“Fuck you, you Trump -supporting fascist!”
––Ethics Alarms troll “David” signing off after being banned
Why is this just an “ethics quote” instead of an “unethical quote”? I chose that designation because the line is invaluable information, revealing the crippling delusions at the heart of the implacable Trump-deranged that swarm around us.
“David” entered the fray here demonstrating some rhetorical ability and intelligence. It became clear, however, that he was here only as a hostile adversary and an advocate, not to explore ethics issues but to confront those whose analysis didn’t mesh with his pre-determined ideological and partisan biases, which proved unshakable. They also manifested themselves in trolling and sealioning tactics to relentlessly push a single narrative, the one that the news media, the resistance, Democrats and, to significant extent, Trump himself has fostered by his own incurable trolling habit.
The sequence that produced that quote goes like this. Trump is a bad person, and thus anything he is accused of, anything harmful that is predicted about his future conduct, any malign motives or intent that is attributed to him. must be true regardless of the sources and irrespective of facts. The confluence of these presumed vile acts, confident predictions and bad motives and intent points to racism, lust for power, instability, a thirst for revenge, and determination to topple the democracy. This, in turn, “proves ” that Trump is a super-villain out of Marvel Comics, and driven by fascist aspirations.
Anyone—like me—who points out how double standards, projection, hypocrisy and irrational hate have been used against Trump to a dangerous and unprecedented degree, that the impeachments were garbage, that his entire term was deliberately crippled by a biased press and constant well-poisoning by Democrats and the “resistance” (I just reviewed the outrage heaped on Mich McConnell when he said that the goal of his party would be to ensure Barack Obama was a single term President. The head of the DNC condemned his comments as “un-American” and “disgusting.” Good times, good times…), is “supporting” Trump, a fascist villain, making such “supporters” fascists themselves.
This is how these people think, and it cripples any critical analysis skills they might have once had. It is literally the same kind of brain-lock that creates intractable racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or any other prejudice. It doesn’t matter what Donald Trump does, what matter is what he is. And what his foes think he is has been concocted, stirred, and power-washed into the brains of previously reasonable people terrified of being called “fascists” themselves by their friends and colleagues.
I just had a conversation with someone I know very well who now reasons like this. She really thinks that when Trump is elected President, his intent will be not to allow another election. What did Trump do in his first term that would justify that belief? Trump’s four years witnessed far fewer blatant incursions on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution than the Biden administration has attempted. “Maybe,” she said, “but the next term will be different.” Oh. And how did she know that? “Because all he cares about is power and being worshiped.”
There it is again: what he is, according to years of Big Lies and false narratives, and not what he has done. This was how Trump was convicted in the Manhattan kangaroo court trial.
Of course, next the conversation shifted into Trump’s post-election tantrum. When my debate partner conceded that, okay, he didn’t lead the riot, she quickly pivoted to “but he wanted it to block Biden’s certification.” This is the fascinating dichotomy that was often evident in the demonizing of the previous GOP President, George Bush II: he was supposed to be both an evil genius and a moron simultaneously. No drunken, bear spray -wielding mob was going to accomplish anything, and Trump certainly realized that. He should have pursued legal appeals of the obviously insecure and untrustworthy election machinations rationalized as pandemic measures, but those law suits were long-shots. When the court efforts failed, his responsible course was to shut up, concede, be gracious, and behave like an adult. But there were plenty of valid reasons for him to feel he had been jobbed, and part of Trump’s weird package is that he is incapable of accepting any defeat with grace or civility. It still doesn’t make him a fascist, or prove that he had plotted a futile bear-spray coup. Moreover, any President who sincerely believes an election has been tampered with has a Constitutional obligation to act to ameliorate the damage, if possible. It wasn’t possible, but refusing to accept reality is another feature of the Donald Trump package. Sometimes it serves him well. In this case, it did not.
But the Trump Deranged won’t, and can’t even process that degree of nuance, because it means according the previous President some basic respect as a human being, something they refuse to do.
