For instance, The New Yorker editors (sigh) allow Ian Crouch to write a piece that begins:
In the same week that Donald Trump’s nationwide support from likely Republican voters reached its highest levels yet, the G.O.P. front-runner was compared to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Lord Voldemort, and Darth Vader. This is what political operatives refer to as some pretty big negatives, and is a further reminder of Trump’s deep divisiveness. When people are debating whether you’re more like Hitler or Mussolini, you are certainly on to something, though that something is not what a normal American political candidate would ever desire…
… and that includes:
On social media, meanwhile, Trump’s critics seem game to match Trump’s own hysterical hyperbole—to fight fire with fire. Hence, the images you’ve probably been seeing recently on your Facebook or Twitter feeds: a GIF of Mussolini and Trump, side by side, making eerily similar, clownish facial movements; or of a list of offenses shared by both Hitler and Trump (the use of “racism to rise to power,” calls for “mass deportations”); or, more simply, one of the many images of Donald Trump with a Hitler mustache above his lip. (In real life, this week, in Atlanta, someone put up posters featuring Trump on a swastika.) These examples, and others like them, have been created and shared out of what appears to be an earnest concern about the outrageousness of Trump’s political statements, and to sound an alarm about the dangers that his candidacy might pose to the country. Perhaps if enough people share these memes, the thinking goes, it will act like a social-media version of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” and wake others up to the threat of creeping Fascism.
So, The New Yorker is now analyzing animated GIFs.
This is Sophisticated Journalism™, circa 2015.
Here’s the above referenced Mussolini/Trump animated GIF:
It’s funny how the Left doesn’t seem to notice The Organizer’s penchant for Mussolini’s chin-raising body language of arrogance:
