2018 HEADLINES: Writer resigns from New Yorker magazine after Twitter flap over Marine vet’s tattoo.
Talia Lavin, whose tweet about a veteran’s tattoo implied he was a Nazi, has apologized to him and resigned from her position as a fact-checker at the New Yorker magazine.
But in another tweet, Thursday evening, Lavin also lashed out at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, saying it unfairly targeted her in its own tweet about combat-wounded veteran Justin Gaertner.
“This has been a wild and difficult week,” Lavin said in the tweet. “I owe ICE agent Justin Gaertner a sincere apology for spreading an rumor about his tattoo. However, I do not think it is acceptable for a federal agency to target a private citizen for a good faith, hastily rectified error.”
“Good faith.”
Related: “Talia Lavin Fails as Fact-Checker, Succeeds as Smear Merchant,” Michelle Malkin writes:
Lavin has not commented on the matter and instead turned her Twitter account private. But we can infer her attitude about her present troubles from a defiant piece she published just last week in The Forward magazine, where she writes a regular column. Titled “No, We Don’t Have to Be Friends with Trump Supporters,” the piece, laden with Nazi allusions, decries asylum reform, strengthened borders, and ICE agents enforcing the law.
Rejecting calls for decency in public debate over these contentious matters, she spat:
Tough nuts, sugar. When they go low, stomp them on the head.
Responding to Sarah Huckabee Sanders being kicked out of a DC-area restaurant, Lavin tweeted today, “they can eat in peace in their own damn houses,” adding, “Oh no, the fascists concertedly stripping away our rights might have to brown bag lunch. We should be more submissive. Direct anti fascist action is so gauche.”
As Joe Gabriel Simonson of the Daily Caller tweets, “the left’s constant use of Nazi analogies is being revealed as a mechanism for how they cope with what they feel is the inherent meaninglessness to their lives. It gives them purpose to fight Nazis. They need to invent them.”
And it has consequences: At the Hill, Allan Richarz spots “The strategic blunder of ‘Trump-as-Hitler.’”
Is this perhaps the last, desperate gasp of the president’s critics? Do they double down and ride the Trump-as-Hitler narrative — and themselves — into the ground until November’s midterms and beyond? Undoubtedly, the president is ready to chum the waters with another carefully manufactured outrage to distract the pundit class.
Despite what should have been a slam-dunk for critics of the president, the overwrought rhetoric of Democrats may have handed the modern-day Teflon Don another victory, and harmed their longer-term prospects in the process.
Prior to 2016, prominent leftists were only occasionally caught on microphones openly referring to Republican presidents and presidential candidates as Nazis. Today, social media gives the left a nonstop world in which they openly imagine the current GOP president is Hitler* and they’re the French underground. Where does that level of madness go from here?
Let’s ask Maxine Waters:
Waters calls for attacks on Trump administration: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Flashback: Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History.
* And yet curiously, they never seem to notice the lack of consequences from attacking this week’s Hitler.