Well, it seems like our great investigative media has finally discovered the great secret that Donald John Trump has been not hiding at all for his entire life: He’s a racist shithead.
Who exactly didn’t know this after his claim that Mexicans are “rapists”; his attempt to ban Muslims from entering the country; his reference to “shithole countries”; birtherism; his calling for the death penalty against the Exonerated 5 from the Central Park Jogger case; his being sued twice for housing discrimination; his father saying “You know I don't rent to n*ggers”; his father being arrested at a 1927 Klan riot; the Polish Gang and his encouraging clients of his modeling agency to violate immigration laws; saying Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s judgement can’t be trusted because he has Mexican heritage; saying that Gold Star Mother Ghazala Khan didn’t speak at the DNC for cultural reasons; claiming there were “fine people” on both sides of a violent alt-right attack on Charlotesville, including those who support keeping the favorite flag of the Klan on public and state property; “I don’t like black guys touching my money”; trying to convince The Apprentice first season runner-up Kwame Jackson that he should share his win with a white guy; repeatedly using the n-word backstage at The Apprentice; saying “black people are too stupid to vote for me” and “Haitians all have AIDS”; and finally, his use of a phrase that’s literally in the EEOC manual as a prime example of discrimination, when he told four U.S. citizens who happen to be members of Congress to “go back to the [crime-infested countries]” they came from?
Who didn’t know? Apparently, nearly all of the Republican Party didn’t—and is still unable to admit it.
Having a well-documented racist in the White House is terrible, but that’s not the really big problem. The problem is that Trump still has 72% approval from Republicans, and that his support among the party faithful actually increased after his attack on Reps. Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.
- Support for U.S. President Donald Trump increased slightly among Republicans after he lashed out on Twitter over the weekend in a racially charged attack on four minority Democratic congresswomen.
- A Reuters/Ipsos public opinion poll showed his net approval among members of his Republican Party rose by 5 percentage points to 72%, compared with a similar poll that ran last week.
- The poll was taken after after Trump told the lawmakers they should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
It’s not just that Trump is a raging bigot, but that so are those at the base of his support. Other than calling them out, what exactly should we, and can we, do about it?
As my favorite YouTube content provider Steve Shives points out: You just can’t be nice to neo-Nazis. It should be obvious that some people are so far gone that you can’t simply argue them out of their point of view, and you aren’t going to be able to come up with an amazing rationale that will show them the error of their ways and convert a raging bigot into a calm, reasonable, rational, and fair-minded person. That is simply not something they’re capable of.
Shives argues that once you begin trying to debate with a bigot who inherent believes in white supremacy, you’re likely to fall into the trap of trying to find the middle ground between bigotry and no bigotry.
When you assume you can have an honest conversation about our difference of opinion with someone who is a Nazi — neo or original recipe — we’re making a couple of very dangerous mistakes.
First, we’re elevating the belief and goals of Nazis to the level of civil discourse. That’s a bad idea. That’s worse than a bad idea — that’s morally abhorrent. If you’re on one side of the table arguing that all people deserve justice and equality regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, what-have-you, and the person across from you believes that certain people are inherently inferior and deserving of persecution and death based on which of those categories they happen to fall into, what’s the middle? Where do you compromise with someone who rejects the very idea of universal human rights?
Ah, you might say that I’m not seeking to compromise with that person. I won’t have to give up any ground, because I’m going to persuade them that I’m right. That’s where the second mistake come in: assuming that the Nazi sitting across the table from you is any less committed to his ideals than you are to yours.
I think that whether we realize it or not, a lot of us have the idea that people only disagree because they haven’t seen what we’ve seen, and they don’t know what we know. A Nazi only thinks white people are superior because he hasn’t gotten to know enough people of color. He only wants to establish an ethnostate because he doesn’t know any better. Right?
Sometimes. It happens. There are ex-Nazis, ex-Klansmen, People do see the light and change. But a world war wasn’t necessary to end the horrors of the Third Reich because more people didn’t try to reason with Hitler. It wouldn’t have mattered how many Jews answered Hitlers hatred with shows of goodwill. it wouldn’t have mattered how many other took the high road and tried to argue the Nazis out of committing atrocities.
