1/ I think everyone would prefer that the day-to-day political discourse in this country not descend into hostility and that people could speak rationally to one another about their differences. A few problems though...
2/ First off, these "differences" are not boiler-plate types, like disagreeing over tax policy or trade or the military budget or any number of other things. The differences now are quite literally about whether you support splitting families and denying them due process...
3/ They're about whether sending kids 1000s of miles from parents w/no clear plan 2 reunite them is 2b considered OK. Whether it's OK 2 say that some among the Nazis in C'ville were 'fine people.' or 2 call black/brown nations "shitholes" while calling 4 more Norwegians...
4/ ...Whether it's acceptable to call immigrants animals who are invading or infesting the nation. And the bottom line is, the people who continue to work for this president are saying those things ARE ok with them...
5/ And most of his voters, who stick with him no matter what he says or does, are saying those things are OK. So then the question becomes, at what point does the endorsement of something truly evil justify public shaming and verbal pushback?...
6/ What is the proper threshold? Because I can't assume there isn't one, for everyone, somewhere. So where is the line? And why hasn't this administration crossed it?...
7/ Secondly, let's remember that Dems and even insufficiently Tea-partyish Republicans were verbally harangued in public during the Obama years, not bc the president was doing anything evil, but bc he was pushing for a health care plan, previously endorsed by Mitt Romney...
8/ One would think differences over the proper role of government in health care would have been one of those issues on which cooler heads could prevail and differences could be addressed without shaming or public attack...but they weren't...
9/ And now the right clutches its pearls over a trend they started and perfected. It was one of theirs who shouted "you lie" at the president during the state of the union. Before that, it was right-wing radio hosts who said, among other things...
10/ That they would like to kill Rep Charles Rangel with a shovel (Beck), that Obama was looking to take farms away from white people like Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe (Limbaugh) or purposely tanking the economy as payback for slavery (Limbaugh and Beck both)...
11/ Or that immigrants were 2 blame 4 the swine flu epidemic and leprosy (Savage and Dobbs), or that Obama "hated white people" (Beck again), among other things. These kinds of attacks became normative, and those hearing them followed suit, repeating the same stuff constantly...
12/ And then Trump comes along and violates every rule of civility that ever existed. He calls women fat and slobs, calls Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, says a Mexican American judge can't be impartial bc of his ethnicity, mocks a disabled reporter...
13/ And calls on his fans to physically assault protesters, and promises he would even pay their legal bills for doing so. And this isn't even to get into what he admitted DOING, not just saying, to women...
14/ And again, his minions heard him loud and clear and started parroting him on those things: wearing shirts at rallies that called Hillary Clinton the c-word, and "fuck your feelings," and "Trump that bi--h!"...
15/ ...while others shouted blatantly racist things at people of color in their presence or vile rants at the media covering the rallies (all of this is on video) & then, we had story after story of KIDS chanting "build the wall" at Latino/a students during athletic events...
16/ And most recently, an old friend of mine reported that his middle schooler's multiracial tour group at the Smithsonian was confronted by some kids in a much whiter group wearing MAGA gear, one of whom thanked 1 of the black kids for picking his cotton shirt...
17/ In other words, when you initiate such an intense level of incivility and even outright hatred, you really can't claim to be the victim. Whether or not one thinks public shaming is effective is one thing. But 2 act like this is a left creation is an inversion of reality...