And that’s why people like David think I am a fascist when I evaluate the unethical way Donald Trump has been and is treated by Democrats, journalists, pundits, academics, historians and others exactly as I would evaluate similar behavior against anyone else. He doesn’t deserve the same consideration as someone else. He doesn’t deserve ethical treatment. He doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. He’s evil. EVIL!!!!
Visitors to Ethics Alarms who reason this way are useless to the colloquy here, indeed destructive to it. I kept trying to convince myself that “David” was arguing in good faith and from a position with some factual rather than a purely emotional orientation. His response to being banned neatly demonstrated that this was a false, indeed naive hope.
These are the people who will vote for a senile, failed President being manipulated by totalitarians, bigots, socialists and Marxists.
Good to know.
Ethics Alarms 
Reading this, I ccan’t help but wonder if any of the above-mentioned are lawyers. I mean, don’t lawyers have to have a firm grasp of formal logic to be effective at their jobs? And wouldn’t this inoculate them against this kind of thinking?
While I cannot answer for lawyers, there are plenty of Trump deranged engineers, and we sure get trained in logic, critical-thinking, and evaluation of consequences of our thought processes. This training does not inoculate us from our own biases. Indeed, biases manage to short circuit the training.
Jack is fond of saying biases make us stupid, and certainly today’s society proves it. I cannot tell you how frustrated I get when a trained engineer tells me that electric cars will solve all our problems. No one with the training I went through should say that electric cars are a universal solution. They should be able to calculate life cycle pollution, understand vehicle weight issues with roadways, realize the limitations of battery technology, mineral scarcity, and electrical grid load. However, by the time we get our intensive training in logic, critical thinking, and more, we have also been inundated in “global climate change” mass hysteria. The biases I saw my fellows come out with was amazing, even as I was standing there with the damn numbers.
For another example, many left leaning engineers and accountants believe the bunk that oil companies shouldn’t get tax breaks for depreciation of assets because ‘no one else’ does. Yeah, that whole section in all the required Econ classes on depreciation and tax law must have been purged from their brains to believe that. On the other hand, when much your training includes “cultural context” courses, you get a full EVIL OIL COMPANIES treatment, which rather lessens the value of learning to think critically when biases are intended to be ingrained in you.
Higher education has become a joke. It is now more about indoctrinating you in progressive bias than teaching you how to think logically and applying that to life. When I was in college, in a conservative establishment (comparatively at least), there was still intense indoctrination against critical thinking on certain topics. My professor and his group of grad students (including me) got shut down from our research because it was focused on items against the prevailing winds. We had some good data on a way to have made the US independent in the electricity, transportation, and chemical sectors for about 200 years and with the then-current electricity prices, chemical prices and oil at $90-110 a barrel equivalent, after adjusting each for inflation. We needed to pilot our ideas out further and do some triple checks of our assumptions, but the initial passes checked out. We even limited ourselves to old technology that had been in use, at that point for no less than 80 years, to keep confidence high and speculation low. However, the indoctrination centers disliked our project due to it not following the political winds, shut our work down, and chased us out. That was over a decade ago. Look at where we are now.
Bias not only makes you stupid, but it keeps your training from being engaged. Now, higher education truly sees itself as an indoctrination facility, no longer teaching how to think, but what to think. I doubt that lawyers are any more immune to this than engineers are.
Indeed, engineers’ process or decision-making is far more formal and inflexible than lawyers, virtually the opposite of legal reasoning. They should be more immune to this phenomenon. But non-ethical considerations are powerful.
Comment of the Day, Sarah.
I don’t know about “David,” but the second individual I mentioned is a lawyer, and a good one.
But remember, lawyers are also trained as advocates, and they can convince themselves while they are making a case, even if the case is lousy.
Ah, the “Alamo” position taken by those unable to honestly debate a position – insults.
Do these people who believe Trump is evil know that the liberal glitterati embraced the Donald when he was giving to their causes. At one time even the ladies on the View held him in high esteem and was often a welcome guest on their show.
