Purity
Purity
The strong fatherly embrace of tyrants, zealots and bigoted fools.
Two things:
For 10 years, we have seen an endless succession of lies, threats and other Trumpgressions, all part of his strategy to control the media cycle while simultaneously appealing to the prejudices and ignorance of his MAGA base. The media have aided and abetted him by meticulously and breathlessly documenting every one. Unfortunately. The intrinsic depravity of each episode is thus lost in the sea of Trump deviancy, inuring us to the horror, while the convict remains perpetually front and center.
That’s why we in the media should stop taking the bait — or chasing every brushfire, or whatever metaphor you like. If a toxic lie spews evil in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it … you get the point. What I’m saying is: It’s high time for the press to show some discipline.
I shall now meticulously and breathlessly document the latest grotesque Trumpgression.
It came Monday at a rally in Pennsylvania, where the rambling sociopath labored to impress female voters in the crucial swing state. As everywhere else in the country, it’s a tough sell. The Republicans have frightened and antagonized women by depriving them of legal access to abortion and even criminalizing reproductive health for both patient and doctor. But Trump needs their votes and has some obstacles to overcome, such as his reactionary Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling. Or being found liable for (at least one) rape. Or endlessly demeaning women as nasty and stupid. So what does the bloviating cretin say to mollify women and win them over?
“I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector,” he said, promising further that women’s “lives will be happy, beautiful, and their lives will be great again. So women, we love you. We’re going to take care of you.”
Awwww! So paternal! So sweet! It reminded me of a previous declaration of dedication to the fair sex and “the sacred duty of protecting womanhood” by protecting “the chastity of womanhood.” No, that’s not from the constitution or Maya Angelou. It is from the 1925 members’ manual of the Ku Klux Klan.
The degradation of women is a violation of the sacredness of human personality, a sin against the race, a crime against society, a menace to our country, and a prostitution of all that is best, and noblest, and highest in life. No race, or society, or country, can rise higher than its womanhood.
Ah, those were the days! When white was white and women knew their place. When migrants weren’t running amok to dine on pets and sully the purity of the white woman, and the gene pool. That evil, of course, is another constant Trump refrain, such as this from December:
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told his faithful in New Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. … They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
Then he said, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Oh, wait. My mistake. That second quote is from Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. I suppose you’d say Trump stands on the shoulders of giants. Protect us, Mein Covfefe. Sieg heil!
It would, of course, be unfair to compare Trump and the Republican Party to Nazi Germany and the Ku Klux Klan. That’s so reductive. If we are speaking of patronizing, condescending, infantilizing, dehumanizing conduct, MAGA also follows in the steps of the Taliban.
Just last week, the Islamofascist Afghan regime published “vice and purity laws” to defend the sanctity of its women, who must now veil themselves head to toe outside the home and take care not to peer through the narrow eyehole at a man. Nor be overheard speaking, lest some male be seduced into penetrating their vaginas in a department store fitting room. If an Afghan woman sings within the walls of her own home and the melody should escape to the street, she will be subject to imprisonment and beating. Nasty, nasty women. Such is “protection” from the viewpoint of zealots and tyrants.
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian vision of authoritarian misogyny, is being told every day.
I’m not naive, but I am a bit clairvoyant. I know this post will attract scoffing comments from those who deem me hyperbolic and unserious. Just like those in September 2021, when I wrote “Call Today’s Republican Party What It Is” (i.e., the gathering resurrection of Nazi Germany in the 1930s).
So you also believe in the bogey man? Booowahahaha!
I am disappointed you indulge in the same rhetoric and false equivalence you were lamenting.
I am a conservative Republican and a proud Jew. I consider this post to be a personal insult.
Sorry you were insulted, dude. But I’d suggest wearing Kevlar to temple. Since that column, we have had a sharp spike in antisemitic rhetoric and violence, the Dobbs decision, Haitian pet abductions, Trump promising to be a dictator, but only on Day 1 of his second term, Trump blaming disloyal Jews for his political failures, hysterical anti-migrant rhetoric by Republican governors and members of Congress and parallel efforts in Georgia and elsewhere to suppress minority votes, three criminal cases against the former president for attempts to overturn the 2020 election and Project 2025. To name but a few examples echoing the rise of the Nazis.
These people mean it. And there are consequences.
If you think Trump will protect women, think of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy from Mississippi who made the fatal mistake in 1955 of whistling at a white store clerk. He apparently didn’t realize that the degradation of women is a violation of the sacredness of human personality, a sin against the race, a crime against society, a menace to our country, and a prostitution of all that is best, and noblest, and highest in life. So the clerk’s righteous husband and brothers kidnapped the boy, tortured him and hung him from a tree.
But this didn’t happen just in the context of the racist Jim Crow south. It happened in the midst of a contentious election. In a just-published book The Barn, author Wright Johnson documents the violent racial rhetoric of the campaign, creating a pervasive fear of dark-skinned others.
Mississippi during the election of 1955 was a place trapped in a cycle of hysteria, conspiracy and rage. ‘A Nazi rally,’ is how former Gov. William Winter once described to me the state’s mood during the civil rights era. … It was existential; an old system was dying. The newspaper accounts of the year’s political rallies also feel modern, and in hindsight you can watch the fear of the population react with the hyperbole of feckless politicians to create elemental rage and violence.
I ask you: With protectors like this, who needs predators?
Spot-on, as usual.
💯