Have to agree on that. Trump is a complete embodiment of the American Myth. The power of Marketing especially self-marketing is integral.
Let’s be honest, he’s spent his entire career and a good part of his personal life as a confidence artist, which is a different thing than being a normal salesman. Through a combination of talent and long practise starting as an adolescent, grifting has become second nature to him in a way I’ve never seen in anyone else. If that wasn’t enough, his father turbocharged it all by handing him the equivalent of millions of dollars to get started.
The whole thing would be fascinaing if we didn’t all have to live with the results of the con.
An expert confidence artist knows how to build one scam on top of another in order to continue milking his mark dry. That’s why he never apologised for the birther scam but instead used it to claim that it forced Obama to release the birth certificate (which of course was another lie he knew his suckers would swallow).
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Thanks. Russell’s dry and vicious eloquence never disappoints, especially when he’s eviscerating priests and authoritarians.
And Harry Edwards, holy moley! The “outhouse negroes” line alone makes that interview worth listening to. I hope his voice starts extending beyond the sports world.
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They’re not explicitly defined in the Constitution, but they are covered by the 14th Amendment. There was a time in certain places in this country when an African-American could be killed by a crowd of people who would walk away with no penalties because the local community didn’t consider it murder. Shamefully, that continued for decades after 1868, in defiance of the 14th which was imposed on their local “values.”
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Yes, economics is the issue only in a roundabout way-- people who voted for Trump were less likely to have an education, which means they are less likely to get good paying jobs.
So improving education should be the long term goal. I think some in the GOP know this, which is why the GOP is so hell-bent on cutting public education and/or privatizing it. If you don’t understand the issues you will vote against your own best interests and not even know it.
I think less education also means you’re more likely to succumb to racist anger. This article came out long before the election, but it shows a certain accuracy to what actually happened on Nov. 8th.
I would say better education for everyone is in our country’s best interest.
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Well, this is a big issue. Plenty of people have been complaining about democratic smugness towards less-educated Americans, but the big problem isn’t whether or not some people are smug, it’s the lack of education. That’s not an easy problem to fix, but the US (and Canada) have been trying our best to make it worse by making education unaffordable. I might not be better or more valuable than someone who has less education than I do, but I certainly have something they don’t, like they have a car and I don’t.
I have no idea what the psychological/cultural roots of racism are, but it seems impossible to deny think that tendency towards racist behaviour is a spectrum and that your position on that spectrum can be moved by education. Even if we are naturally inclined by some evolutionary hang-up to judge people who look more different than us more harshly, second guessing those judgments (or at least not acting on them) is a learnable skill.
The economic/racism issues are hard to disentangle because right now they are both heavily influenced by degree of education.
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From Central Office of Propaganda, the UK’s Telegraph:
“The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office,” tweeted John Weaver, a Republican political consultant who was John Kasich’s chief strategist. “Be very vigilant America.”
I wish that guy wouldn’t muddle his words so much, right? Come right out and say it already, don’t sugar coat it with your propaganda and such.
Here’s a long read from the Left Wing Political Operatives of Bloomberg (who are undoubtedly, as I write this, attempting to undermine Our Economy and Our Women).
Stop with the “ghost stories” nonsense, the deflecting–people are reacting to his statements. HIS statements, because we don’t even need to drop down to his surrogates’ nonsense to find batshit insane ideas–his are perfectly crazy and ignorant on their own.
Did you think the 350+ newspaper editorials against trump were all ghost stories? Perhaps the wave of anti-trump comments from just about every sector, private and public, were all just people being “hysterical”?
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I don’t believe this is even necessarily true.
But there does appear to be a feeling of truthiness to it.
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Maybe “functional education” is a better way to put it.
People who don’t know how to think about things critically are much more likely to be duped.
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Perhaps I should have said “college education”, which does appear to be represented in the data.
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If people want to learn from the experience of this election, people need to look hard at the actual facts, instead of just telling themselves things to make them feel better.
My Dad voted for Trump. He has a PHD in History, and not a bigot. of course one person is an anecdote. But the assumption that anyone who voted for Trump is ignorant or hateful certainly does not apply to him, and is probably the same for large numbers of other people.
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For instance, this:
Emphasis mine. You presume things about Trump and his employees that you can’t back up with evidence, and which are even contradicted by evidence but which you apparently want to believe are true.
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If you discount everything we heard, learned or saw after the President-elect announced his run for the Presidency and only go on that statement alone, he ran on a platform of racism.
Everything we heard during the campaign supports this.
A PhD in history held by one of his voters, or many, doesn’t change that.
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Also, this PhD in history voted for Clinton, and I don’t think @Max_Blancke’s dad’s degree makes him more valid a voter than me.
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Well, he raised you, so …
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The links are great, but don’t expect him to read the articles. He doesn’t read the articles he posts to support his own contentions.
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You also seem to have this problem that you believe that can use descriptive terms prescriptively–i.e. declaring yourself to be a moderate, despite having extreme conservative and racist attitudes instead of holding positions that are politically moderate and/or centrist, and declaring your father to not be a bigot, despite voting for the candidate with the platform based on xenophobia and bigotry, to give two examples. Please also see your attempts to redefine racism, antisemitism, and majority privilege for additional examples.
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According to polls, as of only three months ago, 72% of Republicans still believe that Obama was not born in the US.
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- Not all Trump voters are ignorant.
- Not all Trump voters are OK with bigotry and sexism.
But to support Trump you have to be at least one of those two things, because there’s no way a non-ignorant person could be unaware of Trump’s bigotry and sexism.
I am sorry to hear about your father. There are people in my extended family who voted for Trump too. Without exception, I believe all of them embody some combination of those two traits.
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