So what do you call a group of people who require absolute obedience to their way of thinking or else they will do whatever it takes to destroy you? I have several words for that.
Exactly. I have thought this many times, and it was a reason I was so reluctant to vote for President Trump in 2016. I believed I was being set up by a lifelong Democrat wearing a Republican moniker…a true RINO. Years before he was a media darling. He got cameos in movies, guest appearances everywhere, and had a hugely-successful show.
He really wasn’t all that conservative and I was afraid his “willingness to work with both parties” would effectively mean “commander-in-chiefing to the liberal view.” I voted for him in ’16 because I could not – would not – vote for Sec. Clinton. I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it: had President Biden been the Democratic nominee in ’16, I would have voted for him.
President Trump was someone with whom Democrats could have worked; his history as a Democrat meant he was open to their ideas. And had he lost in 2016, he would still be popular, he would still be a guest on “The View” and “Late Night” and “Letterman”, and he might still have a TV show.
But the day he dared to beat Hillary Clinton in the election that she was supposed to dominate, everything changed. When he came out and addressed his gathering at what?…3am or something?…he became a pariah, “beyond salvage” (as Robert Ludlum was apt to write), a President-elect worthy of destruction.
And since then, we have watched our family members, our friends, our co-workers, our elected leaders, our celebrities, our teachers, (in some cases) our preachers, our professors, and most tragically, our lawyers and judges, set aside ethics, reason, and even the law itself in the single most destructive attempt to “get that man” that we have maybe ever seen.
As for “David” and his ilk, it’s rather humorous to be labeled a “fascist” by a group of people whose totalitarian desires and actions have only been bested by their heroes that they refuse to name aloud: Hilter, Stalin, Mao, Amin, and those like them.
Conservative activists at the time were concerned that a President Trump could easily be goaded into picking fights with the Republicans leadership in Congress, a strategy they expected the Dem leadership to pursue should he actually be elected. Like, if a particular policy supported by Democrats had a bare majority of support among the American population, a President Trump would go all in support of the policy, and pick fights with Republicans who objected.
Even as Dem talking heads were yapping about how Trump was a fifth columnist for Russia, both these activists and the Republican leadership were expecting the Dem leadership to provoke Trump into picking fights with other Republicans.
It was not until the Mueller investigation was announced that the game plan became obvious to them.
Conjecture from where I live:
White culture tends to avoid displaying emotion.
Black culture tends to elevate loud spoken emotion to a position of honor.
The people who are anti-Trump are people who are afraid of facially expressed emotion and tone of voice.
When I was about 11 years old, my grandparents’ church showed a movie called “The Hiding Place” about a Dutch family that hid Jews from the Nazis. I was fascinated by the idea that there could exist a country so very unlike America where people could be punished for helping others. Since I was already very interested in history, I began what is now a 40-plus-year study of the Third Reich and Hitler, in particular.
I do not consider myself an expert; however, I am certainly more knowledgeable than the average layperson. I have read hundreds of books over the years concerning Nazi Germany and not just the military build-up and harassment of Jews. I’ve read a lot about the culture, the education and the day-to-day life of Germans.
And, of course, I’ve read multiple biographies of Hitler himself. Not every biography is created equal, though (Don’t get me started on movies about Hitler. The last one I tried to watch was a TV movie called “Hitler: The Rise of Evil” starring an otherwise fine actor named Robert Carlyle. I turned it off after 10 minutes due to the blatant misrepresentations and outright fabrications of Hitler’s early life. Apparently, the expert consultant had his name taken off of it for the same reason). Some biographies are pretty bad and postulate things that are not likely to be true. A good example of this are the ones that try to push the idea that Hitler was a homosexual.
There is no evidence that he was gay. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Hitler, it’s not necessary to stretch imagination to make up other things. It’s also rather homophobic, isn’t it? “Hitler was a psychopathic bigot with delusions of grandeur who started the most destructive war in human history…and he was a homosexual!”.
