Trump May Finally Be Getting Too Racist for America

[babylonsister]

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evwjwp/trump-may-finally-be-getting-too-racist-for-america

by Issac J. Bailey
|Nov 1 2018, 4:17pm
Trump May Finally Be Getting Too Racist for America
His naked appeals to white identity politics may appeal to some of his supporters—it's up to the rest of us to stand up against those appeals.

Dear Trump fans:

As you likely know, the Trump administration is sending thousands of US troops to our border with Mexico. The number may rival the number of American troops we have in Syria and Iraq—and may go as high as 15,000 if you believe Donald Trump. They aren’t being sent because there has suddenly been a flood of armed, masked men about to overrun the Border Patrol and the US troops and other security personnel and equipment already on the border. President Trump is deploying them for you, and you alone.

This is not about our national security or sovereignty. This move by Trump may actually be undermining both, given that it makes us look utterly weak and callous. We are so fearful that we have to deploy the most advanced military in the history of the world to confront a caravan of poor, desperate people who are still several hundred miles away? Excuse me. It’s not we; it’s you. I’m not afraid. No sane American is afraid of this bigot-manufactured crisis. Trump is doing this because you seem to be terrified of your own shadow these days.

snip//

All of this analysis assumes, cynically, that the best way to get you angry is to tell you that poor, dark skin people might get something that betters their lives. The pundits and politicians, and Trump in particular, know the most popular image of you is that you either are bigoted yourself or are at least comfortable with bigotry if it means you can continue feeling special and elevated over others. Trump is counting on your callousness, your cruelty and, frankly, your idiocy. He wants you to believe a small band of desperate migrants is a threat to the greatest country on the planet, a country of nearly 330 million people. I mean, how dumb must you be to believe something so cravenly disgusting and untrue?

Unfortunately, there is plenty of American precedent for the kind of immorality and cowardice Trump is banking on to protect himself during the midterms—because that’s what we did during the Holocaust. From Smithsonian magazine:

Immigration restrictions actually tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps. At a press conference, President Roosevelt repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis. “Not all of them are voluntary spies,” Roosevelt said. “It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

Here and there, skeptics objected. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out in her book Beyond Belief, the New Republic portrayed the government’s attitude as “persecuting the refugee.” The Nation didn’t believe that the State Department could “cite a single instance of forced espionage.” But these voices were drowned out in the name of national security.

We don’t need a repeat of that kind of cowardice. We need to make sure that more Americans are so upset by this ugly fearmongering, this open bigotry—to the point of the president of the United States using American soldiers to carry it out—that they will overwhelm polling places next week.

Trump is using this to gin up votes among a base of support he is convinced is bigoted and racist enough to fall for it at least one more time. The rest of us better be ginned up as well. If we aren’t, if we—if you—allow this kind of bigotry to stand, the rest of the world should be ashamed of what you have allowed this nation to become.

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Sure appears

there is a movement happening to put a end to this Race Baiting crap. The real test here is,how will our African American candidates fair . As of yesterday,they are all leading in their respective races.

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. This seems to be the election where Republicans

are testing whether they can win on racism alone.

But if it fails, don't expect them to learn anything from this, they will just double-won again. Not learning from experience is a core feature of conservatism.

[Blue_Tires]

3. as if...