A Pale Horse tramples Michael Medved

Equus Pallidus vs the Gay Mustachio: a transcript:

We go to Forth Worth, Texas, and Gregg, you’re on the Michael Medved show!

Hi Michael. I disagree with you about your mischaracterization of Vox Day’s article on deporting illegal aliens. You basically called him a Nazi, he’s not a Nazi and I don’t know how anybody could compare a libertarian to the National Socialist party.

I’ll tell you how, now hold on, let me read you a quote from the article that led me to say he was basically taking a Nazi position. He was talking about the idea of deportation. He said this. He said “Not only will it work, but what can actually estimate how long it – meaning deportation – would take. If it took the Germans four years to rid themselves of six million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.”

Now doesn’t that sound like he’s saying we ought to follow the example of the Nazis?

No, I think what he’s saying is, if you read on in the article, that Bush is just not telling the truth, that we can do this. That it can be done.

Wait, wait, wait! The Nazis did it by murdering people! They put people in death camps!

He never suggested murdering people, did he?

But he said that the Nazis showed how it could be done! Isn’t it close to saying – listen let me read it to you again –

No, it’s not close to saying that! You made that up in your head.

I didn’t make it up, I read you the quote from his own article. He wrote that, I didn’t! Are you there?

He said nothing about killing people.

Listen again. “Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take”

To deport.

Okay, the Germans didn’t deport Jews, they murdered them.

So what? You’re comparing the final example of the Jews, what he’s talking about is deportation.

No, he is not talking about deportation! Do you see?

That’s exactly what he’s talking about.

Unless, he is denying that the Holocaust took place. First of all, he’s an ignorant fool, because the Holocaust, of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, about 200,000 of them were German. Most of them were Polish, they didn’t even live in Germany. They weren’t deported from Germany. Secondly, what he’s talking about is murder, here, and he’s talking about it approvingly.

No, he’s not.

“If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of six million Jews…” let me ask you, Gregg, how did the Germans rid themselves.

Well, the Germans, that’s the end. They killed them. They gassed them.

Okay, if it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of six million Jews, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens! What he’s saying is that he approves of the Nazi program of deportation and execution.

I tell you what. Inference doesn’t equal implication. You’re putting words in his mouth that’s in your head.

I read you his own words. Don’t you think that it hurts the case for deportation to analogize the Nazi persecution of Jews?

I don’t know whether it does or doesn’t. He was making a point. He doesn’t even support the deportation of illegal aliens. He was pointing out that George Bush was lying that it can’t be done.

Okay, first of all, it cannot be done in the United States of America. Secondly, it couldn’t even be done, in other words, in the Nazi regime, they, many of the six million Jews who were killed – and again this is his ignorance and you need to know it too – many of the people who were killed were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in their own villages. They came in and they lined people up in their own villages and they never got deported anywhere. They just got shot by firing squads and then put into ditches and then buried over. That’s what happened in Babi Yar in Ukraine. And people were killed that way. But you see, if you’re comparing the way we want to treat illegals in the United States to the slaughter of millions of German Jews – and European Jews and Ukrainian Jews and Romanian Jews and Hungarian Jews – if you want to compare it, then you’re giving the worst possible association to the anti-immigrant movement. Appreciate your call, nice try.

What a contemptible fraud! Now I’m not just a “Nazi boy” and a “Nazi-lover”, I’m also ignorant and a Holocaust denier, at least in Michael Medved’s Happy Faux Conservative World. Notice first that he never even attempted to answer EP’s question regarding the rather obvious difference between a libertarian and a member of the German National Socialist Worker’s Party. Second, one can see how in this short dialogue, Medved commits six blunders, although he managed to catch himself just after committing the last and most fatal one.

1. Compare these two Medved quotes referring to me: (1)“he was talking about the idea of deportation” and (2)“he is not talking about deportation!” So, in an article devoted to the question of immigration and a border wall, which one do you think it is, Mustache? Make up your little mind.

2. Medved talks about 200,000 German Jews killed in the Holocaust, which is correct to the best of my knowledge. But he omits to mention that the Jewish population in the June 1933 German census was 600,000, and as Robert Wistrich notes in HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST “nearly 10 percent of German Jews had already fled the country by the end of 1933”. So, the Germans managed to remove around 430,000 Jews from the population – 512,000 if you count German-speaking Austrian Jews as German – without mass slaughter or even mass deportations. Only a very shallow thinker or a propagandist could believe that there is nothing to the historical example but bloodshed.

3. Identifying and locating illegals is the primary logistical challenge at hand, not transportation. So, for the purposes of the illegal alien debate, it makes no difference if the Jews of the analogy were deported or killed by the infamous Einsatzgruppen. Considering that 25 million children are bused to school every weekday in the United States, it is silly to assert that transportation is the challenge. Furthermore, Wistrich not only has 29 references to deportations, but, with regards to Poland, has the following in the index: “Poland: and deportation of Jews, 59, 74, 82, 97, 138, 208, 214, 224-5”. Medved is simply flailing about here.

And on behalf of the quasi-illiterate, let me quickly assure everyone that in using the schoolbus analogy, I am not calling for the forced public education of all illegal aliens….

4. More comparative Medved: (1)“They weren’t deported from Germany.” (2)“the Germans didn’t deport Jews, they murdered them.” (3)“What he’s saying is that he approves of the Nazi program of deportation and execution.” So, Medved is outraged by what he infers to be my approval for what he declares is a nonexistent program of deportation. While I am ignorant of many things, logic isn’t one of them. It’s clear one cannot say the same for Mustache.

5. Medved, in attempting to correct my accurate statement about “many German Jews”, makes a mistake in saying that “most of them were Polish”. Historians estimate that about three million of the 3.3 million pre-war Polish Jews were killed, but three million is half of six million, it is not “most” of it. Medved puts himself in the unique position of simulataneously denying that between 200,000 and 700,000 German Jews are “many” (depending on if y
ou count only the dead or if you include the self-deported) but one-half is “most”. Even his pedantry is incompetent.

6. Medved himself referred initially to the slaughter of “millions of German Jews”, before realizing it and quickly correcting himself. In doing so, he was making use of the common rhetorical shorthand that I was using in the original column, but since he has chosen the role of the outraged and overly pedantic critic, he’s no longer in a position to do so.

As I have said before, Michael Medved is a peddler of false outrage; his schtick depends upon having something to get worked up about, however imaginary. Last week it’s Nazi Libertarians, perhaps next week it will be Communists Under Your Bed. Like Michelle Malkin, he prefers to destroy his own credibility and look like a fool rather than admit to making a mistake that is obvious to everyone. That’s bad enough, but what’s contemptible is his cowardice in hiding behind a microphone rather than directly confronting those he is so willing to criticize from the safety of screened phone lines.