Abby,
I would imagine that you'll find that personality type drawn to movements
with ideologies that welcome rigid adherents: the Communist Party, the
Catholic Church, Evangelical Churches, Chassidic Jews and other Orthodox
Jewish sects. People like that can be anywhere but they like definite
answers to things with no ambiguities.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Abby Vincent
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 2:32 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is
Wildly Dangerous but Not Far Outside the US Mainstream
I, too, have wondered who are these Trump supporters. John Dean and others
have suggested it's the authoritarian personality.
They can't tolerate ambiguity or ambivalence, nuance Or abstraction. They
need someone to blame for their unhappiness. So, when someone says things
like "Let's nuke Isis ", or "shut out all Muslims", it resonates. One
issue with this is that authoritarian personalities exist in other groups
besides old angry white guys and low wage low information workers.
Abby
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 9:16 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is
Wildly Dangerous but Not Far Outside the US Mainstream
I'm just so really disheartened by where we are and where we're going. I
read poll numbers yesterday and a vast majority of Americans are in favor of
our bombing in Iraq and Syria. Someone told me about how she wouldn't take
her grandchildren to the Thanksgiving Day Parade because she's afraid of a
terrorist attack. I just posted a Tiabby article about how people's
responses are manipulated by TV. The fact is, people's knowledge is
superficial and ever since 9/11, the government has used their shock and
terror to manipulate them into allowing prepetual war and the increasing
encroachments of a security state. And they don't know anything about
history. The person who does my food shopping is in her fifties, grew up in
Suffolk County, Long Island, is a high school graduate, and is married to a
NYC police officer. We were talking about books because she works in her
local library. I began telling her about this really good novel that I read
which is about a neighbor of Ethel Rosenberg. I asked if she knew who Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg were. She'd never heard of them.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice Dampman
Humel
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 11:59 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is
Wildly Dangerous but Not Far Outside the US Mainstream
Yes, Miriam, my point does not contradict you or Greenwold, for that matter.
I am taking the discussion in another direction and examining more closely
the demographics, in general terms at least, of those who are Trump
supporters, and, going further back in history, those who thought throwing
Japanese, many of American citizens into remote camps, depriving them of
everything they had but what they could carry, and keeping them there while,
irony of ironies, many had sons, brothers, husbands, lovers, other family
members, friends, who were off fighting in the European theater to defend
the very country who imprisoned their wives, daughters, children, parents,
families, and friends. Same goes for the anti-Semites, then and now. Trump's
supporters, the supporters of these and far too many more unspeakable
actions in this country belong largely to the demographic I mentioned,and
that you, in your answer, also described: largely uneducated, ignorant,
uncultured, unskilled. poorly read, and so on.
So although I read the article quickly, I don't really disagree with
Greenwold, I would only examine the demographics more carefully before I, or
more likely, the editor, chose the word "mainstream." Is Fox news
mainstream? In terms of numbers, maybe it is, scary though that is to
contemplate. But not in terms of the population taken as a whole.
On Dec 10, 2015, at 9:49 AM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My friend who is a Dominican Sister, was home from her convent a few
months
ago, visiting her sister who lives in a senior citizens' apartment
complex
in the town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, Long Island. The people
who owin
and live in these government subsidized co-ops, are largely white,
lower
middle class folks. My friend told me that a large percentage of the
people
whom she met while visiting there, are Trump supporters. So, by the
way, is
my son-in-law, who is the son of a NYC police detective who grew up
in
Levittown, attended community college briefly, and has ended up
making a lot
of money first working for, and then becoming part owner of a
company that
sells supplies that are not pharmaceuticals, to pharmacies and
beauticians.
But what I think Greenwald is talking about, and it would be clearer
if you
read the article more carefully rather than skimming it, is that we
have a
history of virulent racism and anti immigrant feeling in our
country. All
you need to do is to have experienced the widespread anti-semitism
which
existed throughout world war 2, and review the population's response
to each
new wave of immigrants who arrived here, and look at the
imprisonment of the
Japanese Americans during the war, as well as the prison camp I
wrote about
last week for Japanese, Germans, and Italians. And there was our
treatment
of Native Americans, then and now, and the increase in anti-black
activity
when Obama was elected President.
