We need someone who has the straightforward common sense and knowhow to fix a nation that has been beaten down by nuanced pseudo-intellectuals who have no practical experience nor leadership qualities.
Trump—whether you like him or not—is the kind of individual who built and made this country great. He is deserves serious consideration in spite of what some may perceive as unpolished presentation.
.. I watched some of the commentary from the left-leaning news shows and the smug, elitist, smirky attitude which some displayed toward Trump’s message. This is exactly the kind of cynicism that is being taught in our schools in an attempt to strip America of its exceptional qualities.
.. Trump has the ability to be bold.
.. Donald Trump has the balls, common sense, and know-how to lift America out of the current destructive path it is currently facing. He communicates plainly to the American people with bold clarity.
.. We need someone who will take those ideas on directly. My thinking is that Trump has a knockout punch, the question is: how hard is his chin?
How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump
George W. Bush joked at a Yale commencement: “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”
.. The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now.
.. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the “party of ideas,” because it harvested so effectively the intellectual labor of conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and publications like The Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary.
.. In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will.
.. The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.
.. It is hardly surprising to read Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Mr. Trump’s best seller “The Art of the Deal,” say, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”
.. What little Mr. Trump does know seems to come from television: Asked where he got military advice, he replied, “I watch the shows.”
.. He claimed that Mexican immigrants were “bringing crime” even though research consistently shows that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born.
.. Mr. Trump also proposed barring Muslims from entering the country despite terrorism researchers, myself included, warning that his plan would likely backfire, feeding the Islamic State’s narrative that the war on terrorism is really a war on Islam.
.. The Trump acolytes claim it doesn’t matter; he can hire experts to advise him. But experts always disagree with one another and it is the president alone who must make the most difficult decisions in the world.
Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco
the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.
.. The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution.
.. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.
.. Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian.
.. 1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
.. there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
.. 2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
.. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
.. 3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.
.. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”
.. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
.. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
.. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation
.. Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.
.. the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies
.. In the US, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order
.. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens
.. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
.. 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
.. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.
Conservatives Have Groomed the Perfect Suckers for Trump’s Epic Scam
There have been ex-presidents who have enriched themselves by dubious means, as the George Bushes and Bill Clinton have by giving high-dollar speeches to plutocrats. But there has never been a presidential nominee whose primary raison d’être is to make money, and who has organized his or her campaign around that goal.
.. In a sense, conservative voters have been groomed for Trump since the 1960s. As the historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler and The Nation in 2012, the American conservative movement has become more and more amenable to get-rich-quick schemes, snake-oil salesmen, and confidence men. Direct-mail barons like Richard Viguerie began raking in the dough in the 1960s by stirring up ideological hysteria and convincing an audience of senior citizens that only their small-dollar donation could fend off union bosses, abortionists, and gays. Of course, most of the money ended up with the fundraisers.
.. Conservative ideology, as Perlstein persuasively argues, is particularly vulnerable to grifters because of its faith in the goodness of business and its concomitant hostility toward regulation—which makes it easy for true believers to buy into the notion that some modern Edison has a miraculous new invention that the Washington elite is conniving to suppress.
.. There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican “war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies.
.. Writing in the New Republic in 2014, the journalist Ben Adler documented how an entire class of Republican politicians, including Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Mike Huckabee, used mailing lists built up in their presidential campaigns to sell dubious products afterward.
.. In Cain’s case, anyone who gave money to his campaign would get ads, after the campaign ended, promising a “breakthrough” remedy for erectile dysfunction, “one of more than 50 similar pitches for miracle cures and easy-money tricks that Cain has passed along to his e-mail followers.”
.. Cain made more than $420,000 from e-mail ads in 2013—minus Newsmax’s cut and the costs of maintaining his list.
.. By the time Trump launched his campaign, the conservative movement had already destroyed the intellectual immune system that is necessary to resist grifters.
.. Could the people who have been conditioned to think they need to buy the Patriot Power Generator in order to fight off an ISIS attack on America’s power grid really be expected to see through Donald Trump? Conservative publications like National Reviewhave spent a generation cultivating an audience of gulls. Now they’re shocked that a far more talented hustler has stolen them away.