy to have P.E. outside. That doesn’t mean Goodfellas is being banned by the Nazi parents across America.
At the tail end of this cut, he slammed the cowards, the so-called leaders for failing to lead on stamping out hate, without naming names. If Emhoff were not a bit cowardly himself, wouldn’t he be calling out the haters by name, being he’s allegedly in a position of so-called leadership?
So if this is the kind of expertise we get from Mr. Emhoff, what else did he have to say at SXSW?
We’re doing great as an administration, a viewpoint that’s shared by exactly 15% of the American electorate, Democrat and Republican. Way to shore up the credibility, Mr. 2nd Dude.
When it comes to talking about Kamala Harris, he lets us all in on a little secret.
Now I’m not going to give him too much grief over this statement, as husbands should speak well of their wives in public. That said, exceedingly normal? This is a woman who literally talks to space cadets all day and fantasizes endlessly about her glory days on a yellow school bus and playing with Venn diagrams. And then there’s this.
I’ve been around this rock almost 57 times. I’ve seen odd. I’ve experienced eccentric. I’ve been accused of being weird. And yes, I’ve seen normal plenty of times. This ain’t that.
I’ll leave you with this. Many jokes have been made about the Vice President transforming Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Veep from a sitcom to a reality show. You’ll never guess who confirmed that with Stephen Colbert Wednesday night.
We already know, Madam Vice President. We know.