The piece in question is one published in The Daily Banter. The author is Justin Rosario, self-described as a “center-left Jewish-Puerto Rican atheist liberal.” His essay came out just before Thanksgiving, and he titled it, Yes, You Should Shame Your Trump Voting Relatives At Thanksgiving Dinner
(They’ve gone beyond politics and should be treated like the pariahs they are).
Here are the guts of it, when he explains exactly what your Trump-voting relatives “are”:
They’re the people in Germany who stood by and watched the Jews be herded into concentration camps and murdered. Except they’re worse because at least the Germans had never seen anything like the rise of Hitler before. They had no frame of reference to understand what was happening to their country. Your Donald voting relatives have heard and read about Nazis their entire lives. They know and they didn’t care.
Yes, they will have a million excuses for why they voted for someone they knew was a monster but they’re all bullshit. It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t ISIS. It wasn’t unemployment. It wasn’t Hillary’s emails. It wasn’t Bill’s affairs. It wasn’t Washington corruption. Every single reason they give is a lie and they know it. They wanted one thing and one thing only: To take “their” country back from that fucking n*gger in the White House. That’s it. End of line. Full stop.
Your Donald voting relatives were so freaked out that a black man was president that once Donald told them it was not just permissible to be racist but necessary, they leapt at the chance to put Those People back in their place. And in doing so, they knowingly elected a man that will be all the things they were so afraid Obama was going to be: A tyrant. A dictator. A bully. An autocratic pig that will disregard the rule of law and treat America like his own personal playground. A brutal despot that will silence the media, arrest his political opponents and use the full power of the government to destroy his enemies.
Observations:
1. If anything qualifies as hate speech, this does. Its only objective is to create hate—not illumination, not truth, not perspective, just plain, unreasoning, blind hate. The fact that the objective is to foment hate against one’s own family is especially sinister, and demands attention.
2. Rosario’s objective is the a complete commitment to social schism, assigning the worst qualities imaginable to those whose offense to civilization was disagreeing with the writer’s highly flawed choice for President. No intellectual, qualitative, analytical explanation for the damning vote is conceded: it must only be an endorsement of evil.
3. This is a pure form effort to de-legitimize the Trump victory and impending Presidency by not only demonizing him, but the Republican Party and anyone who voted for him. It is a rejection not just of Trump, but civil debate, democracy, dissent, and opposing political views. Only we are right and good, Rosario believes. They who disagree with us must intend evil, be motivated by evil, are evil.
4. This is, in method and motive, a totalitarian screed—ironic, since among the evils Trump is found summarily guilty of is a totalitarian mindset. It is, in fact, Trump’s opposition which, after labeling him anti-democratic for not pledging to accept the results of the election, is now attempting to undermine the election and democracy in every way possible: seeding fear, protesting the results, demanding a change in the rules, denying the legitimacy of the Electoral College, holding futile recounts, and, of course, “shunning” and denigrating the half the nation and its values.
5. Either Rosario is a world contender for the Lack of Self Awareness Championship, or he is intentionally hypocritical. He engages in racism to accuse others of being racist. He employs hate to accuse others of hate. He makes gross and unsupported assumptions about a man and his supporters, the essence of bigotry.
6. Elsewhere in the same article, the author wields unconscionable and hypocritical weapons against Trump and his supporters, guilt by association, that old standby of red-baiters, prime among them. When Obama’s links to figures like Reverend Wright and William Ayers, and the support of the New Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam were used to tar him in 2008, the left was apoplectic. Now that some unsavory groups and individuals support Trump, the same individuals who defended Obama from guilt by association are using that support to smear Trump.
7. The despicable essay is one of many traveling the web with the purpose of inciting mindless fear in the vulnerable, ignorant, gullible, weak-minded and paranoid. Fear is the main weapon of choice the Left has settled upon to undermine the new, duly-elected President before he has spent a day on the job. The ahistorical and defamatory comparison with Hitler is the prize lie: nothing, and I do mean nothing, Trump has ever done, said or promised either echoes Adolf Hitler or hints of fascism.