It’s not as if the people who are not ex-Nazis are the only ones who ever encounter the arguments that convinced them to walk away from their old ideology. Lots of Nazis have heard those arguments. Most of them aren’t persuaded. Most of them don’t change.
[...]
You can’t put your faith in the reason and humanity of Nazis. If their reason and humanity were functioning properly, they wouldn’t be Nazis in the first place. Being nice to them, engaging them in intellectual discourse, appeasing them, doesn’t work.
You have to fight them.
Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean violence. [...] Those who promote bigotry and intolerance, who vilify and scapegoat minority groups, who seek to destroy institutions setup to guard against dictatorship and despotism must be resisted.
if you pass them a microphone, you’re not resisting them. if you fight for their ability to fundraise or recruit, you’re not resisting them. If you argue they deserve a place onstage, you’re not resisting them. if you ignore them, you’re not resisting them.
Where is the halfway point, where you can concede that their point of view has at least some validity? It may seem like an absolutist view, but do we have a responsibility to have a certain amount of tolerance for the intolerant? Is it possible to talk someone out of their most deep-seated beliefs? Should you simply ignore those beliefs and try to move forward in other ways, or do you have a moral duty to confront them over it? Do you have to make certain they know that those views are not tolerable, even if in the end there’s no chance that you might reach a middle ground, or ever convince them of the wrongness of their position?
We’ve seen different versions of this argument play out between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, when Biden said that he had been able to put aside the personal views of various pro-segregationist senators by compartmentalizing that issue as something they disagreed on and finding common ground on other issues where they could work together. Part of the backlash to his view was that if you’re able to ignore the basic immorality of someone’s position, are you being a tacit enabler of that position, even if you disagree with it?
Wasn’t former House Speaker Paul Ryan an enabler of Trump’s racism and bigotry after he stopped being willing to call him out publicly once he won the Republican nomination, whereas before he said that Trump’s attack on Judge Curiel was “textbook racism?” Didn’t he become a collaborator in Trump’s racism when he stopped being willing to oppose it? Or did he help America by keeping silent on those issues while working to shave off the harsher edges of Trump’s proposed policies?
"I'm telling you, he didn't know anything about government," Ryan says in the book. "I wanted to scold him all the time. What I learned as I went on, to scratch that itch, I had to do it in private. So, I did it in private all the time. And he actually ended up kind of appreciating it."
Ryan's story is remarkable, but not rare. Trump's critics in the GOP are increasingly unwilling, or unable, to speak their minds publicly about the president for fear of enduring his wrath, or that of his constituents.
The silence of Republicans takes on new significance as Trump seeks a second term, potentially deepening his hold on the party.
"Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time," said Ryan, who stepped down after nearly two decades in Washington , in the book. "We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he's making some of these knee-jerk reactions."
Did he manage to mainstream Trump’s bigoted attitude directly into the American bloodstream by downplaying its toxicity or did he manage to save us—at least temporarily—from potentially even worse policies? It could be argued that he did both. He certainly didn’t resist Trump.
There were others in the GOP who simply weren’t willing to grin and bear it, even for the “greater good.”
"He's not alone," said Flake, who retired early rather than run for reelection alongside Trump.
"I could not stand on a campaign stage with the president when people shouted, 'Lock her up!' — and I'm not alone in that," the Arizonan said by phone Friday. "The problem isn't just Trump. It's Trumpism. Unfortunately, it's a virus that's infected not just the Republican party, but the Democratic Party, as well."
The truth is that Trump’s own personal bigotry is only a symptom of a much larger problem. He was more than willing to ride the wave of political racial resentment and grievance that had been building during the Obama years among middle-class and blue-collar whites who felt left behind and ignored while America had an African-American president. Now, many of them feel more than a little emboldened to let their frustrations out—particularly in public, and against people of color.
