There’s no shortage of evidence for the origin of the term, nor of examples of Democrats using it.
As David Harsanyi notes, Democrats who profess to be shocked at the irresponsible Marjorie Taylor Greene being irresponsible with a Holocaust analogy are, themselves, chronically addicted to Nazi and Holocaust analogies. One of those is their use of the term “Big Lie”:
This very week you can read, for example, a Chris Cillizza piece headlined, “A majority of Republicans are living in a fantasy world built around the Big Lie.” The “Big Lie” — highly popular among Democrats (and Donald Trump) — is, of course, referring to a tactic the Nazis deployed against their political enemies. No one seemed upset when President-elect Joe Biden claimed Ted Cruz was a latter-day Goebbels spreading the “Big Lie.”
There are those on the left who insist on denying that “Big Lie” is a Hitler/Goebbels reference. After all, Hitler and Goebbels described the tactic but never admitted that they used it themselves. This is so literal-minded an application of history that it misses the obvious cultural baggage of these references, many 0f which are stated out loud, particularly by Joe Biden.
The term “Big Lie” comes from Mein Kampf, in which Adolf Hitler (then an imprisoned First World War veteran in his early thirties composing his animosities into a philosophy) outlined the concept to explain his “stab in the back” theory that the German people had been fed a “great lie” about the war:
One started out with the very correct assumption that in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of a people may be more corrupt in the bottom of their hearts than they will be consciously and intentionally bad, therefore with the primitive simplicity of their minds they will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others; indeed, they may doubt and hesitate even when being enlightened, and they accept any cause at least as nevertheless being true; therefore, just for this reason some part of the most impudent lie will remain and stick; a fact which all great lying artists and societies of this world know only too well and therefore also villainously employ.
Hitler being Hitler, he immediately digressed into blaming the Jews for this tactic:
Those who know best this truth about the possibilities of the application of untruth and defamation, however, were at all times the Jews; for their entire existence is built on one single great lie, namely, that here one had to deal with a religious brotherhood, while in fact one has to do with a race what a race!
Goebbels, who knew the value of staying on his master’s message, used the same terminology in a 1941 article, “Churchill’s Lie Factory,” accusing Churchill of lying:
The astonishing thing is that Mr. Churchill, a genuine John Bull, holds to his lies, and in fact repeats them until he himself believes them. That is an old English trick…The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Naturally, despite their embrace of the theory that the “Big Lie” was an effective tactic of propaganda, Hitler and Goebbels never admitted that they, themselves ever lied — perish the thought! “How different we Germans are!” Goebbels assured his readers. Nevertheless, for obvious reasons, outside observers noticed how the Nazis’ actions fit with the theory. An OSS psychological profile of Hitler observed:
His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
In American popular culture and politics, the “Big Lie” — especially when the term is capitalized — is universally understood to be a reference to Hitler and/or Goebbels and their tactics. Biden has been quite open that this is what he means. In September 2020, Biden said of Trump in an MSNBC interview: “He’s sort of like Goebbels. You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge.” Bloomberg’s report on Biden’s statement helpfully added: “Adolf Hitler and Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, espoused a technique known as the ‘Big Lie,’ which involved repeating a colossal falsehood until the public came to believe it was true. Hitler coined the term in his 1925 book ‘Mein Kampf.'”
Biden did this again in January, comparing Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to Goebbels:
I think they should be just flat beaten the next time they run. I think the American public has a real good, clear look at who they are. They’re part of the big lie, the big lie. I was being reminded by a friend of mine, and maybe you were with me, I can’t recall, when we were told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie. Well, there was a print that when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed, or it was 2,500 people were killed. And Goebbels said no, 25,000 — or 250,000 were killed, and our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s the big lie. People will know, it’s one thing for one man, one woman, to repeat the lie over and over and over again. By the way, Trump said that before he ran. If you say it enough, I’m going to convince you. I’ll say it enough. The press is bad, the press is bad, the press is bad, the press is bad. If he’s the only one saying it, that’s one thing. But the acolytes that follow him, like Cruz and others, they are as responsible as he is.
Media reports on these remarks did not miss that Biden (himself a lifelong chronic fabulist) was drawing a direct, explicit Nazi parallel. Nor have commentators on the left shied away from using exactly this term to invoke exactly this parallel, now or in the past. Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen in 2011, comparing Republican criticism of Obamacare to Goebbels:
They say it’s a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That’s the same kind of thing. … The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it — believed it and you have the Holocaust. We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care.
It is a question I often hear people ask during conversations about the rise of Adolf Hitler: If I had been alive in Germany when the Nazis took power, would I have had the courage to side against them? Thanks to the 2020 presidential election, there is now a convenient way to answer that query. Hitler rose to power because he told a Big Lie. Millions of people believed that Big Lie because they held more sinister beliefs; millions more likely didn’t believe it, but weren’t willing to denounce it as an outright lie at the time. The same dynamic is true regarding Donald Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the election from him. It is a Big Lie being embraced to advance a racist, anti-democratic agenda. Anyone who doesn’t stand up to that Big Lie today would have likely been complicit in Hitler’s Big Lie last century. Anyone who actually believes Trump’s Big Lie … do I need to finish that sentence?
There’s at least one crucial parallel between Trumpism and Hitlerism. It’s the shameless embrace of what Hitler in his book “Mein Kampf” called the Big Lie. This is distinct from the ordinary fibbing that all humans do every day, and also from Trump’s egregious but banal mendacity before the November election. Instead, a Big Lie is so “colossal” (Hitler’s term) in inverting reality that the human mind struggles to grasp its audacity, leading many people to succumb.
There’s more examples where these came from. Websites of ordinary usage recognize the parallel as well. The American Psychological Association’s dictionary definition of “big lie”:
a propaganda device in which a false statement of extreme magnitude is constantly repeated to persuade the public. The assumption is that a big lie is less likely to be challenged than a lesser one because people will assume that evidence exists to support a statement of such magnitude. Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister in Nazi Germany, repeatedly used this technique when he charged the Nazis’ enemies with heinous crimes.
Wikipedia, which is nothing if not a distillation of conventional wisdom:
A big lie (German: große Lüge; often the big lie) is a propaganda technique used for political purposes, defined as “a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body.” The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe the use of a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Hitler claimed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and bring about the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie propaganda technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis’ big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at an “international Jewry”, which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeated over and over the claim that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It spread claims that the Jews had begun a “war of extermination” against Germany, and it used these claims to assert that Germany had a right to “annihilate” the Jews as self-defense.
We can argue about the fairness or accuracy of Nazi analogies; I’m inclined to the view that they tend to cheapen the monstrous evils of Nazi Germany and should be reserved for comparisons to actual mass murder, tyranny, and genocide. Either way, any minimally honest accounting has to admit that the use of “Big Lie” is, in fact, a Nazi analogy.