Miriam
________________________________
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Alice
Dampman
Humel
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2015 6:46 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal
Is
Wildly Dangerous but Not Far Outside the US Mainstream
I only quickly skimmed this article, but I take issue with the title
line
itself. I guess it depends on how broadly or narrowly one defines
"US
mainstream." If one sees his largely uneducated, ignorant,
xenophobic,
bigoted, resentful followers as "mainstream," then, yes, what
Greenwold
outlines is accurate and true. But there has been a widespread and
vocal
backlash about this even in the mainstream media, the NYT, the
Boston globe,
NECN news, even the network news and commentaries, NPR and social
media.
That is more how I would define "mainstream." Trump's followers are
the
lunatic fringe, a dangerous and large fringe, but none the less.
Even his
own party is distancing itself from Trump, not fast or far enough,
and I
believe this distancing is far too little far too late...
On Dec 8, 2015, at 3:43 PM, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Greenwald writes: "Trump does not need to win, or even get close to
winning,
for his rhetoric and the movement that he's stoking to be dangerous
in the
extreme."
Donald Trump, running for president, drew several thousand people to
a rally
in Phoenix. (photo: Charlie Leight/Getty Images)
Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous but Not
Far
Outside the US Mainstream
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
08 December 15
ours after a new poll revealed that he's trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa,
GOP
presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement advocating "a
total
and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until
our
representatives can figure out what's going on." His spokesperson
later
clarified that this exclusion even includes Muslim-American citizens
who are
currently outside the U.S. On first glance, it seems accurate to
view this,
in the words of The Guardian, as "arguably the most extreme proposal
to come
from any U.S. presidential candidate in decades."
Some comfortable journalists, however, quickly insisted that people
were
overreacting. "Before everyone gives up on the republic, remember
that not
even a single American has yet cast a vote for Trump," said New York
Times
columnist Ross Douthat. The New York Daily News Opinion Page Editor
Josh
Greenman was similarly blithe: "It's a proposal to keep Muslims out
of the
U.S., made in a primary, being roundly condemned. We are a long way
from
internment camps."
Given that an ISIS attack in Paris just helped fuel the sweeping
election
victory of an actually fascist party in France, it's a bit
mystifying how
someone can be so sanguine about the likelihood of a Trump victory
in the
U.S. In fact, with a couple of even low-level ISIS attacks
successfully
carried out on American soil, it's not at all hard to imagine. But
Trump
does not need to win, or even get close to winning, for his rhetoric
and the
movement that he's stoking to be dangerous in the extreme.
Professional political analysts have underestimated Trump's impact
by
failing to take into account his massive, long-standing cultural
celebrity,
which commands the attention of large numbers of Americans who
usually
ignore politics (which happens to be the majority of the
population), which
in turn generates enormous, highly charged crowds pulsating with
grievance
and rage. That means that even if he fails to win a single state,
he's
powerfully poisoning public discourse about multiple marginalized
minority
groups: in particular inciting and inflaming what was already
volatile
anti-Muslim animosity in the U.S.
As The Atlantic's Matt Ford put it yesterday: "The immediate danger
isn't
Trump's actual policy, but the bigotry and violence that it both
legitimizes
and encourages." Muslim Americans (and, for that matter,
Mexican-Americans
and African-Americans) don't have the luxury that people like
Douthat and
Greenman have to be so dismissive. That's what Al Jazeera's Sana
Saeed meant
when she said that she's "tired of people telling us to not be
afraid -
Trump may not win but his words will last & there are people who
support"
the bile he's spewing.
All that said, it's important not to treat Trump as some radical
aberration.
He's essentially the American id, simply channeling pervasive
sentiments
unadorned with the typical diplomatic and PR niceties designed to
prettify
the prevailing mentality. He didn't propose banning all Muslims from
entering the U.S. because it's grounded in some fringe,
out-of-the-mainstream ideas. He proposed it in part to commandeer
media
attention so as to distract attention away from his rivals and from
that
latest Iowa poll, but he also proposed it because he knows there is
widespread anti-Muslim fear and hatred in the U.S. Whatever else you
want to
say about him, Trump is a skillful entertainer, and good
entertainers - like
good fascist demagogues - know their audience.
Trump's proposal yesterday, though a new low, is not that far afield
from
what other credible GOP presidential candidates previously proposed.
Jeb
Bush previously urged that the U.S. be wary of Syrian Muslim
refugees but
eagerly accept "proven Christians." Ted Cruz advocated an outright
ban on
Syrian Muslim refugees and then introduced a bill to bar refugees
from
multiple predominantly Muslim countries unless they're Christians.