Let me be plain here because my fascination with this period of history is often misunderstood: Adolf Hitler was a terrible person who caused terrible things to happen. His end came entirely too late and history should lament that not enough people realized how toxic his leadership was sooner when removing him without bloodshed was still possible.
But a lie about Hitler is still a lie.
And a lie about Trump is still a lie.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Donald Trump. The so-called resistance – Democrats and their allies in the news media, the entertainment industry, academia and other influential institutions in our country – seem determined to attribute every negative characteristic possible to him, up to and including that he is literally Hitler.
There is no evidence that Trump will get rid of the Constitution, begin herding dissenters into re-education or concentration camps or turn the country into a theocracy (that last one is ludicrous on its face. Anyone who thinks Trump is anything more than what Richard Dawkins recently referred to as a cultural Christian is deluded). But that same so-called resistance has been propagandizing relentlessly for 8 years now so there are people out there like your debate partner who think that hurting Trump is a good thing, regardless of the damage it does to our institutions in the process. If you lie about Trump, it’s okay because Trump is evil – like Hitler – so they’re good lies. If you point out that they are lies, you must be a Trump acolyte and are evil just like he is just like I get sideways looks from people who think I’m “defending Hitler” when I point out that it is unlikely that he was gay and that, no, he did not hate his mother.
The trouble is that people like your friend don’t realize they’ve been propagandized to believe the lies. It’s almost as if there’s a bureaucracy out there intent on disseminating generalizations about other people in order to keep in office those with whom they are politically aligned. There have been countries throughout history in which things like that have happened. I’m sure I will think of a good example of one soon.
And, yet, you are the one called a fascist.
That’s two Comments of the Day already on this post. And I almost didn’t write it…
This was superb, Golden. Thank you for taking the time.
Yep…very very good. And I watched “The Hiding Place” in church as a child as well, but it was the mini-series “The Winds of War” that ultimately sparked my fascination with the WWII era.
For me, it was seeing the previously censored footage of the liberated concentration camps George Stevens filmed in “Judgement at Nuremberg,” which had never been offered to the general public before.
“Night Will Fall,” produced in 2014, is an absolute must see documentary. In part “… the 1945 documentary for the British government was produced by Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock’s participation. For nearly seven decades, the film was shelved in the British archives and was abandoned without a public screening–for either political reasons or shifted Government priorities–to be ultimately completed by a team of historians and film scholars of the British Imperial War Museum, who meticulously restored the original footage.”
It is some of the most horrific footage I have ever seen; and yet I felt compelled to bear witness.
“It is some of the most horrific footage I have ever seen; and yet I felt compelled to bear witness.”
Along those lines, I would add Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine and In Darkness
PWS
Speaking of Treblinka, if you can find Steiner’s book “Treblinka”, it’s worth a read. I’ve gone through it twice…it’s pretty horrifying, but worth your time.
It is literally the same kind of brain-lock that creates intractable racism, sexism, anti-Semitism or any other prejudice.
I must wonder if these people have some psychological need to be against something.
With my relative absence recently (still reading just haven’t commented much) I didn’t have the pleasure to read any of David’s comments, that might have been “fun”.
They’re still up, except for the one that banned him and the ones that followed.
I wouldn’t know where to start.
There’s a 100 comment post that has most of it I think.
I found it.
I think we should get used to this. I’m pretty darned sure the treatment the Dems have cooked up for Trump will be deployed against any and every Republican candidate. This is not anything peculiar to “TRUMP!” Don’t be fooled, Trump’s primary shortcoming is … he’s not a Democrat. Remember, this was all precipitated by Hillary Clinton’s having been unceremoniously denied her birthright as the first woman president. That’s what pushed all these deranged people over the edge. They will only be placated if there is never, ever another Republican president. They’ll deploy the same play book against even an anodyne Republican like Rubio or Youngkin. To use one of their annoying phrases, this is “the new normal.” Ugh.
I can’t argue with that. Remember when McCain and Romney were would-be fascists, too? Remember when it wasn’t ageism to criticize Bob Dole’s age?
