Man, it never fails, does it? Whenever the Right-wingers are in a tough contest, they go for the hate. Is there a group in the population that a lot of people are suspicious or afraid of? Is there a group that has traditionally been hated, looked down on, or discriminated against? The Right will demonize it for votes, and way too often that tactic works. It’s why they keep it up. It’s like the explanation for the persistence of evil I read many years ago: Evil persists because it works. The principle is simple: MAKE THE SUSPECT GROUP “THE OTHER”. This is the mentality produced by reducing a group of our fellow humans to The Other:
They’re not like us!
They might not even be humans!
They don’t belong here!
They are not part of our group/neighborhood/town/region/country.
They are a danger!
They are a threat!
They must be controlled...or expelled...or, if necessary, physically exterminated.
And if you wanted an example of evil, a prime example of reducing people to The Other, the Orgasm of Hate at Madison Square Garden on Sunday (27 October 2024) reminds us that the MAGA “movement” is built on nothing else, really. People who are filled with grievances (real or imaginary), angry about their own lives, seeking to blame others for their own mistakes, and/or indoctrinated by Right-wing hate media make up the core of the MAGAS. We saw them in action, led by the most gruesome array of speakers since the last big Nuremberg rally. Naturally, I have examples:
Come at me, bro.
The “comedian” at the Trump rally:
His now famous “joke”:
This lovely man:
I did not know this about Kamala:
An entire thread, if you can take it:
And now we get to the heart of the matter:
The main focus of MAGA hatred is the immigrant/undocumented population. I’ve seen a lot of hate in American politics. I thought George Wallace’s racist 1968 campaign was the worst I’d seen. But Trump’s savage war on immigrants makes Wallace look tame and tolerant by comparison.
Trump Promises Immigrants He Wants to Deport Will Get Serial Numbers
Immigrants are no longer welcome in Donald Trump’s America. Instead, the Republican presidential nominee posited that under his potential second administration, he would round up and mass-deport noncitizens based on their “serial numbers.”
Speaking with Full Measure’s Sharyl Attkisson, Trump argued that the United States—which was founded by and has historically been a nation of immigrants—shouldn’t be a “dumping ground” for newcomers.
“But we’re getting the criminals out, and we’re going to do that fast, and we know who they are, and the local police know their names, and they know their serial numbers,” Trump said. “They know everything about them.”
Trump has regularly mimicked Adolf Hitler during his campaign. But the mention of serial numbers—a terrifying echo of the identification numbers forcibly tattooed on concentration camp prisoners—is one of his most chilling references yet.
The ugliness of Trump’s hatred is simply obscene. Trump (and Vance) demonize immigrants so viciously that I can scarcely believe this is America anymore. To wit:
Trump’s ridiculous claim that “millions” of immigrants came illegally from jails, mental facilities
JD Vance wrongly blames rural hospital closures on immigrants in the country illegally
Trump says migrants who have committed murder have introduced ‘a lot of bad genes in our country’
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Monday suggested that migrants who are in the U.S. and have committed murder did so because “it’s in their genes.” There are, he added, “a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It’s the latest example of Trump alleging that immigrants are changing the hereditary makeup of the U.S. Last year, he evoked language once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump made the comments Monday in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. He was criticizing his Democratic opponent for the 2024 presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, when he pivoted to immigration, citing statistics that the Department of Homeland Security says include cases from his administration.
Trump Doubles Down on Lies About Haitian Immigrants Eating Pets
Fact-checking Over 12,000 of Donald Trump’s Statements About Immigration
Donald Trump knows how important his words about unauthorized immigrants are.
“Migrant criminals.” “Illegal monster.” “Killers.” “Gang members.” “Poisoning our country.” “Taking your jobs.” “The largest invasion in the history of our country.”
Repetition has been core to Trump’s speech throughout his political career. The Marshall Project used text analysis to identify 13 major claims about immigration in over 350,000 of Trump’s public statements from Factba.se, some of which Trump has made 500 times or more. All of them are untrue or deeply misleading.
Research has shown that as someone hears a statement more times, it feels more true.
Trump claims that:
▪ Unauthorized immigrants are criminals [said 575+ times], snakes that bite [35+ times], eating pets, coming from jails and mental institutions [560+ times], causing crime in sanctuary cities [185+ times], and a group of isolated, tragic cases prove they are killing Americans en masse [235+ times].
▪ They are stealing Americans’ public benefits [270+ times] and jobs [155+ times].
▪ He has to build a wall [675+], and mass deportations are acceptable because Eisenhower did it [50+ times].
There is so much more that The Marshall Project has.
From Boston University School of Public Health:
The Trump campaign often points to immigration as the cause of issues in the United States, including overcrowding of hospitals.