8. Anyone who seriously thinks Donald Trump is a “monster” doesn’t know what a monster is. This is an ad hominem attack based on animus rather than truth. Advocating enforcing the immigration laws does not make someone a monster. Admitting that there is an inherent problem allowing into the country many members of a foreign culture that resist assimilation and includes significant numbers of individuals prone to terrorist acts does not make someone a monster. Even blurting out half-baked and constitutionally ignorant ideas for addressing the problem doesn’t come within 500 furlongs of justifying calling someone a monster. Opposing Obamacare doesn’t make someone a monster. The increasing theme of progressive political activism for the past eight years has been that anyone who doesn’t agree with progressive cant is a monster…and that itself is monstrous.
9. Some Ethics Alarms readers get upset when I point this out, but again, the constant last ditch defense against criticism of Barack Obama on the merits (his eight years have been a disaster of historic proportions, especially for his party) is that his critics are racists. This has been used as an illicit tactic to block media criticism, political criticism, and even the barbs of comics and satirists. Never in U.S. history have the deplorable results of a President’s leadership been so out of proportion to the criticism of them, and these are the primary reasons: intimidation and race-baiting. The strategy has been effective, but has come at a terrible cost, gouging deep and widening racial and partisan divisions in society.
9. I believe that Rosario is sincere, and that he is one of those souls who, after eight years of being told that anyone who opposes the President who rammed a massive, expensive, flawed health insurance plan down the public’s virtual maw using a lie to do it (I don’t have to repeat the lie, do I?), does not appreciate being told the national debt would be decreased only to see it raised by a staggering seven trillion dollars…doubts the efficacy of a President who presided over scandalous incompetence in one agency and department after another, usually with no accountability resulting, exchanged five terrorists for a deserter, paid millions for terrorist hostages, and agreed to release billions in funds to a terrorism sponsoring state pledged to wipe Israel off the map in exchange for a promise that past experience says that nation will not keep…doesn’t trust the judgment of a POTUS who let Syria explode into an international disaster after botching an intervention in Libya and destabilized Iraq after it was finally under control and allowed his allies and a partisan and politicized Justice Department to undermine law enforcement and a great deal more…must be a racist, since that is the only reason any sentient citizen would ever find fault with such things.
10. I believe that thus deranged, Rosario really embraced the Bizarro World logic that no informed citizen who eschews the opportunity to vote for an all-white national ticket headed by Presidential candidate who seems incapable of telling the truth, admits in speeches to a Wall Street firm she was paid $600,000 to give that she has a public position and a real position, attacks her opponent for being a sexual predator after she rose to national power through her loyalty to another sexual predator who will follow her into the White House if she gets there, at various times proposes to remove constitutional rights from individuals “under suspicion” without due process of law, to make flag-burning a crime, to limit access to guns or confiscate them like Australia, uses her position as Secretary of State and expected election as President to raise millions from nations expecting favors and assistance, all after pledging to Congress that she would not, and whose surreptitious and bungled violation of her own department’s policies on handling official communications, destruction of likely evidence and trail of lies in an attempt to deny doing so nearly got her indicted and probably should have...could do so without being—wait, what?–a racist.
11. What possible motive could a pundit have for spreading this assertion about half the country, and deliberately promoting it to fellow Clinton voters regarding their own family members? The only one I can see is to try to drive the nation into civil war. What other motive could there be?Trying to divide the nation into incompatible groups based on hate and distrust is unethical. Why do I even have to write that?
12. Speaking of Hitler, how is spreading this outrageous, illogical, hysterical Big Lie to turn children against parents, sibling against sibling, black against white and generation against generation any less sinister than what the Nazis did to turn Germans against the Jews? And Rosario calls Trump a fascist.