Can any of us afford not to stand up and confront bigotry directly and clearly whenever we encounter it? Shouldn’t we feel a moral imperative, as did this fast-food restaurant manager when some of his customers demanded that he and a co-worker speak English to each other, even though it was a conversation that didn’t involve the customers?
In reaction, the manager kicked them out of the establishment immediately, yet relatively politely. If you don’t stand up against racism, are you not enabling racism? In another incident, a person pulled a knife on people who were peacefully protesting Trump’s immigration policy.
And then there’s the white man who flew into a rage and ran over an autistic black man with his car for talking to his girlfriend.
Anderson was accused of purposefully striking 20-year-old Kevin Marshall with his pickup truck during a party, abandoning the vehicle in a wooded area and then fleeing to upstate New York, where he was taken into custody on Tuesday, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The 27-year-old Anderson started fighting with Marshall, who had autism, after the black man talked to his girlfriend, who was hosting the party at her Covington home but left with her boyfriend after the incident.
“That’s hatred, to beat somebody and then run him over at that impact and keep going,” said the victim’s mother, Robbie Marshall. “He took my son’s life, he deserves not to have his. I want him to have the death penalty.”
Hate crimes against black and minority citizens are on the rise. There are even children who have been whitening their skin to avoid racism not just in the U.S, but overseas.
Children as young as 10 are whitening their faces to avoid being subjected to racist abuse in Britain, a child protection group has warned, as police struggle to stem a rising tide of hate crimes against minors.
A total of 10,571 racially-motivated hate crimes against children -- an average of 29 a day -- were recorded by police in 2017-18, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) found. Toddlers and even babies were among those targeted.
That number is now a fifth higher than it was just three years ago, and is growing at a rate of about 1,000 new crimes a year.
This is not just a local American phenomenon, and it’s not just about Trump. There is an international, nativist, anti-immigrant, racist movement afoot. We would be remiss not to recognize that, and to recognize just how deeply entrenched it has become.
Trump supporters and nativists have responded to the clear human rights violations by Customs and Border Patrol agents on our border by basically accepting the Trump administration’s excuses and lies, and blaming the migrants themselves for being held for as long as 40 days without a shower, brushing their teeth, changing their clothes, or access to fresh clean water.
They think Ocasio-Cortez calling these migrant detention centers “concentration camps” is worse than the fact that the U.N. agrees that they are concentration camps.
Republicans were aghast on Tuesday when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who has an ability to rile up the GOP like few others — called out the moral crisis that is President Donald Trump’s ongoing widespread use of “concentration camps” to detain immigrants and asylum seekers who have crossed the southern border.
“This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying,” the New York Democrat wrote on Twitter, linking to an Esquire article. “This is not hyperbole. It is the conclusion of expert analysis.”
The claim set off a firestorm, with Republicans lashing out and saying Ocasio-Cortez was spreading falsehoods and zeroing in on her use of the term “concentration camps.” Among those who lashed out at her was Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the third highest-ranking member of her party in the House and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney:
Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has said she is "deeply shocked" by the conditions at the CBP migrant detention centers.
“As a pediatrician, but also as a mother and a former head of State, I am deeply shocked that children are forced to sleep on the floor in overcrowded facilities, without access to adequate healthcare or food, and with poor sanitation conditions,
So: not at all like summer camp. The facts of the conditions are the facts, even if Republicans like Mike Pence and Lindsay Graham have tried to white-wash things with their staged photo-ops.
It’s also not true that Rep. Ilhan Omar has expressed “support or pride” for al-Qaida.
President Donald Trump accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of professing a “love” for al Qaeda and talking about “how great” and “how wonderful” al Qaeda is. That is false.
Trump also misleadingly claimed polls showed Omar only has 8% support, not mentioning that a similar figure is from a poll of white likely general-election voters without a bachelor’s degree.
[...]
The White House press office did not provide any evidence to back up the president’s claim. But Trump appears to be referring, wrongly, to comments Omar made in October 2013 during a local PBS show in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. The program, BelAhdan, is hosted by Ahmed Tharwat, who described it as a show that “brings Somali Americans to your living room.” Omar’s appearance as a local political organizer came on the heels of a deadly attack at a Kenyan mall by members of al-Shabab, a Somali Islamist militant group that declared its allegiance to al Qaeda in 2012.
