Right wingers love to use a particular logical fallacy when talking about what to do with “the other” in political discourse. These days it concerns the Great Wall of Whatever that Trump wants to build on America’s southern border. Today Trump used the familiar “what if” fallacy in his speech demanding $5 billion dollars to BEGIN building a wall that will wind up costing a hundred times more.
Trump told us to imagine it was our own family killed by an illegal alien. What would you want to do about it then? It’s an age-old loaded question that you’ll hear in bars, high schools, or even at the dinner table with your crazy uncle that watches Fox all day.
Here’s what you tell them.
Well obviously, I would want to murder the perpetrator with my bare hands.
That would probably get a victorious grin from the righty. See? You’re no different than —
But of course, killing him wouldn’t be enough. I would want him strapped to a chair, so I could work on him unimpeded. Slowly, with various surgical instruments, I would disassemble his body, starting from toes and fingers, gradually working my way inwards. After each cut, I would carefully stop the bleeding, lest my victim expire prematurely.
Now Uncle righty stops grinning. That’s not what he meant by —
His screams and pleas for mercy would of course be carefully recorded by high-resolution cameras, later to be broadcast on the internet. As each inch of flesh was flayed from bone, cameras and microphones would bear witness with pornographic detail. The bright, glossy red of blood spurting from a fresh wound, the dazzling white of underlying bone, the rubbery bits of veins and sinew, the despairing wails of the victim with each new cut. Sadly, there is no way to record the smell of terrified piss and shit.
Uncle righty’s eyes are bugging out. You’re some kind of —
What’s the matter, don’t you love your family?
Sure, but —
Once his arms and legs are no more than stumps, you stand back and mock his pain for a bit as he wriggles, moaning, like an over-sized, bleeding worm in the chair. You shout at him, What? What did you expect? You fuck with fucking Keyser Söze, he’s gonna fuck you back ten times worse!
Jesus, mumbles Uncle righty. That’s not —
Of course you already know who his family are, and where. You send a hit team to wipe them all out, and then wipe out their whole neighborhood. That’s the law. I would make that the law.
What do you mean?
I mean that any time an immigrant kills an American citizen, we torture and kill the perp on live TV, and then we send fucking Seal Team Six into their home country and wipe out their whole fucking neighborhood, that’s what I mean. Then we nuke the city, so they can’t produce that kind of murdering trash to come to my country.
You can’t make a law like that…
What, you mean you don’t want laws written by enraged men that are seeing red and seeking revenge in the most violent way possible?
Yeah, you can’t —
Ah, finally we agree on something. Pass the butter, would you Uncle?