13. When I read the revolution-tinged rhetoric from friends who I know—know—to be good and reasonable, if politically naive, too easily manipulated by propaganda, and still trusting of a news media that is untrustworthy, and hear the genuine fear from African-Americans, other minorities, mothers, women, gays and just ordinary Democrats, it is clear that no normal and rational analysis would cause them to let their emotions run wild this way. This fear, which can only exist if one believes that Republicans, conservatives and half the nation would submit to this imaginary Trump-Monster and allow his plans to reduce the U.S. to a Nazi Germany clone, has been created and inflamed by unethical published essays like this.
14. We should not just shrug off these pieces as inconsequential ravings of the hyper-partisan, because they are more than that. There are many of them, and they are tearing the country apart. They are posted with approval in the social media every day, and their poisonous effect is undeniable. The act of rebutting and condemning them is a bi-partisan civic duty.
UPDATE: Just so you don’t think this kind of hysterical fear-mongering is restricted to mouth-foaming wackos, here’s Neil Gabler writing on the website of PBS icon Bill Moyers:
America died on Nov. 8, 2016, not with a bang or a whimper, but at its own hand via electoral suicide…It turned out to be the hate election because, and let’s not mince words, of the hatefulness of the electorate. In the years to come, we will brace for the violence, the anger, the racism, the misogyny, the xenophobia, the nativism, the white sense of grievance that will undoubtedly be unleashed now that we have destroyed the values that have bound us….Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t….
Ethics Alarms 
The second article was not by Bill Moyers but by some other guy, Neil Gabler.
The first article did not have much power in it. It was almost ironic.
But the second article seemed more powerful rhetorically. It was a genuine lament and I think a genuine expression of the *sense* of something lost and gone. Or on the way out. I remember a conversation I had with an older women living in Venezuela who had been part of the Allende movement in Chile in the 70s. She said it was like being in a romance: the excitement, the hope, the daily struggle and stimulation. When it was crushed (and crushed it was) she described a grieving process that went on for years, as happens with lost love. Although I think the Progressive movement is somewhat deranged, and their anthropology is skewed (but then I also think this of many conservatives so-called who write here: your essential views are not THAT different), I can understand their grief. Something radical and strange is taking place and no one, not really, has much of an idea what is happening.
I read recently someone’s opinion that we Alt-Righters, in this person’s opinion, can seem like a sort of inverse version of the classic SJW. I think there is a certain sense to this. It is true that *we* tend to some oversimplification of very complex issues. That we are not very mature in our opinions and our ideas are untested and, in the end, possibly impracticable. And we are also idealists. But I also think that *we* have thought through the essential predicates of the Left-Progressives and deny, perhaps, their particular idealisms. We are forced in a sense to accept how they view us, and instead of rejecting the designations and trying to fight our way from under the condemnations, we take them on, we explain them:
Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans?
There it is: the devilish construct. We DO have all manner of different thoughts about people — other people if you will, the OTHERS — and we do not feel that it is unconscionable to have those thoughts. Instead of *hating* we say we would rather, in the best of all possible worlds, separate. Instead of being an expression of *hate* it is an expression of desire to be free. To go our own way. That IS the view of the Right that I admire. What this means is turning against the mountain of PC that has been extruded on us for a number of generations. Not to like is NOT the same as ‘to hate’.
Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities?
There is very definitely a *conversation* making the rounds among the Right that begins on the predicate that feminism is a radical political doctrine principally linked to Marxist class-struggle. It pits the female against the male and turns man into the ‘class enemy’, the source of evil and brutality in this world. The dread Patriarchy and all that. It is, seen from one angle at least, an evil doctrine and it destroys relatedness and union. OK, so fine. I know many men who speak about what these doctrines and ideologies have done to them. But this is different from ’emasculation’. To be emasculated is something else altogether. It is feminist doctrine that seeks to turn a man into something other than a man! There is where the emasculation begins. And to consciously make women (as in engineer women) not to be women. To become mannish women. But this CONFUSION is a confusion of the entire culture. And if one developes a counter-doctrine against it, why in the name of Heaven should this not be described in positive terms? So, let’s then turn against the emasculating feminists and their destructive doctrines.
