The Politics of Hate

“Not surprisingly, Mr. Trump’s politics of hate is now metastasizing into violence. He incites people—not all people to be sure, but enough. On social media in particular, one sees how he gives his supporters permission to express dark and ugly sentiments that existed before but were generally kept hidden from view.

“Max Boot, a Republican Trump critic who was a foreign policy adviser to Marco Rubio’s campaign, says that he has never experienced as much anti-Semitism as he has since the start of the Trump campaign. There are no filters anymore, no restraints, no cultural guardrails. Now, under the sway of Trumpism, what was once considered shameful asserts itself openly. As we contemplate this, it is worth recalling that the membrane separating what the Scottish novelist John Buchan called ‘the graces of civilization’ from ‘the rawness of barbarism’ is thinner and more fragile than we sometimes imagine.”

—Peter Wehner, “The Man the Founders Feared,” New York Times, 19 March 2016

• • •

Wehner wrote this in the spring of 2016—before Trump was even elected. Eight years later … it’s worse. It’s so much worse. Contrast and compare to this piece, also in the Times:

“It stands to reason that threats of violence kept more Republicans from voting to impeach Trump in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack. In fact, Romney confirmed as much. In all likelihood, threats have also worked to suppress the growth of a meaningful anti-Trump faction within the Republican Party. It’s hard, under normal circumstances, to take a stand against the leader of your political party. It is even more difficult, as well as frightening, to do so when the cost of your opposition is a threat to your life or your family.”

— Jamelle Bouie, “Trump Is Playing With Fire,” New York Times, 12 January 2024

• • •

I have a dream, indeed. In this house, Dr. King, we hold that dream ever close to our hearts.

 

 

The Hate Machine

Halfway through Donald Trump’s term as the forty-fifth president of the US (late November 2018), I was watching Chis Hayes interview Ta-Nehisi Coates on MSNBC.* Toward the end of the conversation I was struck by something Coates said: “In ’08 we were so excited … but we were naïve to think there wouldn’t be an enormous backlash.”

And yes, that clicked. That’s it. People like me thought that was just another presidential election. They come around every four years, those pesky presidential elections. People like me thought the hand-off would be … normal. Just another change of administrations. But it wasn’t.

The racist hate machine (you might call it the Tea Party movement) that ginned up around the same time as Obama’s election took people like me by surprise. It never crossed my mind that those were white people who were angry that a Black man had ascended to the highest office in the land. (Honestly, there’s a part of me that can’t even understand that kind of anger.)

But Gerry pointed it out to me during Obama’s second term, and I had a light-bulb moment. Oh.

Trump’s election was a second light-bulb moment. Then Biden’s election gave me hope. I thought we could put it behind us. We were past it. I am alert to racism now, and I’ve removed from my association people I didn’t realize were racists.

And now Trump (long a racist) is talking about things in his campaign for a second term that sound like fascism.

My father gave me a copy of Mein Kampf when I was in high school. It sits on my bookshelves even now. Daddy wanted me to know some of the things Hitler had said, and how he had basically signaled what was coming. I didn’t read it back then because I believed we were past all that. I had Mexican, Portuguese, and Black friends in our little town in California’s Central Valley.

But it seems we weren’t past it. Hell, “Henry Ford had the additional distinction of being the only American mentioned favorably in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s memoir of 1925,” journalist/author Bill Bryson tells us in his 2013 book of history, One Summer: America, 1927. Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism “charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century,” according to Random House’s discussion of that book.

Trump … is nothing but hate. And he’s walking around this earth while Putin tries to steal Ukraine and while the situation in Gaza is making some Americans feel like they need to take sides in a conflict they may not fully understand. Elon Musk aids and abets the confusion. Republicans all over this country—knowing their policies are not popular—have gerrymandered voting districts and raised propaganda to a high art to keep their hold on power.

What the actual hell is wrong with these people?

I have no solutions. I have no conclusions. All I have is worry. Help.

* I loved Rachel Maddow, and by virtue of his lead-in to her show, I became familiar with Chris Hayes, another smart, well-educated journalist I enjoy watching. Over months and years, Hayes introduced me to two other thinkers: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Anand Giridharadas. Both have written excellent nonfiction books that you might find interesting.

Hate Group

Can an Ethiopian change his skin
or a leopard its spots?
Neither can you do good
who are accustomed to doing evil.
—Jeremiah 13:23 NIV

• • •

Patriot Front are evil. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls them a white nationalist hate group. Communities should not give them permission to gather or march. We should arrest them every chance we get.

 

Imagine Our Enemies’ Children …

It is useless to try to adjudicate a long-standing animosity by asking who started it or who is the most wrong. The only sufficient answer is to give up the animosity and try forgiveness, to try to love our enemies and to talk to them and (if we pray) to pray for them. If we can’t do any of that, then we must begin again by trying to imagine our enemies’ children who, like our children, are in mortal danger because of enmity that they did not cause.
—Wendell Berry, ”The Failure of War,” in Citizenship Papers (2003)

“For the Children”: Kramatorsk Station Attack

I sat down to watch the news Friday night for the first time in nearly two weeks. (Deadlines. Lotsa work.) The opening story was the attack on the Kramatorsk train station, starting with an interview of Nate Mook, CEO of World Central Kitchen, the not-for-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) established to provide meals in the wake of natural disasters founded in 2010 by chef José Andrés. Mook had been at the station and made a video with his phone, documenting the thousands of people waiting to board. Elderly. Women. Children.

