It Could Never Happen Here

Saturday night (September 17, 2022), Donald Trump held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, that was attended by a few thousand people. I think it's notable that the number of attendees is far below the capacity of the arena: it looked at most a third full in a video I saw.

But the ones who were there were doing this...



...as Trump read a string of nonsense and lies off a teleprompter.

What is the motivation or thought process of a person attending this rally and behaving this way?

Is it really just hatred of the other (perceived liberals, immigrants, people of color) and change of any kind?

As Walter Schaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, said on Twitter this morning,

The fascists in this photo do not believe Trump can make their lives better; they believe he can make other people’s lives worse. It’s a movement of hate and destruction.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow threw away a good line on Twitter, probably in reference to a combination of Trump's rally, the lack of action on indicting The Former Guy, and Ron DeSantis's launch of Inhumanity Airlines late last week.

At this point any pundit who tries to reassure you that any given worst case scenario isn't possible because norms or precedent or rule of law or whatever should really just be dismissed out of hand.

Speaking of worst-case scenarios, Ken Burns has a new documentary series starting tonight on PBS. It's called The U.S. and the Holocaust and it looks at what the U.S. did and could have done in response to Nazi atrocities.

Here's one more from Twitter this morning:

Everyone: It could never happen here!

Trump supporters:


(((Jennifer Mendelsohn))) @CleverTitleTK

And a cartoon from Pat Bagley, which was shared on The Weekly Sift in a post called Fascist is a description, not an insult:

___

When I started to write this post, I was going to include more about the linked item above that claims to show that MAGA-ites are motivated by innate hatred of liberals because they see liberals as weak and therefore inferior. I just saw it shared on Facebook today. Before posting, though, I did a little investigating to see  where it came from. 

Well, it turns out there doesn't seem to be a clear source for it. Hmm. The oldest date I could find was September 14, 2020 (less than two months before the presidential election and after early voting had started), and it was a person questioning whether it was created by Russian bots. 

This kind of vitriol, telling one side of the divide that the other side innately hates them, does nothing but feed hatred back. And who does that serve?