Ironically, the main discussion was about Omar’s frustration that the entire Muslim community — and the Somali Muslim community in Minnesota in particular — is asked to respond to violent acts committed by extremists overseas. She said there’s “a difference between the people that are carrying on the evil acts, because it is an evil act” and “the normal people … who carry on their lives.”
[...]
Later in the interview, Omar was even more explicit in condemning al-Shabab.
“These people are taking part in terror and their whole ideology is based on terrorizing the communities that they would like to have an influence in,” Omar said, later adding that she does not share the group’s ideology.
Unfortunately, the truth of this can barely get out of bed before right-wing lies have made it halfway around the planet. GOPers have long criticized the Muslim community en masse for failing to stand up to Islamic extremism, and yet when they are asked to stand up to white supremacists, they are largely insulted by the notion that a connection between them and alt-right/neo-Nazis can even be drawn.
Trumpism is not exactly like Nazism, of course. There is a distinction in that Trump’s goal isn’t to implement a genocide. Then again, with his new “You can leave” argument, it does appear that he supports encouraging America to become an ethnostate, just as a neo-Nazi would like. And for the record, neo-Nazis really like Trump’s latest rhetorical attack.
These Dallas Republican women are not Nazis, but it’s also pretty clear that they aren’t resisting Trump’s naked bigotry even a little bit. Instead, they’re enabling and excusing it.
Again, these women are not Nazis, but they are bigots. They have completely absorbed Trump’s ridiculous reverse racism gambit that “The Squad” of freshman congresswomen are the “real racists” and poor Trump is just a victim of their mean, mean, meanness.
Trump is not a Nazi either, not exactly, but it’s clear that his efforts to block all asylum seekers from entry (even though it’s legal to cross the border at any point in order to seek asylum), his efforts to implement mass deportation and remove hundreds of thousands recipients of Temporary Protective Status (who again, are legal residents), and now saying the native-born U.S. ciitizens “should leave” if they don’t like his administration, are all very Nazi-like. You could say that it’s alt-Nazism, if you like.
The fact is though, that Trump and his sycophant followers — including the “Trumpettes” shown above — are actually somewhat worse than just merely alt-Nazis, because if racism isn't the source of these comments it’s much more horrible. Although he’s never suggested sending “Crazy” Bernie Sanders “back to Vermont”, he has implemented multiple racist attacks against Elizabeth “Fauxcohantus” Warren’s slim amount of Native Americn heritage, even though the DNA test she took exactly confirms the family history she had previously claimed, and he has said to ball players who kneel during that national anthem that “Maybe they should leave”, which includes several white players and also World Cup Star Megan Rapinoe.
If you honestly take the Trumphettes and most of the GOP at their word, where they make the excuse that his statements aren’t racist because “he didn’t say color”, and you assume that when he isn’t defending and holding a “summit” for actual hate-mongering Right-wing social media mavens of the ilk of Alex Jones, Gavin McInnis and the Proud Boys who’ve been banned by Twitter and Youtube for their hate speech, and encouraging the geniune anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that “Liberal Jews” like Tom Steyer and George Soros have been paying for the migrant caravans to “replace” the so-called forgotten man, he apparently thinks that even white native-born American citizens who dare to use their specifically enumerated right under the First Amendment to seek “petition for redress of grievances with their government” to criticize him and his policies somehow deserve to be attacked, harassed, intimidated and frankly terrorized — considering the already existing death threats against them even from members of law enforcement — even to the point of being physically forced out of their own country.
All people wanted Kierstjen Neilsen and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders to do was “leave” a public restaurant, not the entire country.