World Central Kitchen was preparing to set up a meal tent. After filming (you can see it here or here, but be aware it will make you cry), Mook had gone to their warehouse, about two minutes’ walk away. That’s when they heard the bombs.

The BBC says, “Debris from one of the rockets could be seen lying on the grass near the station. The message in Russian “Za detei”, meaning for or on behalf of the children, had been daubed on the missile in white.”

Fifty-two people are dead. The message on the missile—it’s in all the reportage of this incident—is a “revenge message,” according to the Washington Post, which “appeared to refer to the Kremlin’s claims about the security of Russian speakers in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region after years of conflict. Russia has cited defense of the Donbas, and of Russia, as a reason for the invasion.”

What happened here is a war crime, y’all. For me it was the end of a long day, and this story, the visuals, just knocked me to my knees. I can’t speak coherently about war (see my comments on Vietnam, for example); I can’t write a moving tribute to these poor people who, a month ago, were simply going about their lives (as I am now). But I want to note in these pages that it happened, it was awful, and I went to bed, demoralized. You’d think we’d have figured out how to live with each other by now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Politics of Hatred

On 3 February 2020, a year ago, I wrote:

Last night I saw a segment on Chris Hayes’s All In with A. C. Thompson of ProPublica and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC. There are no clips that I can find anywhere. I had to pull up the entire program so I could rewatch it and think about it.

But it was was a really good outline of the radical extremists we’re facing in this country and I wanted to be able to talk about it. Radical extremists. This isn’t new. What is new is the idea of a second civil war right out in the mainstream. Our MAGA relatives are all over it, cheering it on.

Thompson said there are a whole spectrum of far-right characters, such as the Boogaloo Bois, who identify as libertarian; the Proud Boys, which he called “an ultra-nationalist street gang”; Qanon (he sort of dismissed this as “just” conspiracy theorists); and the militia types like the Oath Keepers, which are really dangerous because they’re well-trained, often military or law enforcement types. In all cases, their political identity evolves around violence. Thompson also noted that groups that were BLM (pro-police) and previously reluctant to engage have now been radicalized by the events of January 6, 2020.

Zadrozny reminded us that it’s easy to ridicule Qanon but then filled in a lot of violent fantasy detail on that group,* underpinned by their idea of “the storm”—a judgment day when all the people they hate will be marched out and executed publicly. She reminded viewers that this also is not new. Remember the “Jounalist / Rope Tree” T-shirts? Remember the violence at trump rallies? She named other things that were clues, and said journalists who have been reporting this story were absolutely not surprised by anything that happened on January 6th.

When asked for concerns, where it goes from here, Thompson said, “My honest and worried prediction is that there will be an act of mass-casualty terrorism over the next year and that we need to be prepared for that. … There are a lot of people who seek to do harm to this nation, and it’s very easy to get a gun or build a bomb.”**

This is really sobering commentary, and I urge you to seek it out if you have access.

• • •

This was really interesting to read in light of what has happened—and not happened—in the last year.

It also makes me nervous.

I have been called a “hater” to my face more than once by people who have known me for a long time and should know better. And yet … the real haters, to my eyes, are the people-groups mentioned in this commentary—particularly the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. (Qanon, while not specifically engaging in violence that I know of, yet, has certainly inspired it: remember the young man who showed up at a DC pizza parlor with an AR-15, ready to shoot up the place for harboring child sex trafficking that he’d “learned” about on Qanon websites?)

Those people attacking the Capitol last year, they sure looked hateful to me. But even since that violent day, violence seems to be lurking just below the surface of every public interaction. I’m thinking, say, of those people in Franklin, Tennessee, last August, who harassed medical personnel who spoke at a school board meeting, for example, screaming and banging on their cars as they tried to drive away. I’m thinking of the people who show up at school board meetings sporting yellow stars on their clothing, the sort that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. I’m thinking of the spate of bomb threats to historically black colleges and universities that started on 1 February and still continues, which is being investigated as a hate crime. I’m thinking of the hater who took Jews hostage at a synagogue in Dallas, Texas, last month. I’m thinking about trump, speaking at a rally and stirring up the ignorant—that’s hateful.

I actually think calling someone a hater because she doesn’t agree with your politics is pretty hateful too. I’m not proud of being called a hater—it makes me kind of sick, frankly—but I do know where I stand. (On the side of truth/facts, just to start. Democracy. Justice. Kindness. Antiracism. Voting rights. I could go on.)

However, I am angry. And I’ve said this before.

On the same day I watched  the interview discussion of radical extremists, Congresswoman Katie Porter was interviewed about what she’d experienced in the Capitol on January 6, 2021. She related a story, now familiar, of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coming to her office to hide from the mob overrunning the Capitol: Porter welcomed her in and said, “Don’t worry, I’m a mom, I have everything we need.” And AOC responded, “I hope I get to be a mom; I’m afraid I’m going to die today.”

This made me weep out loud in my living room. Not tearing up. Crying. Sobbing.

This is why my rage level is through the roof. It’s the politics of hatred, people.

* They have now also moved into COVID resistance, characterized by alternative treatments such as ivermectin, which have proven to be harmful, and the straight-up crazy stuff like drinking their own urine.
** As we have seen over, and over, and over in this country, to our great sorrow.