Ben
Carson argued that no Muslim could be President because their
beliefs are
anathema to constitutional principles. Those proposals are more
limited than
what Trump advocated yesterday, but they're hardly in a different
universe;
they're grounded in the same principle that Muslims are uniquely
dangerous
and antithetical to American values.
Lest liberals become self-satisfied about all this, this obsession
with
demonizing Muslims is by no means confined to the GOP presidential
field.
Residing - or so they claim - outside the far-right and Fox News
swamps,
there's a sprawling cottage industry of pundits, academics, authors,
TV
hosts, think tanks, and "anti-extremist" activist groups devoted
primarily
to one idea: that Islam is supremely dangerous and Muslims pose the
greatest
threat. Beloved Democratic General Wesley Clark, while on MSNBC
earlier this
year, explicitly called for "camps" for radicalized American
Muslims. CNN's
role in all this is legion.
These are the people who have laid the rancid intellectual
groundwork in
which Trump and his movement are now festering. Just yesterday, The
Daily
Beast's supremely loyal Democratic partisan columnist Michael
Tomasky - who
in 2013 instructed us all to celebrate the Egyptian military coup of
the
brutal tyrant Abdel Fattah al-Sisi because it got rid of the
democratically
elected Muslim Brotherhood - repulsively demanded that American
Muslims
first prove they are loyal and can be trusted before they are
"given" their
rights.
Praising Obama (as always), this time for saying that religious
fundamentalism is "a real problem that Muslims must confront,
without
excuse," Tomasky wrote that "if anything Obama should have been more
emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities
in
Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a
speech
that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then
you
have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real
service." The liberal pundit added: "That doesn't mean just reading
them
their rights. It also means reading them their responsibilities."
The imposition of this sort of collective responsibility - telling
Muslims,
as CNN anchors did after the Paris attacks, that they are all
legitimately
regarded with suspicion when individual Muslims engage in violence -
is
unthinkable for almost any other group. Indeed, it's the defining
hallmark
of bigotry: imputing the bad acts of individuals to all members of a
group
or to the group itself. But it's commonplace when it comes to
discussions of
Muslims.
It's not hard to see why this demagoguery is so effective, why it
spreads so
easily and rapidly. Tribalism is a potent component of human nature,
one of
the most primitive and instinctive drives. Stoking it is and always
has been
easy. It's particularly easy to do in an overwhelmingly Christian
country
that has spent 14 years and counting waging a relentless, seemingly
endless
war in predominantly Muslim countries and which touts Israel as its
closest
ally. Numerous factions have all sorts of lurking incentives to
demonize
Muslims as the greatest menace, and Trump has simply become an
unusually
unrestrained vehicle for expressing all of that and an unusually
aggressive
exploiter of it, but he is not its creator nor its prime mover.
All of this preexists Trump's candidacy and is fueled by a wide
array of
groups with all sorts of cultural, religious, ideological, financial
and
tribalistic motives for isolating and demonizing Muslims. Trump is
not an
outlier, and it's dangerous to treat him as one.
As for the American media, I hope nobody harbors any hope that
they're going
to be some sort of backstop preventing the emergence of dangerous
extremism.
They simply do not see that as their role. For most of them, a
posture of
"neutrality" and "opinion-free" blankness are the highest values.
Here, for
instance, was CNN anchor and dynastic prince Chris Cuomo last night
vehemently scorning the suggestion that the U.S. media has any role
to play
in sounding the alarm balls on Trump's growing fascism:
In Cuomo's TV-journalism-trained mind, Trump's call for the complete
exclusion of all Muslims from the U.S. is nothing more than "a
suggestion
that perhaps offends certain sensibilities," and it's not for him or
other
journalists to "strike him down." When people objected, he said:
"Characterize? Hmm. Test him on the implications, bring on other
opinions
and analyze the potential.that's the job." In response to an angry
individual denouncing Trump's extremism, Cuomo added (emphasis
added):
"Absolutely. That's your role in voting. Accept and reject. Your
role, not
mine."
Here's what Mark Halperin - whose little-watched Bloomberg TV show
was just
picked up by an increasingly desperate MSNBC - had to say about
Trump's
announcement:
No matter how extreme and menacing Trump becomes, that's all one can
expect
from large sectors of the U.S. media: cowardly neutrality, feigned
analytical objectivity (how will Trump's fascism play with New
Hampshire
independents?) as an excuse for not taking any sort of stand. We are
indeed
a long, long way away from Edward R. Murrow's sustained, continuous,
unapologetic denunciations of Joseph McCarthy.
