Salon - I love my Fox News enemies: What I learned from the most hateful emailers in the world

[Xipe Totec]

A decade ago, I resigned my position as an adjunct professor at Boston College to protest the selection of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the school’s commencement speaker. I did so in an open letter to the Boston Globe, which I dashed off in disgust, on an airplane.

I never expected the Globe to publish this epistle, which excoriated Rice for issuing misleading statements in the run-up to the Iraq War. Nor did I anticipate that the letter, once published, would go viral. But within the next 48 hours more than 500 emails arrived in my inbox.

“Hey [Expletive],” one began, “You are a [expletive] idiot!!! And your daughter in the picture on your website looks like a maggot! You are a disgraceful american [sic] and it would have been so nice if you had been a passenger on one of the planes that crashed into one of the [World Trade Center] towers on 9/11/01.”


http://www.salon.com/2016/01/25/i_love_my_fox_news_enemies_what_i_learned_from_the_most_hateful_emailers_in_the_world/

[underpants]

1. Good read

[Botany]

2. And Trump now channels this anger

Norcross, Georgia 10/10/2015 Trump Speech

[bemildred]

3. That anger comes from the dawning realization that they have been taken for a ride.

And all the noise is to fend that idea off for as long as possible:

Even more striking are the notes in which genuine despair reveals itself beneath the fury.

I think here of the screed I received from an older gentleman, which concluded with this oddly tender confession: “With your comments I wish not to have a happy retirement.”

Whether or not this was a typo, the message was painfully clear: I choose to remain embittered rather than face the disappointment of a happiness that I know is out of reach.

I get the same feeling when I listen to Tea Party activists talk about their lives, or the legions who have thrown in their lot with Trump. There is always a sense of hopelessness lurking beneath the triumphant bluster. The diatribes about taxation or immigrants, the livid sanctification of troops and football players, are really just a way of keeping deeper anxieties at bay.

[nxylas]

4. That reminds me

When was the last time we had a Hate Mail thread on DU?