Donald Trump’s televised address
“condemning” white supremacy and bigotry should be the kind of thing that from
him rings as hollow as the vacuum of space (between his ears?). “In one voice,
our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy. Hatred warps the
mind, ravages the heart and devours the soul.” Pretty words that he clearly was
incapable of coming up with all by himself, or truly believes himself. Remember
his “denunciation” of bigotry after Charlottesville that was clearly forced on him?
How long did it take him to reverse course? One day? It might take a little
longer for that to happen this time—but probably no longer than his next
campaign rally. With 22 now reported dead from the El Paso mass shooting
specifically targeting Hispanics, Trump’s words ring both false and
hypocritical, and he has only himself to blame. Trump has compromised himself
with his unending stoking of racial animus in his “base,” and he lost any
credibility he ever had in being a source of “healing” in this country the
moment he opened his mouth announcing his intention to run for president in
2015
'.
Trump, like everyone else on the
political right, blames violent video games and “mental illness” for the record
number of mass shootings that have occurred during his presidency, most of them
by white supremacists. Hell, half the country would be suffering from “mental
illness” if the definition of mental illness is what we knew of Patrick Crusius
if you deleted the references to killing from his anti-Hispanic hate manifesto
(which I am certain sounded “logical” to millions), containing the same typical
racist paranoia that Trump and many like-minded people have broadcast
loudly and clearly to the world on a daily basis. So is Trump and his racist
base suffering from “mental illness” too? Is the difference between being
“mentally ill” or not nothing more than actually going out and killing innocent
people just because they belong to a race or “ethnicity” that you hate, rather
than, say, “merely” confronting a Hispanic man and his mother doing yard work
and shouting racist epithets at them, or threatening a black couple with a gun
because they didn’t have a “permit” to have a picnic at a campground?
Were the “ordinary” Germans who
claimed to be “ignorant” of what was going on in the concentration camps and
the handicapped children’s homes right in their own midst suffering from
“mental illness”? How about those who looked away from the Nazi thuggery that
was going on before their very eyes? What about “ordinary” soldiers or police
who “merely” carried out “orders” to commit atrocities? What about “ordinary”
Americans—not just those consumed with racial animus, but even some who style
themselves as "moderate," “liberal” or “progressive” who just go about their self-obsessed
daily lives acting the same way they always do, completely oblivious to
children being warehoused in and sometimes dying in filthy cages, or the latest
carnage wrought in this Trumpian atmosphere of hate, very likely because if
they are white or Asian they have no real motivation (beyond momentary “guilt”)
to change it because they are its technical “beneficiaries” rather than its principle
target? They may even harbor similar beliefs as that of people like Trump and
Crusius, but they are less “dangerous”
because it isn’t their principle “obsession” in life. Still, such “benign” prejudices
do in fact have tangible effects, such as what Trump parolee Dinesh D’Souza
called “rational discrimination,” a phrase he coined to “justify” racial stereotypes
and discrimination.
It is ironic that Trump uses the
term “mental illness” to describe others in order to escape responsibility for words
and actions emanating from his own questionable mental and emotional stability.
“Mental illness” has been used in other contexts as well; in George Orwell’s 1984, it was those perfidious “loners,”
who quietly opposed the rule of “Big Brother,” who after being arrested and
accused of harboring “thought crimes,” and were tortured into something almost
unrecognizable as a human being, and after “reeducation” were obliged
to broadcast to the masses that they had been suffering from “mental illness,”
confessing to a laundry list of made-up crimes. It was “mentally ill” to simply
desire to live and let live without being fed a steady diet of hatred against
whoever or whatever the state decreed was the “enemy” of that moment—always a
group that did not possess recognizably Caucasian features (or was a “traitor”
with a “Jewish” name)—as a means of controlling people by feeding on their
fears, the reasons usually complete inventions. And hatred toward and fear of what group has Trump routinely fed the masses to keep them in line? And who has Trump routinely
accused of being “low IQ” and suffering from “mental illness” for having had the audacity to criticize him for his “Big Brother " proclivities?
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