While hospital wait times have increased in recent years, there is no evidence that immigrants are driving the increase.SPH's Paul Shafer tells the New York Times that the more relevant causes include an aging population, a decline in the number of hospitals and beds, staffing shortages across the health care system, poor access to and underinvestment in primary care and increased severity of patients showing up to emergency departments
White House calls Trump's claim FEMA disaster relief money spent on migrants 'absolutely false'
In Tucson stop, Donald Trump vows to launch massive deportation effort
Trump said undocumented immigrants and refugees were “raping and sodomizing” [my emphasis] American women, and “walking off with pets.”
“We are being conquered and occupied by a foreign element,” said the Republican candidate.
‘‘The Mack-haired Jewish youth lies in wait for hours on end, satanically glaring at and spying on the unsuspicious girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood and removing her from the bosom of her own people ... I have a nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by repulsive, crooked-legged Jew bastards . . .” Adolf Hitler
Fact Check: Trump Falsely Claims ‘100%’ Of New Jobs Under Biden Went To ‘Illegal Migrants’
The former president told a crowd at the Economic Club of New York [in September] that “we have an economic disaster on our hands,” and restated his false claim that “100% of the jobs created under this administration has gone to illegal migrants that came into our country.”
Trump and other Republicans have continuously falsely said job growth under Biden has been “virtually 100%” from illegal immigration, which is not true as the number of employed American-born people in the workforce has grown about 6% under Biden and the number of employed foreign-born people in the workforce has grown 22%.
Despite Trump’s claims, data shows migrants aren’t taking jobs from Black or Hispanic people
Migrants with criminal records - what new US data shows
Trump said that the 13,000 convicted of killing someone entered the US under the Biden-Harris administration, but the ICE figures do not state when these people came to America.
The DHS said: "The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this [Biden-Harris] administration."...
The numbers were previously published in June 2021, five months into the Biden presidency, which showed there were 405,431 convicted criminals on the list at that time.
Before that, an official report published in August 2016, towards the end of Barack Obama's presidency, showed 368,574.
So, the list grew by almost 37,000 over five years, which includes Trump’s term in office. [Emphasis added]
The indefatigable Daniel Dale is on the case:
Trump’s Racist Rants against Immigrants Hide under the Language of Eugenics
Eugenic thinking and attitudes remain widespread in the worst parts of popular culture, however, a relic of the past century plainly evident in calls from Trump for more immigrants from Norway, and in attacks on immigrants from Haiti in Ohio and Pennsylvania, made by Vance and Trump. Racist nostalgia for Jim Crow baked into the “Make America Great Again” movement walks on a throughline from the eugenics era and comes dressed in its language. As does the claim that immigrants are “replacing” white voters, a moral panic born of the eugenics era.
The ugliest thing about the specter of eugenics is why Trump and his fellow immigrant-hating partisans keep spouting its dead, discredited nonsense: because it is popular. To everyone’s shame, racism thrives in a significant part of the population, which cloaks prejudices in the leftover language of eugenics. Just so, Trump and his allies deploy that shameful era of science when he disparages immigrants as murderers with “bad genes.”
Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini
In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
Oh, and just as a reminder:
New probe confirms Trump officials blocked Puerto Rico from receiving hurricane aid
The administration of former President Donald Trump obstructed an investigation looking into why officials withheld about $20 billion in hurricane relief for Puerto Rico following the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, one of the deadliest U.S. natural disasters in over 100 years, a new report says.
A Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Inspector General report made public Thursday also found that tensions between the department and the Office of Management and Budget resulted in unprecedented procedural hurdles that produced delays in the disbursement of the congressionally approved funds.
NPR Report on Trump Claiming His Puerto Rico hurricane response was a “success”.
For Trump, celebrating success in Puerto Rico in the face of dire realities on the ground is nothing new. When it comes to disasters, he often takes on the role of cheerleader, boosting first responders, marveling at the incredible size of the storms/fires or touting his own performance rather than the more traditionally presidential somber offers of sympathy or resolve. On a visit to the island last October to survey damage, he bragged about the then-relatively low death rate, even as hospitals struggled to keep the power on and the FEMA response was only just ramping up.
"Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody's ever seen anything like this," Trump said.
"What is your death count as of this moment?" he asked local officials. "17? 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands."
He then went to a church where supplies were being distributed to those in need and tossed paper towels into the crowd like they were free T-shirts at a sporting event.
THE ACTUAL DEATH TOLL WAS ALMOST 3,000.
Former DHS official: Trump called Puerto Rico ‘dirty,’ asked to trade it for Greenland
A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said Wednesday President Trump called Puerto Rico “dirty” and asked if it could be swapped for Greenland.
Miles Taylor, a former DHS official who has endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, said Trump asked about trading Puerto Rico for the Danish territory amid trips officials took to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island.
“The president’s talked before about wanting to purchase Greenland, but one time before we went down, he told us not only did he want to purchase Greenland, he actually said he wanted to see if we could sell Puerto Rico. Could we swap Puerto Rico for Greenland,” Taylor said Wednesday on MSNBC. “Because in his words Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”
I don’t know what else I can add, except for one thing:
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