We Have Descended to a Lower Circle of Hell, Built by Trump
I get the sense we have crossed another once-inviolable barrier in the Ballad of Donald Trump. Three horrifying hate crimes in five days, like four 500-year floods in a decade, give people overwhelming evidence of big changes, and not in a good direction. Or, if you prefer, people can see shit ain’t right.
I could be wrong — I often have been, especially about how much stomach Republicans would have for the horrors of the past two years — but it feels like last week was different. Trump is reacting to the tragedies, and accusations about his role in them, in ways that will disgust all but his hard-core fans.
Trump thrives on his ability to distract the media by giving them a new outrage to report on every day, sometimes twice a day. But he might find that people who have been mailed explosive devices are going to dwell on this one a little longer — certainly a week. And most Christians will not react to a slaughter at a Jewish house of worship with the indifference that probably would have met such an attack on a mosque.
When even Matt Drudge criticizes Fox News, you know they’ve crossed a dangerous line. White Americans routinely internalize racism, sexism and xenophobia, but as conservatives keep telling us all the time, they’re not fond of being identified as racist. It’s one thing to beat up on eggheads, do-gooders and other liberals, who, in the conservative mind, deserve it. It’s quite another to side with the Nazis in proclaiming there’s a Jewish conspiracy to run the world.
After previous massacres, Trump has usually managed to choke out a few words of condolence, but this time his pallid attempts at promoting “unity” were seen as a cruel joke pretty quickly, because within minutes he was back demonizing Democrats, the media and the immigrant Caravan of Doom. Now he’s going to crash the funerals in Pittsburgh, despite being told by everyone from the governor of Pennsylvania on down to stay away.
Two short years ago, when the GOP was still preaching “personal responsibility,” Trump’s blame-the-victims schtick would have been criticized. The man has never taken responsibility for anything in his life. But so complete is his takeover of the GOP that not a single Republican in Congress (or the Delaware GOP) has stood up to condemn him.
The role of Fox News in promoting this climate of violence is even more obvious than Trump’s influence, prompting the U.S. editor of the Financial Times to call for a boycott of Fox advertisers. (Here’s a list of its top 10 advertisers).
This nightmare will end either when Republicans stand up to the human detritus that constitutes its base or when they no longer control government. I am not betting that Republicans will act before they are voted out of office. But I do wonder how many, 10 years from now, will admit they voted for Trump.
Thanks for the link to Fox Advertisers. Here is my action list:
1) Proctor and Gamble: Stop using Tide, Bounty, Dawn, Febreze, Cascade, Swifter, Gillette, Crest.
2) Disney: Continue not going to theme parks, avoid Disney Studios after seeing “Mary Poppins” remake.
3) Berkshier Hathaway: No more Duracell.
4) Office Depot /Offcie Max: Will never use again
5) Bayer AG Monsanto: List of Bayer Consumer products to avoid .
6) Angies lIst, Home Advisor, Match.com: Don’t use so can’t boycott
7) Allstate: Don’t use so can’t boycott
8) Beaches/Sandals Resorts: Don’t use so can’t boycott
9) Nutrisystems: Don’t use so can’t boycott
10) Liberty Mutual: Don’t use so can’t boycott
Even better than a boycott is a letter or email to the company explaining that you’re currently a customer and would hate to have to stop using their products (especially Tide) over their support of white supremacy.
Also, if you boycott Bounty, don’t switch to Brawny, which is owned by the Kochs.
This is a good idea, but I can’t stop watching Geico ads. I won’t buy their insurance, though. Nor will I buy a lizard. The others are easy.
This is like another step in the dissolution of Weimar Germany. Nationalist Socialists targeted communists, trade unionists, and Jews. People were murdered. The pace and scale of the killings picked up both frequency and scale as time went on eventually becoming state run murder apparati. Don’t think it can’t happen here. Trump is an existential threat to everything we value. There is no easy exit from where we are now. Maybe no legal one at all.
I’m just going to re-up on this here. If you don’t like a repeat, I don’t care.
“In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed completely under your nose. The world you live in – your nation, your people – is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.”
—Milton Mayer, ‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 – 1945’, (1955)
Trump calls himself a Nationalist at a rally and it doesn’t make the news. When he calls himself a White Nationalist, why would that be different?
Globalist is very vague. I mean we didn’t stand up at Mexicans are rapists and punch them in the face. This actually appears no worse, I guess.