No I have a functioning conscience because I can recognize a monster who has orchestrated the deaths of many human beings for his own enrichment. What you see as people cheering his death is simply the rest of us finally setting down the terrible burden of mourning his life.
We’re not engaged in a disagreement about petty politics or some abstract difference of opinion. In the age of Trump we see the exact contours of the world the national spirit calling itself “conservative” wants to build, and it is a murder nightmare/billionaire playground.
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I'd like everybody to yell at me, so I wrote about the upcoming election.
Or, to put it more specifically, I wrote about what an anti-fascist coalition might look like and how it might fall apart, using the election as a context.
We’re dealing with rising fascism both globally and domestically, as I might have mentioned once or twice recently—“domestically” for me meaning the United States, though maybe you find it is true in your part of the old cosmic blueball, too.
I think there are a lot of people who realize this and agree that it should be stopped, and that’s good for people who want to stop fascism’s rise—people who I am going to assume includes you, the reader of this. Isn’t that nice of me?
Say that the person who was the focus of the rally was a politician, a man who had once been president of the United States, had stopped being president of the United States, and now was running to be president of the United States again.
Say the person was going to use the rally to talk about all the violence he thought should happen, and who he thought the violence ought to happen to. Say all the people who came to the rally came because they liked to cheer at suggestions of violence.
At the U.S./Mexico border, Republicans are defending their right to make themselves feel safe by murdering refugee men, women, and children, using as rationale a once-fringe Nazi conspiracy theory they are promoting.
They’re talking about a civil war in order to protect this "right." And yes, they’re framing it all as self-defense, as if they—the ones eager to murder both foreigners and fellow citizens—are the ones in danger, and the rest of us—who they are eager to murder—are the danger.
And yes, they’re also against antisemitism, they’ll tell you, whenever they aren’t promoting their Nazi conspiracy theory.
Promoting ideas and actions in the name of some fine thing that you don’t believe in and might actually oppose is what is meant when someone says "bad faith."
For example say your name was Elise Stefanik, and you were for example a US Senator
Say also you belong to a political party whose leader is an open fascist who approvingly quotes Hitler in order to promote a conspiracy theory called ‘replacement’ that forms the undergirding bedrock of antisemitism, to better enact eliminationist brutality against refugees.
Now say that, in order to enact eliminationist brutality you find it useful to demolish and discredit things like awareness and knowledge and learning and the concept of knowable truth.
What worries ME is that when the Republicans (who are a fascist party) do what fascists do when opposed (which is baseless retributive retaliation) that pre-defeated cowards like Dowd will blame not them for their fascist acts but those who dared anger fascists with opposition.