Trump: ‘Weaponizing the conservative id’
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Several articles published this morning take a look at the alarming rise of overall right-wing thuggery tied to the Trump presidential campaign. Salon looks at the disturbing behavior of The Donald’s vicious sycophants on social media:
As Donald Trump cruised to victory in the Nevada caucuses on Feb. 24, Huffington Post politics reporter Julia Craven sent out a string of tweets expressing the fear she felt at the extremist support Trump has attracted. The responses she received were shocking:
@CurlyCrayy To be fair he will give you the choice between slavery or deportation.
— Franz Soapbar (@franz_soapbar) February 24, 2016
@CurlyCrayy When you're deported to Africa you'll learn what living in a country without white people in power is like. You won't like it.
— Alasdair Mackenzie (@Alasdair202) February 24, 2016
@CurlyCrayy @LampShades4Days We built this country we are taking back what is ours
— Reed Jones (@darkknightva101) February 24, 2016
I don't think we will be able to fit you in the oven. https://t.co/K5uucScnsF
— Christian Copland (@PopulationWatch) February 24, 2016
This is just a small sampling of the disturbing hatred directed at Craven. In the hours following her initial tweets, she received hundreds more racist and aggressive messages from Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, Trumpis trying to place all of the blame on that hippie Bernie Sanders:
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump blames Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders for increasingly frequent disruptions at the GOP hopeful’s massive campaign rallies, and he says he has the answer: Send his supporters to Sanders’ rallies.
Sanders on Sunday offered a reply: Bring ’em on.
Trump took to Twitter on Sunday, writing that the Vermont senator is “lying when he says his disruptors aren’t told to go to my rallies. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!”
The answer followed from Sanders’ official Twitter account: “Send them. They deserve to see what a real honest politician sounds like.”
Heather Digby Parton ties it all together with a terrific essay at Salon about how Trump’s rhetorical incitements and manipulation to place the blame on Democrats is filtering into both conservative and mainstream media:
To those of us who have been closely watching [Trump’s] speeches from the beginning, none of this is unexpected. It’s obvious even through the television that the energy at his rallies is by turns ecstatic and hostile toward minorities. There have been numerous examples of protesters being beaten and manhandled going back at least six months. (Plug “Trump protest” into Youtube to see just how many incidents there are.) And Trump has encouraged it every step of the way. …
There is no evidence at all that the Sanders campaign had anything to do with the Chicago protest, and there has not been even the slightest amount of violent rhetoric or behavior at any Sanders events. Nonetheless, in the right-wing media, the protesters are now called “infiltrators” and “outside agitators” and a narrative is taking shape of normal political protests being acts of sabotage against Trump to deprive him of his constitutional right to free speech. …
At first [the mainstream media] did seem to be shaken by the events of the last couple of weeks as the violence began to escalate at the rallies. But they’re settling back into their usual “both sides do it” groove, which is exactly what Donald Trump is hoping for. …
Welcome back to 1968, politics junkies!
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