They would have treated any Republican the same way. We know this because of how they handled losing the 2000 and 2004 elections. The only difference is that Trump inexplicably makes it easier for them to harass him.
He’s not a career politician, AM. He’s a salesman and a wise guy. But he has good basic instincts about what’s good and not good for the country. But as you say, this relentless and unbridled pursuing of Republican presidential candidates is not anything new. Come to think of it, it dates back to Richard Nixon, certainly Barry Goldwater, and perhaps even Herber Hoover.
-bert.
Remember, this was all precipitated by Hillary Clinton’s having been unceremoniously denied her birthright as the first woman president.
After the 2016 election, in the comments section of Cleveland Plain Dealer articles (which has since been removed), my longtime Usenet ally, Christopher Charles Morton, compared the Democrats to the German ultrarightwing circa 1919.
He never found out how right he was.
Jack wrote, “The sequence that produced that quote goes like this. Trump is a bad person, and thus anything he is accused of, anything harmful that is predicted about his future conduct, any malign motives or intent that is attributed to him. must be true regardless of the sources and irrespective of facts. The confluence of these presumed vile acts, confident predictions and bad motives and intent points to racism, lust for power, instability, a thirst for revenge, and determination to topple the democracy. This, in turn, “proves ” that Trump is a super-villain out of Marvel Comics, and driven by fascist aspirations.”
I have a very conservative buddy, a long term card carrying Republican and a past elected Republican politician, that I has voted for Trump twice and after the riot on January 6th he was consumed by the anti-Trump rhetoric and is now an anti-Trump activist. For this person, I think the riot at the Capitol was the straw that broke the proverbial camels back. It seems to me that he now ignores any reasonable argument about Trump and has climbed on the anti-Trump bandwagon resorting to the same kinds of political left narratives (propaganda) that he once openly condemned and now he appears to be eating his own because of some level of TDS.
As an non-partisan, critically thinking, and logical minded independent that leans conservative maybe even a little Libertarian, depending on the questionnaire, I view what the political left has done regarding Trump as pure unethical and immoral totalitarian minded persecution, and yes I really do mean immoral. That doesn’t mean that I’ll vote for Trump out of retaliation; at this point in time, it would take an unpredictable act of God, an extraordinary turn of events, for me to vote for Trump or Biden (I can add Kennedy to that list now) in the 2024 general election.
I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but I truly can’t see a positive outcome for the 2024 election.
This is not the first David or Tom we’ve had on this blog, and they typically follow the same path.
The new David will fixate on one item, one phrase, one comment — typically these days it is something concerning Trump — and they will write a provocative comment that they believe refutes the thing, or shows how evil Trump is.
When someone or someones respond, the David will respond (usually at length). Every time someone in the commentariat replies, the David will shoot back at least one reply.
The problem we have is that their replies are typically nonresponsive or irrelevant to what we said. They will ignore facts, just assert ‘it isn’t so’ or seize upon a tiny aspect of what was said and use that as a straw man to refute something that in fact wasn’t ever really asserted.
And the David will do this over and over and over and over, implying bad faith or our part or that we are just putting him down because we are racist, homophobic, transphobic, humanophobic, misogynistic, or whatever the ‘crime’ du jour might be.
As we have seen many times, the Davids are almost impossible to stop until their cross a red line with Jack — and he will actually enforce his red lines, albeit generally with plenty of warnings.
==============
My suggestion for the future (and we know this won’t be the last David), is after a point we should try to put a lid on a given topic and stop responding. To be sure, that’s a really tough ask but I don’t know how else to handle it.
I have to say, as well, that we’ve had commenters here who are able to disagree without being monomaniacal about it and we can engage and respect those folks.
Generally, I find limiting replies to replies to three. After that, it’s usually big-time diminishing returns.
In other words, “Don’t feed the trolls”?
Pretty much. These folks typically self-identify as trolls pretty quickly, and after that it is a futile effort trying to engage with them.