The issue of ‘minorities’ is also misstated. It is not that there are ‘minorities’ it is that the flood-gates have been opened to a demographic disaster … for the ethnicity, culture and people who, in fact, founded the country. But you are not allowed to even *see* in those terms. You are not allowed to do the math and see where it goes. I agree that the Alt-Right and the Ultra-Right dramatizes it into ‘white genocide’. But I have no doubt that there is a simmering hatred of whites for being whites and for having ‘done all those terrible things’ in history. Now, we must put ourselves aside and we must seat The Others down at the table. No. It is not going to happen like that.
Therefor: the only sane option is to gain awareness, consciousness, and a renewed sense of historical mission, and to ‘identify’ oneself. It is a peculiar twist on the Black and Brown identity politics. ‘Know your history’ and such.
I suggest that the whole power dynamic has to be reversed. That is a hard statement to make! We must reverse the immigrations trends and, over 50 years, bring things back to the normal that *we* define. That is political power and political will. I hope it happens.
Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool’s paradise. Now we aren’t.
Well, who knew that the conscious, largely Marxist-inspired, social engineering project of the postwar … would come to a point where it was rejected at a somatic level. That the ‘body’ itself would rebel against it? Yes! The world is filled with Wonders. There are, indeed their are, people who do not desire to participate in this grand Universal race-blending project. I’d bet that is 9/10ths of the world’s population, I mean if you really gave them the chance to make their own choice.
Who would have guessed that people seem to wish to rebel against a giant world-scale economic project and the establishment of a great huge world Walmart? Does anyone see that? Whose project is this? Jesus Himself? The very Lord of the Universe?
One by one you can go through their shame-lists and deflate each point. One is better off believeing in people, and even believing and accepting their foibles than in imagining you can simply put them through an ideology-renewal mill like through a dishwasher.
So, as I say, the Alt-Right is reactionary to a whole set of supposed-values. I have watched very interesting ‘hangouts’ (shared video meetings between up to 10 people) where young men and women — nice thoughtful people — are talking about how they have turned against the liberal paradigm. And if it means any thing to you, they do indeed, in their ‘best of all worlds’, want to live in WHITE COMMUNITIES. That is what they say. And they explain themselves. It is not *hate*. It is intelligence.
Thanks for that correction: I saw the name on the home page, and missed the by-line. Of course, since it’s under Moyers’ name, one must assume he approves…unless he’s like Newsweek, and didn’t bother to read it.
It includes a part of this Auden poem ( I like him because he is accesdible and I understand his poems): https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/september-1-1939
He writes his article in the same mood as the poem!
It’s likely to become dangerous too, unless I and those like me can hold back the mob. I have enough on combatting those like you without having to deal with others who in a universe next door would be bombing abortion clinics instead of nazi rallies. Only the label changes, the underlying philosophy’s pretty much the same. “We have right on our side, so no enormity is forbidden, and the enemy is not really human.”
You can be sure that if I do get concrete warning of such things, both police and prospective victims will be informed, no matter how much I oppose them. Not just police, for they might be unwilling to accord the matter the priority it deserves.
I make a lousy activist, don’t I?
Irrationality appears to be contagious.
I also think you ain’t seen nuthin yet. The anger is growing, not diminishing.
The words in that article are words, nothing more. Meanwhile, the number of gay kids actually ejected from home, not merely ostracised at family reunions, has grown almost exponentially in the last year. Actions, not words, and no-one has given a damn about it.
So have murders of trans people, a new record set this year, breaking last year’s record high, at a time when rates of homicides overall were decreasing.
The President elect has stated that he can and has been allowed to get away with sexual assault, has mocked the disabled, has nominated for cabinet positions some of the most extreme bigots ever to disgrace the halls of power.