So by all means: unleash the contempt and the righteous indignation
for
Trump. It's well-deserved. But that should not obscure everything
that led
to this moment, nor exonerate those who for years have been spewing
unadorned anti-Muslim animus from multiple corners and under various
banners. They're more subtle and diplomatic (and thus more
insidious) than
Trump, but they're reading from the same script.
* * * * *
Shortly before this article was published this morning, Cuomo
re-appeared on
Twitter and apparently had a change of heart from last night's
proclamation.
Faced with a tidal wave of anger over his posture of neutrality, he
did a
complete reversal, seemingly thanking his critics by writing: "Thank
you for
stepping up and saying #trumpban is not about sensitivities or PC
but core
American values." He added: "We have crossed a line in campaign and
it
deserves attention." He then basically spent the whole morning
atoning for
last night's statement by arguing that Trump's "ban Muslim" policy
is a
"defining moment" and telling people they "should be angry."
Sometimes,
social media shaming works.
On a different note: Trump gave a speech last night in South
Carolina where
he defended his "Ban Muslims" proposal. Speaking on an aircraft
carrier
underneath a suspended bomber jet (picture, above), Trump added a
new policy
proposal about internet freedom that provoked substantial anger and
mockery:
We're losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see
Bill
Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's
happening.
We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that
internet
up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom
of
speech.' These are foolish people.
As Trevor Timm noted, Trump's statement - both in substance and even
words -
was strikingly similar to what Hillary Clinton said the day before
while
delivering a foreign policy address at the Brookings Institution:
We're going to have to have more support from our friends in the
technology
world to deny online space. Just as we have to destroy [ISIS's]
would-be
caliphate, we have to deny them online space. And this is
complicated.
You're going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom
of
speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism
and we are
truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow
of
foreign fighters, then we've got to shut off their means of
communicating.
Again, it's easy and fun for elites to mock and scorn Trump. But he
knows
what he's doing, and he's not speaking to those elites. He
specifically
knows that what he's saying will find a large, enthusiastic audience
because
of the ideas that have been mainstreamed in the U.S. for many years
now: by
political and media figures widely respected in the same elite
circles that
patronizingly mock Trump and his supporters.
The always-smart Teju Cole with a related but somewhat different
point, a
crucial one:
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Donald Trump, running for president, drew several thousand people to
a rally
in Phoenix. (photo: Charlie Leight/Getty Images)
https://theintercept.com/2015/12/08/donald-trumps-ban-muslims-proposal-is-wi
ldly-dangerous-but-not-far-outside-the-u-s-mainstream/https://theintercept.c
om/2015/12/08/donald-trumps-ban-muslims-proposal-is-wildly-dangerous-but-not
-far-outside-the-u-s-mainstream/
Donald Trump's "Ban Muslims" Proposal Is Wildly Dangerous but Not
Far
Outside the US Mainstream
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
08 December 15
ours after a new poll revealed that he's trailing Ted Cruz in Iowa,
GOP
presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a statement advocating "a
total
and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until
our
representatives can figure out what's going on." His spokesperson
later
clarified that this exclusion even includes Muslim-American citizens
who are
currently outside the U.S. On first glance, it seems accurate to
view this,
in the words of The Guardian, as "arguably the most extreme proposal
to come
from any U.S. presidential candidate in decades."
Some comfortable journalists, however, quickly insisted that people
were
overreacting. "Before everyone gives up on the republic, remember
that not
even a single American has yet cast a vote for Trump," said New York
Times
columnist Ross Douthat. The New York Daily News Opinion Page Editor
Josh
Greenman was similarly blithe: "It's a proposal to keep Muslims out
of the
U.S., made in a primary, being roundly condemned. We are a long way
from
internment camps."
Given that an ISIS attack in Paris just helped fuel the sweeping
election
victory of an actually fascist party in France, it's a bit
mystifying how
someone can be so sanguine about the likelihood of a Trump victory
in the
U.S. In fact, with a couple of even low-level ISIS attacks
successfully
carried out on American soil, it's not at all hard to imagine. But
Trump
does not need to win, or even get close to winning, for his rhetoric
and the
movement that he's stoking to be dangerous in the extreme.
