Back in June (16, 2016) I was listening to a GOP TV spin doctor explaining how Donald Trump's racist, xenophobic and inflammatory language is actually a Good Thing!. I can't recall which Channel it was or which Spin Doctor (there were a lot of them) but as I expected this lead trial balloon actually flew among the Righties and the GOP manipulators who go along with this sort of thing. Trump's leadership fit the EMAD profile! Altemeyer was writing about this years ago. All that was missing from the list of features of a Fascist movement was the fearless leader and Brownshirts. Trump provided the fearless leader our many fascists were looking for!
Trump's call to Taiwan is an example of him behaving like Fascist leaders in the past.
The Tasmanian Devil Spin doctoring, aside, Trump's followers in the press, punditry and in his mob, have their future dictator now. The Trumpenführer is showing his real nature.
The kind of hypocritical and circular logic that we see in authoritarian followers was demonstrated among his apologists all over the media. That man back in June said that it is good that Donald Trump has dumped all the "PC" language because we can't bargain with someone if we don't know where he/she is coming from and people "always know what Trump is thinking" because he blurts it out! Talk about pretzel logic. Trump was stating his real feelings. That didn't make him honest. That made him Exploitive, Manipulative, Amoral and Dishonest (EMAD). Maybe it is a good thing that folks know what we are thinking (I'm not diplomat either) but I'm not projecting hatred, xenophobia, bigotry and lie after lie. People usually know what I'm thinking too. But my EMAD scores are low so I'll never qualify as their Trumpenführer.
And the effort to mainstream Trump's overt fascist message continues. I just heard some desperate and shrill sounding pundits on the TV defending Trump's incendiary phone call to the leader of Taiwan in language not that dissimilar to what that other moron was saying back in June. They go out of their way to "fair" to totally weird and incendiary behavior. All it does is make them sound like morons. They simply aren't prepared for someone like Trump anymore than mainstream Germans were prepared for Hitler. Heaven Save us from pseudo Intellectual rationalization.
PC was really Lee Atwater's Coded Racism
But what the Right wing calls "PC" is actually them pretending to believe in principles of human decency, equitable mutual treatment and polity that the rest of us call virtuous behavior and see as a duty. It wasn't invented by the left, either.
Trump isn't throwing out the left's version of "PC", he was throwing out Lee Atwater's version, which the right only hated because they got tired of guarding their tongue and not using explicit xenophobic, racist, inflammatory rhetoric. Lee Atwater and his allies invented the form of PC that Trump rails against to fight against the virtues of the argument against racism, xenophobia and inflammatory rhetoric by burying it in piles of sophism and abstraction. It was Lee Atwatern's PC that Trump threw out the window. Why? because he didn't need it anymore. Atwater and the Revanchist GOP spent the last 40 years "maintreaming" xenophobia and bigotry. Trump saw that Lee's advice no longer applied.
I started this entry and got caught up in other matters. It is a real shame that I had no power or influence to stop this. It is rough when yu can see what is happening and are powerless to stop it. I feel like Jeremiah must have felt when he was making his prophesies.
Further Reading
- On Authoritarianism:
- http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/01/authoritarians-and-totalitarians.html
- I've got a lot more on the subject too.
- Atwater
- http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/09/southern-strategy-and-war-on-poor.html
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