In preparation for the possibility that Der Trumpster will be inaugurated as POTUS 45, this blogger started to watch "The Man in the High Castle" on Amazon Video. (More about that in tomorrow's post.) Today, Eags (Timothy Egan) goes the Full Monty in associating Dumbos/Teabaggers with Neo-Nazism. As the saying goes: "If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck." In other words, if someone goose-steps like a Nazi, looks like a Nazi, and talks like a Nazi, then he/she sure as $hit ain't a duck. However, he/she likely is a Dumbo/Teabagger. If this is (fair & balanced) exposure of racial/ethnic/religious defamation, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Goose-Steppers In The GOP
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
Tag Cloud of the following piece of writing
Well, he’s got the Hitler vote. The neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, was out and proud earlier this week: “Heil Donald Trump — the Ultimate Savior.” After endorsing the Republican presidential front-runner earlier this year for his call to deport 11 million Mexican immigrants, the fomenters of American fascism have now added an apt twist to his slogan, one not far from the truth of the campaign: “Make America White Again.”
Nazis — I hate these guys. Oh, but they’re a tiny minority of pink-faced malcontents living in basements with the windows taped up. Everybody hates them. Add to that supporters of the Ku Klux Klan, who’ve thrown in with Trump as well. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Klan, liked everything he heard from Trump this week, embracing him for standing up for white nationalism.
And sure, all the little Hitlers probably don’t amount to a hill of beans. But what about the 35 percent of Republican voters, in the New York Times/CBS News poll, who say they’re all in with the man sieg heiled by aspiring brownshirts and men in white sheets?
It’s a very ugly political moment, but there it is: The Republican Party is now home to millions of people who would throw out the Constitution, welcome a police state against Latinos and Muslims, and enforce a religious test for entry into a country built by people fleeing religious persecution. This stuff polls well in their party, even if the Bill of Rights does not.
Trump’s proposal — “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — is not just flotsam from the lunatic fringe. Well, it is. But the fringe is huge: Early polls show a plurality of Republican voters agree with Trump on banning all Muslims. And many would go even further.
“Add in every other kind of immigrant and it’s perfect,” tweeted Ann Coulter, who sells xenophobia as a mean girl provocateur, with many friends in the far right media universe.
Trump himself doesn’t seem to care about comparisons to the buffoonish (Mussolini), the truly scary (the evil one admired by the Daily Stormer) or the fictional — worse than Voldemort, as J. K. Rowling tweeted.
He sloughed off the fascism talk by associating his proposal with the internment in America of the Japanese during World War II. There’s a winning thought. I was wondering when he was going to get around to alienating Asian-Americans, the highest-earning, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States, according to Pew.
To review: He started with “the blacks,” through his smear campaign on the citizenship of the nation’s first African-American president. Moved on to Mexicans, war veterans, women who look less than flawless in middle age, the disabled, all Muslims and now people whose grandparents were rousted from their American homes and put in camps.
Which gets us back to his base and their awful bedfellows in the neo-Nazi bunkers. Who are these people? His supporters, most of them, do not see the shadow of the Reich when they look in the mirror. They are white, lower middle class, with little education beyond high school. The global economy has run them over. They don’t recognize their country. And they need a villain.
Trump has no solutions for the desperate angst of his followers. Tearing up trade agreements is not going to happen. Deporting workers who pick our fruit and hang sheetrock is not going to lift the fortunes of those who will no longer do those jobs. Barring all Muslims will not make us safer.
What he’s done is to give marginalized Americans permission to hate. He doesn’t use dog whistles or code. His bigotry is overt. But the table was set by years of dog whistles and code. The very “un-American” sentiment that Republican elders now claim to despise has been a mainstay of conservative media for at least a decade.
Yes, it’s encouraging that what is left of establishment Republicans have condemned Trump’s most odious idea yet. Sarah Palin, who stirred the resentment of “real Americans” against the nefarious Other when her party put her on the ticket in 2008, stands nearly alone in backing Trump’s call to bar entry into our country by adherents of the world’s second largest faith.
Still, it’s hard to take seriously House Speaker Paul Ryan’s rare objection to a lunatic suggestion from his party’s presidential front-runner when he says he would also back Trump should he be the nominee.
“It’s not our party,” lamented Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona. “It’s not our country.” As a Mormon, the senator has to be familiar with a time when there was an open war on his faith, when Mormons were considered not only un-American but domestic terrorists.
That history is instructive, as we struggle with Trump’s hysteria and the millions fired up by his hate. But the only way to get rid of the goose-steppers drawn to the GOP is to vow to never support the man giving them something to march to. Ω
[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (2009).]
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