Professional political analysts have underestimated Trump's impact
by
failing to take into account his massive, long-standing cultural
celebrity,
which commands the attention of large numbers of Americans who
usually
ignore politics (which happens to be the majority of the
population), which
in turn generates enormous, highly charged crowds pulsating with
grievance
and rage. That means that even if he fails to win a single state,
he's
powerfully poisoning public discourse about multiple marginalized
minority
groups: in particular inciting and inflaming what was already
volatile
anti-Muslim animosity in the U.S.
As The Atlantic's Matt Ford put it yesterday: "The immediate danger
isn't
Trump's actual policy, but the bigotry and violence that it both
legitimizes
and encourages." Muslim Americans (and, for that matter,
Mexican-Americans
and African-Americans) don't have the luxury that people like
Douthat and
Greenman have to be so dismissive. That's what Al Jazeera's Sana
Saeed meant
when she said that she's "tired of people telling us to not be
afraid -
Trump may not win but his words will last & there are people who
support"
the bile he's spewing.
All that said, it's important not to treat Trump as some radical
aberration.
He's essentially the American id, simply channeling pervasive
sentiments
unadorned with the typical diplomatic and PR niceties designed to
prettify
the prevailing mentality. He didn't propose banning all Muslims from
entering the U.S. because it's grounded in some fringe,
out-of-the-mainstream ideas. He proposed it in part to commandeer
media
attention so as to distract attention away from his rivals and from
that
latest Iowa poll, but he also proposed it because he knows there is
widespread anti-Muslim fear and hatred in the U.S. Whatever else you
want to
say about him, Trump is a skillful entertainer, and good
entertainers - like
good fascist demagogues - know their audience.
Trump's proposal yesterday, though a new low, is not that far afield
from
what other credible GOP presidential candidates previously proposed.
Jeb
Bush previously urged that the U.S. be wary of Syrian Muslim
refugees but
eagerly accept "proven Christians." Ted Cruz advocated an outright
ban on
Syrian Muslim refugees and then introduced a bill to bar refugees
from
multiple predominantly Muslim countries unless they're Christians.
Ben
Carson argued that no Muslim could be President because their
beliefs are
anathema to constitutional principles. Those proposals are more
limited than
what Trump advocated yesterday, but they're hardly in a different
universe;
they're grounded in the same principle that Muslims are uniquely
dangerous
and antithetical to American values.
Lest liberals become self-satisfied about all this, this obsession
with
demonizing Muslims is by no means confined to the GOP presidential
field.
Residing - or so they claim - outside the far-right and Fox News
swamps,
there's a sprawling cottage industry of pundits, academics, authors,
TV
hosts, think tanks, and "anti-extremist" activist groups devoted
primarily
to one idea: that Islam is supremely dangerous and Muslims pose the
greatest
threat. Beloved Democratic General Wesley Clark, while on MSNBC
earlier this
year, explicitly called for "camps" for radicalized American
Muslims. CNN's
role in all this is legion.
These are the people who have laid the rancid intellectual
groundwork in
which Trump and his movement are now festering. Just yesterday, The
Daily
Beast's supremely loyal Democratic partisan columnist Michael
Tomasky - who
in 2013 instructed us all to celebrate the Egyptian military coup of
the
brutal tyrant Abdel Fattah al-Sisi because it got rid of the
democratically
elected Muslim Brotherhood - repulsively demanded that American
Muslims
first prove they are loyal and can be trusted before they are
"given" their
rights.
Praising Obama (as always), this time for saying that religious
fundamentalism is "a real problem that Muslims must confront,
without
excuse," Tomasky wrote that "if anything Obama should have been more
emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities
in
Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a
speech
that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then
you
have to make that happen. That would be real leadership, and a real
service." The liberal pundit added: "That doesn't mean just reading
them
their rights. It also means reading them their responsibilities."
The imposition of this sort of collective responsibility - telling
Muslims,
as CNN anchors did after the Paris attacks, that they are all
legitimately
regarded with suspicion when individual Muslims engage in violence -
is
unthinkable for almost any other group. Indeed, it's the defining
hallmark
of bigotry: imputing the bad acts of individuals to all members of a
group
or to the group itself. But it's commonplace when it comes to
discussions of
Muslims.
It's not hard to see why this demagoguery is so effective, why it
spreads so
easily and rapidly. Tribalism is a potent component of human nature,
one of
the most primitive and instinctive drives. Stoking it is and always
has been
easy. It's particularly easy to do in an overwhelmingly Christian
country
that has spent 14 years and counting waging a relentless, seemingly
endless
war in predominantly Muslim countries and which touts Israel as its
closest
ally. Numerous factions have all sorts of lurking incentives to
demonize
Muslims as the greatest menace, and Trump has simply become an
unusually
unrestrained vehicle for expressing all of that and an unusually
aggressive
exploiter of it, but he is not its creator nor its prime mover.
