Robert Reich: There's a More Frightening Possibility Than Trump Is Just Nuts
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-theres-more-frightening-possibility-trump-just-nutsRobert Reich: There's a More Frightening Possibility Than Trump Is Just Nuts
The former secretary of labor dissects the president's bizarre wrestling tweet.
By Robert Reich / RobertReich.org
July 3, 2017, 5:34 AM GMT
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But I fear an even more menacing reality.
Trump began his presidency attacking the press for “fake news.” Then he called the networks and publications that criticized him “enemies of the people.”
His new attacks seem to be going a step farther, mobilizing his supporters against media personalities and executives that are critical of him.
As the tweets and rallies become shriller and more provocative, their clear message is that Trump’s critics are bad people who are conspiring to undo his presidency – people whom Trump supporters must “not let” silence him, who deserve to be slammed the way Trump took it out on CNN in the mock video he posted Sunday morning.
It’s a narrative that’s showing up increasingly on right-wing websites.
In one recent video from the National Rifle Association, for example, Dana Loesch, an N.R.A. spokeswoman and former editor at Breitbart News, charges that a left-wing cabal “use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”
As black-and-white images of recent protests play in the background, Loesch says “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country, and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth.”
This “clenched fist” theme is being legitimized by the President of the United States who’s on a warpath against news organizations and professionals who criticize him.
Will news organizations be intimidated? Probably not, at least not at this point. But we may be on a slippery path. Trump’s increasingly incendiary tweets and messages constitute an overt assault on freedom of the press, the cornerstone of our democracy.
Whether you agree or disagree with Donald Trump’s policies, all of us must stand up against this.
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They're so old, so weak, so outnumbered, and they're scared shitless.
Most of these old white guys will be dead in 10 years, including Trump.
All we have to do it wait them out.
If we don't keep our shit together, we will go the way of the Weimar Republic. The Trump administration has already put the word out to private for-profit prisons - they want a gulag archipelago with these for-profit concentration camps all over the USA to house the 11 million people the administration intends to round up.
Everything Bannon is doing is to dismantle our democracy because he is operating under a religious ideology. He wants to precipitate an apocalyptic war between Islam and Christianity so that the survivors of whichever is strongest can climb up out of the ashes of worldwide destruction.
Seriously. This is what the motherfucker wants.
I was speaking to a friend of mine who holds local elected office. She happens to be Jewish and we were talking about the camps. I told her about the Bannon apocalypse and said that since I'm not a Christian, I really don't feel like I want to be part of Bannon's wet dream fantasy.
She quipped, "Oh, we won't be part of it...we'll be in the camps!"