It suggests that these people would support forcibly striping certain people of their citizenship and deporting them, not just for racial reasons or by violaing asylum laws, but because of a political policy disagreement that makes them claim they don’t sufficiently “Love America”, by which they really mean they don’t sufficienly “Love Trump.” Even Nazis didn’t go quite that far, because that’s Stalinist totalitarianism. Just how many people — including U.S. citizens — would wind up in the detention camps under yet another illegal executive order while these people cheer along with it? Stalin ultimately killed 20 Million of his own people, far more than the Nazis, including those who were sent to the gulags, deported and forcibly resettled.
Deportation of kulaks
Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, and 1,317,022 reached the destination. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. Data from the Soviet archives indicates 2.4 million Kulaks were deported from 1930–34.[46] The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521.[10][47] Simon Sebag Montefiore estimated that 15 million kulaks and their families were deported by 1937, during the deportation many people died, but the full number is not known.[48]
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union 1939-53
According to the Russian historian Pavel Polian 5,870 million persons were deported to Forced settlements in the Soviet Union from 1920–1952, including 3,125 million from 1939–52. [46] Those ethnic minorities considered a threat to Soviet security in 1939–52 were forcibly deported to Special Settlements run by the NKVD. Poles, Ukrainians from western regions, Soviet Germans, Balts, Estonians peoples from the Caucasus and Crimea were the primary victims of this policy. Data from the Soviet archives list 309,521 deaths in the Special Settlements from 1941–48 and 73,454 in 1949–50.[49]According to Polian these people were not allowed to return to their home regions until after the death of Stalin, the exception being Soviet Germans who were not allowed to return to the Volga region of the USSR.
If Trump came up with a neo-totalitarian purge agenda for those who “Hate America”, do you think any of the Trumphettes would lift a finger to stop it, or would they turn on those people who most loudly complain about it and cheer as they’re rounded up, jailed and “sent home”?
I have little doubt it would be the latter considering what we’re already seeing at his migrant concentration camps and as I noted above, his support among Republicans has increased as a result of his racist attacks on Democrats. The “Day of the Rope” is what they really want. We could only hope that the courts would stop such a policy, but as we’ve seen that would take time and lead to multiple challeges in the appeals court and eventually SCOTUS while such an illegal policy could potentially continue, just as the completely impracticle and inhumane “zero tolerance” policy continues. It won’t be stopped because his base or the GOP disapproves, because they don’t disapprove — they truly think only they are the true “patriots” in America. The rest of us are expendable and disposable. All of us.
The question I still have is: Is there anything we can do about this other than just criticize it? Can we do anything to change it?
Even after the next election, assuming Trump is defeated or otherwise removed, what can we do about lingering Trumpism? What can we do about resolving the racial resentment that was the fuel for Trump’s rise?
Steve Shives credibly argues that you probably can’t just talk people out of their bigotry, and I think that’s true. However, I don’t think we should totally give up on a significant portion of our own population completely. We probably can’t force them to come around to the ideals of universal human rights, and we may not be able to convince them of the rightness and correctness of our point of view. It would be like trying to talk a drug addict or a cult member down.
I agree with Steve: That won’t work.
But there are some groups and organizations that have had some success bringing people out of hate movements and bringing them out of cults, gradually. Most of them have worked because they’ve been founded and operated by former members of hate groups and cults. Case in point: the anti-Supremacy group Life After Hate, which has been recently defunded by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.
Founded by former extremists, we are committed to helping people leave the violent far-right. We are dedicated to inspiring all people to a place of compassion and forgiveness — for themselves and each other. It was these principles that guided us away from lives of hate and that drive us to help individuals exit hate groups today and to support those who have already left. Our primary goal is to interrupt violence committed in the name of ideological or religious beliefs. We do this through education, interventions, academic research, and outreach. Our primary goal is to interrupt violence committed in the name of ideological or religious beliefs. We do this through education, interventions, academic research, and outreach.
You, I, or Democrats may not be able to make the argument that might bring a neo-Nazi or a hardcore Trump supporter around to our way of thinking. But a former Trump fan, or a former supporter of mass deportation who manages to come to another way of thinking just might be in the unique position to lead others toward enlightenment.
Unfortunately, those people are few and far between.