All of this preexists Trump's candidacy and is fueled by a wide
array of
groups with all sorts of cultural, religious, ideological, financial
and
tribalistic motives for isolating and demonizing Muslims. Trump is
not an
outlier, and it's dangerous to treat him as one.
As for the American media, I hope nobody harbors any hope that
they're going
to be some sort of backstop preventing the emergence of dangerous
extremism.
They simply do not see that as their role. For most of them, a
posture of
"neutrality" and "opinion-free" blankness are the highest values.
Here, for
instance, was CNN anchor and dynastic prince Chris Cuomo last night
vehemently scorning the suggestion that the U.S. media has any role
to play
in sounding the alarm balls on Trump's growing fascism:
In Cuomo's TV-journalism-trained mind, Trump's call for the complete
exclusion of all Muslims from the U.S. is nothing more than "a
suggestion
that perhaps offends certain sensibilities," and it's not for him or
other
journalists to "strike him down." When people objected, he said:
"Characterize? Hmm. Test him on the implications, bring on other
opinions
and analyze the potential.that's the job." In response to an angry
individual denouncing Trump's extremism, Cuomo added (emphasis
added):
"Absolutely. That's your role in voting. Accept and reject. Your
role, not
mine."
Here's what Mark Halperin - whose little-watched Bloomberg TV show
was just
picked up by an increasingly desperate MSNBC - had to say about
Trump's
announcement:
No matter how extreme and menacing Trump becomes, that's all one can
expect
from large sectors of the U.S. media: cowardly neutrality, feigned
analytical objectivity (how will Trump's fascism play with New
Hampshire
independents?) as an excuse for not taking any sort of stand. We are
indeed
a long, long way away from Edward R. Murrow's sustained, continuous,
unapologetic denunciations of Joseph McCarthy.
So by all means: unleash the contempt and the righteous indignation
for
Trump. It's well-deserved. But that should not obscure everything
that led
to this moment, nor exonerate those who for years have been spewing
unadorned anti-Muslim animus from multiple corners and under various
banners. They're more subtle and diplomatic (and thus more
insidious) than
Trump, but they're reading from the same script.
* * * * *
Shortly before this article was published this morning, Cuomo
re-appeared on
Twitter and apparently had a change of heart from last night's
proclamation.
Faced with a tidal wave of anger over his posture of neutrality, he
did a
complete reversal, seemingly thanking his critics by writing: "Thank
you for
stepping up and saying #trumpban is not about sensitivities or PC
but core
American values." He added: "We have crossed a line in campaign and
it
deserves attention." He then basically spent the whole morning
atoning for
last night's statement by arguing that Trump's "ban Muslim" policy
is a
"defining moment" and telling people they "should be angry."
Sometimes,
social media shaming works.
On a different note: Trump gave a speech last night in South
Carolina where
he defended his "Ban Muslims" proposal. Speaking on an aircraft
carrier
underneath a suspended bomber jet (picture, above), Trump added a
new policy
proposal about internet freedom that provoked substantial anger and
mockery:
We're losing a lot of people because of the internet. We have to see
Bill
Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what's
happening.
We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that
internet
up in some ways. Somebody will say, 'Oh freedom of speech, freedom
of
speech.' These are foolish people.
As Trevor Timm noted, Trump's statement - both in substance and even
words -
was strikingly similar to what Hillary Clinton said the day before
while
delivering a foreign policy address at the Brookings Institution:
We're going to have to have more support from our friends in the
technology
world to deny online space. Just as we have to destroy [ISIS's]
would-be
caliphate, we have to deny them online space. And this is
complicated.
You're going to hear all of the usual complaints, you know, freedom
of
speech, et cetera. But if we truly are in a war against terrorism
and we are
truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow
of
foreign fighters, then we've got to shut off their means of
communicating.
Again, it's easy and fun for elites to mock and scorn Trump. But he
knows
what he's doing, and he's not speaking to those elites. He
specifically
knows that what he's saying will find a large, enthusiastic audience
because
of the ideas that have been mainstreamed in the U.S. for many years
now: by
political and media figures widely respected in the same elite
circles that
patronizingly mock Trump and his supporters.
The always-smart Teju Cole with a related but somewhat different
point, a
crucial one:
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