This has consequences. Things will get a heck of a lot worse, the Left adopting the worst of the unrepresentative Right’s evils, because the representative, sane and reasonable Right has shown that that’s OK now.
I’ll quote Nietzsche for the umpteenth time. “Those who fight monsters must beware they too don’t become monsters thereby.”
This article is monstrous.
Someone has to break the cycle. Someone has to take the high road, I don’t care which side, just to restore sanity and simple human decency.
I don’t see it happening anytime soon, not on the Left. Too much anger. Too much swallowing of pride and taking the high road in the past, while others on the Left undermine them by stupidities like “pizza in the shape of a gun” and “zero tolerance”. Trivial idiocies compared with murder rates, and blatantly discriminatory legislation, but not trivial at all to those concerned, the victims of this crap. Too many on the Left haven’t seen these injustices, they only see the Right’s faults. Too many see “shot for walking while black” and not the many more cases of police putting their lives on the line to battle the black thugs who infest the ghettoes.
There is an enormous wellspring of rage, slowly gathering momentum, and it scares the bejeezus out of me, and others whose loyalty to simple respect, decency, humanity and ethics outweighs Left and Right team partisanship. I don’t see us stopping it this time, and have no idea where it will lead. Nowhere good.
The rusty wire that holds the cork that keeps the anger in breaks free, and suddenly it’s day again.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Maybe I’m the worst, because I have a passionate intensity of conviction trying to reverse this tsunami of Leftist rage. I’m losing though, my best efforts hardly making a dint.
You can’t try to attribute hate crimes to Trump’s words, and then shrug off this hatefest as mere words. We allow free speech, but not under the delusion that words are impotent.
Words aren’t impotent, but I’d rather face them than bullets. The situation is not symmetrical.
Maybe this will explain – my concern now is not a repetition of the 1921 Tulsa pogrom.
It’s that KKK meetings may be greeted with ambush and Machinegun fire.
Its that Nazi meetings may get carbombed. Its that political assassinations may become as commonplace as school massacres. Its that being on the alt-right may become as dangerous as being Trans, with homicide rates 17 times that of the general population.
It’s wrong when one side does it, and the Right hardly ever does it any more, only a few loonies like McVeigh. It’s wrong if the other side does it too.
The normal rules have been suspended now.
Violence against those who are well-organized and well-armed is likely to be met with more of the same. Go ahead, ambush a meeting of already none-too-stable white supremacists. I guarantee you there will be Black Panther and BLM ambushes. Set off a carbomb at a meeting of a group associated with the right, but don’t be surprised when a mosque or some other place associated with the left or their causes goes “boom.”
Michael Collins was very successful against the army that had defeated the best one in Europe by making his own rules and targeting those who made his enemies effective. Go ahead, push the envelope, but don’t complain when some obnoxious gay writer is beaten to death with a crowbar in a “robbery gone bad” or some anti-American black minister is surrounded by three men with guns and shot dead on his way to his car. Don’t be surprised if the right takes it a step farther and some of these wacky left politicians start getting shot or bombed.
This isn’t a game, any more than it was a game back in school when the same guy kept harassing and insulting me day in and day out until I snapped, hit him in the mouth, and broke his jaw and three teeth (and two fingers, in a collision between the jaw and the hand the hand is not going to do well).
Back in the 1960s they talked about a race war coming. I dunno about that, but this kind of talk is making it look more and more like a civil war between the right and left might be in the offing. The fuel has been gathered and articles like this are sowing sparks. All it’s going to take is one of them to catch.
P.S. I looked up Tulsa, which isn’t too well known. It was a huge race riot, but using the term “pogrom” will not get you there in a search, as “pogrom” is typically reserved for attacks targeting the Jewish community.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but it was not Bill Moyers foaming at the mouth. Neal Gabler was the author.
Already flagged and fixed. It was on Bill’s website, which is what fooled me. Sounded like Bill, too.
It sounded so much like Bill, I’d be surprised if he didn’t ghost-write it.