the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.
.. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)
.. When two brothers beat up a homeless Latino man last summer and cited Mr. Trump’s words as their justification — “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” one of the men reportedly told the police — Mr. Trump responded by saying that while this was a shame, “I will say that people who are following me are very passionate.” His supporters, he said, “love this country and they want this country to be great again — they are passionate.”
.. Note Mr. Trump’s linkage of violence, passion, anger and love of country.
.. Because we can no longer deny what Mr. Trump is and what he represents.
I reported Omar Mateen to the FBI. Trump is wrong that Muslims don’t do our part.
I know this firsthand: I was the one who told the FBI about Omar Mateen.
.. We are taught to be kind to all of God’s creation. Islam is very strict about killing: Even inwar – to say nothing of peace – you cannot harm women, children, the elderly, the sick, clergymen, or even plants. You can’t mutilate dead bodies. You can’t destroy buildings, especially churches or temples. You can’t force anyone to accept Islam. “If anyone slew one person, it would be as if he killed the whole of humanity,” says the Koran.
What the hell is going on?
The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males. The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them? Brutes?
.. For American men ages 18-34, more of them live with their parents than with romantic partners.
.. Aren’t (some) men the basic problem here?
.. The sad news is that making the world nicer yet won’t necessarily solve this problem. It might even make it worse.
.. If this is indeed the problem, our culture is remarkably ill-suited to talking about it. It is hard for us to admit that “all good things” can be bad for anyone, including brutes. It is hard to talk about what we might have to do to accommodate brutes, and that more niceness isn’t always a cure. And it is hard to admit that history might not be so progressive after all.
What percentage of men are brutes anyway? Let’s hope we don’t find out.
Fear trumps hope
Donald Trump is going to be the Republican candidate for the presidency. This is terrible news for Republicans, America and the world
His success, in short, is based on inviting the most exaggeratedly down-in-the-mouth Americans to indulge their meanest instincts. To attend a Trump rally, as hundreds of thousands of Americans now have, is to participate in a ritual enactment of injury and vengeance; an enactment which has, on occasion, done real harm.
.. It is probably only a matter of time before one of the journalists Mr Trump keeps caged up at the back of the rallies gets badly beaten. One of his party tricks is to insult them—“some of the most dishonest people in the world”—and invite his crowds to jeer. From the cage, as opposed to the privacy of his Manhattan office, where Mr Trump is immensely charming, he does not seem solicitous. He seems threatening and vile.
.. On primary day in Indiana he also gave voice to an outlandish slander against Mr Cruz’s father, a well-known evangelical preacher. (He suggested, on the basis of no evidence, that Mr Cruz senior had been involved in the murder of John F. Kennedy: “I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”)
.. If Mr Trump’s diagnosis of what ails America is bad, his prescriptions for fixing it are catastrophic.
.. Mr Trump’s economic positions, some of which he rehearsed in his office, are also fantastical. For example, he has pledged to pay down America’s $19 trillion national debt in eight years, while at the same time cutting taxes by $10 trillion. Given that he has also pledged to protect Social Security, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, has estimated that he would have to cut other areas of government by 93% to meet his objective. He disagrees, citing the growth he promises to unleash by improving America’s trade terms and the savings he would make by rendering the government more efficient.
.. Mr Trump has in the past bragged about his many sexual conquests. He has had recourse to bankruptcy law four times. His every speech is littered with lies. By one calculation, 76% of his political statements last year were untrue. In a normal year, his Republican critics would have stopped him; why did they fail?
.. First, though it is a caricature to suggest, as Mr Trump and others have, that the Republicans have long made fools of distressed working-class whites by offering them God, the flag and tax cuts to the rich, it is a caricature with some truth to it. None of Mr Trump’s 16 rivals spoke convincingly to the concerns of wage-distressed workers; none had a thoughtful answer to them.
.. The several recent crises Republican congressmen have engineered over the passage of the federal budget, which they sought to hold hostage to their unrealistic and unconstitutional demands of Mr Obama, have earned the voters’ disdain. In that sense, the Trumpian revolt is not a continuation of the false promise raised by the anti-government Tea Party, but its successor. With Mr Trump’s nomination almost assured, its fires, too, must now rage and burn out.