Time to watch Goodnight and Good Luck, if you haven't.Trump does not need to win, or even get close to winning, for his rhetoric and the movement that he’s stoking to be dangerous in the extreme.
Professional political analysts have underestimated Trump’s impact by failing to take into account his massive, long-standing cultural celebrity, which commands the attention of large numbers of Americans who usually ignore politics (which happens to be the majority of the population), which in turn generates enormous, highly charged crowds pulsating with grievance and rage. That means that even if he fails to win a single state, he’s powerfully poisoning public discourse about multiple marginalized minority groups: in particular inciting and inflaming what was already volatile anti-Muslim animosity in the U.S.
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Muslim Americans (and, for that matter, Mexican-Americans and African-Americans) don’t have the luxury [to be] dismissive. That’s what Al Jazeera’s Sana Saeed meant when she said that she’s “tired of people telling us to not be afraid – Trump may not win but his words will last & there are people who support” the bile he’s spewing.
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He didn’t propose banning all Muslims from entering the U.S. because it’s grounded in some fringe, out-of-the-mainstream ideas. He proposed it in part to commandeer media attention so as to distract attention away from his rivals and from that latest Iowa poll [which showed Ted Cruz taking the lead there], but he also proposed it because he knows there is widespread anti-Muslim fear and hatred in the U.S.
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Trump’s proposal yesterday, though a new low, is not that far afield from what other credible GOP presidential candidates previously proposed. Jeb Bush previously urged that the U.S. be wary of Syrian Muslim refugees but eagerly accept “proven Christians.” Ted Cruz advocated an outright ban on Syrian Muslim refugees and then introduced a bill to bar refugees from multiple predominantly Muslim countries unless they’re Christians. Ben Carson argued that no Muslim could be President because their beliefs are anathema to constitutional principles.
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Lest liberals become self-satisfied about all this, this obsession with demonizing Muslims is by no means confined to the GOP presidential field. Residing – or so they claim – outside the far-right and Fox News swamps, there’s a sprawling cottage industry of pundits, academics, authors, TV hosts, think tanks, and “anti-extremist” activist groups devoted primarily to one idea: that Islam is supremely dangerous and Muslims pose the greatest threat.
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Just yesterday, The Daily Beast‘s supremely loyal Democratic partisan columnist Michael Tomasky [...] repulsively demanded that American Muslims first prove they are loyal and can be trusted before they are “given” their rights.
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In [Chris] Cuomo’s TV-journalism-trained mind, Trump’s call for the complete exclusion of all Muslims from the U.S. is nothing more than “a suggestion that perhaps offends certain sensibilities,” and it’s not for him or other journalists to “strike him down.” [ed: Cuomo was subsequently Twitter shamed into reversing his opinion and suggesting people "should be angry" about Trump's comments.]
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Tribalism is a potent component of human nature, one of the most primitive and instinctive drives. Stoking it is and always has been easy. It’s particularly easy to do in an overwhelmingly Christian country that has spent 14 years and counting waging a relentless, seemingly endless war in predominantly Muslim countries and which touts Israel as its closest ally.
Glenn Greenwald
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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