The family was living through the first refugee crisis in history in which people without countries or homes could communicate instantaneously with one another. Previous generations of refugees often ached for any information about relatives, but now messages zipped back and forth around the world on free apps. The joy of such regular communication came at a steep cost: constant updates on the misery of relatives left behind, intensifying worry and impeding progress for those trying to carve out a new life.
.. But thanks in large part to cellphones and social media, Canadians with no prior connection to the Middle East were getting glimpses into the well of desperation that was the refugee crisis.
.. delighted by things Canadians took for granted — new pencils, popcorn at the movies, a soccer goal with a net.
.. The Hajjes were supposed to be self-sufficient by next February, but she feared they had virtually no chance of succeeding. They could not fill out a permission slip, read a medicine label, pay a bill or navigate the subway to a new destination on their own.
.. “No matter how hard he tries, he may never really speak English well, and that will really limit him,”
.. The Canadian women saw sponsorship like a life raft: If you overloaded it, you risked sinking those you were trying to rescue.
Worst of the Trumps
Or perhaps with the fact that comparing Syrians to Skittles carries echoes of the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher comparing Jews to mushrooms in a popular children’s book that posited the ticklish dilemma of how to distinguish poisonous toadstools from edible fungus; and has a mother saying to her son Franz:
“Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk.”
.. The co-founder of Google, co-founder of Tesla, and founder of eBay were all immigrants. Steve Jobs’ biological father was a Syrian immigrant. In fact, earlier this year, the National Foundation for American Policy found that 51 percent of the country’s start-up companies valued at over $1 billion had at least one immigrant founder. A study by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a coalition of governors and business leaders, found that in 2013 more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies, including seven of the world’s 10 most valuable brands, were started by immigrants or their children.
.. Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was a German immigrant. He arrived in the United States in October 1885. For decades, the family lied: They said he hailed from Sweden. In his book, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump says his grandfather “came here from Sweden as a child.” The family historian, John Walter, explained that Trump’s father, Fred, “had a lot of Jewish tenants and it wasn’t a good thing to be German in those days.”
God Loves Donald Trump. Right?
Trump has boasted of infidelities, profited off gambling, mocked the handicapped, cheered and offered financial assistance for his supporters who fight protesters, supported abortion (until his fortuitous change of heart before the election), called for war crimes against innocent people,demonized minorities and immigrants, knowingly played upon racist fears, promoted open racists through social media, promoted conspiracy theories, and crudely treated women.
..Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants stand out as the only one in which a majority, 53 percent, agree that society has become too soft and feminine.
.. 68 percent of Trump supporters agree that society is too soft and feminine, far more than supporters of any other candidate, Republican or Democrat.
.. Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants voiced the highest levels of distress, 64 percent, when they find themselves around immigrants who speak little or no English,.
.. “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”
A solid 57 percent majority of white Americans whom P.R.R.I. surveyed agreed, but two groups stood out: Trump supporters at 81 percent and white evangelical Protestants at 68 percent.
.. Yet another area of commonality between Christian conservatives and the Trump campaign is their shared belief in the duty of the strong to lead the weak — the importance of leadership built on strength, authority and discipline.
.. Dobson’s thinking on the topic of strength and authority is dominated by a single theme:
If the strong-willed child is allowed by indulgence to develop “habits” of defiance and disrespect during his early childhood, those characteristics will haunt him and his parents for the next twenty years.
.. Dobson describes his own method for dealing with a six-year-old pet Dachshund, Siggie, who refused Dobson’s order to go to sleep in “a permanent enclosure.”
The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!
.. Dobson’s story about Siggie gives us a glimpse of how the views on authority of some on the right match up with Trump’s views on what it takes to be an effective leader.
.. For years, secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power.
This year, Moore noted, Christian leaders who in the 1990s
gave stem-winding speeches about “character” in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries.
In backing Trump, Moore concluded, “a group of high-profile old-guard evangelicals has proven these critics right.”
.. Rev. Robert Jeffress in Dallas, who has said that if offered a candidate modeled on Jesus:
I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.
In practice, Jeffress said:
Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek. Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.
Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth, who wrote ..
.. The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump Voters Share Anger, but Direct It Differently
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they are angry, and whites are more likely than African-Americans to say they are angry.
.. Mr. Sanders distinguished his message from Mr. Trump’s, saying the Republican candidate was “using it to scapegoat minorities.” Mr. Trump said he would cool his tone once the campaign battles were over.