Conservatives aren't the only ones who are pissed off…
Author: jpconques
J.P. is faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. He once discovered the meaning of life during a vision quest in Tibet but he got drunk and forgot it. His hobbies include constructing scale models of the world's tallest skyscrapers in his backyard, engineering sophisticated irrigation systems for small African villages, and playing guitar.
If there is any silver lining to the Republican nomination of Donald Trump, it’s that the GOP has effectively driven the last nail into its own coffin. And you only have yourselves to blame. Bobby Jindal told you at your 2012 “autopsy” that you needed to stop being the “stupid party”, and you all smiled and nodded and placated and then kept doing what you’ve been doing for years.
YOU have been telling us for years that illegal brown people are coming to take our jobs, steal our welfare and force us to press “1” for English.
YOU have been telling us for years that racism, bigotry, misogyny, intolerance and xenophobia equate to “telling it like it is” and that “political correctness” is for pussy libtards.
YOU have been telling us for years that America is a Christian nation where the only acceptable greeting from October through New Year is “Merry Christmas”.
YOU have been telling us for years that ALL Muslims are evil terrorists and their mosques should be closed, their communities should be placed under government surveillance and their citizenship status should be constantly questioned.
YOU have been telling us for years that Blue Lives Matter above all others and that any attempts to hold police accountable in any way for their actions is tantamount to supporting crime and lawlessness.
YOU have been telling us for years that financial success is the ultimate measure of ones value to society and that poor people are lazy and stupid and have only themselves to blame for being poor. YOU have been telling us for years that education is for liberal elitists and institutions of higher learning are nothing but centers of left-wing indoctrination for feeble-minded millennials who need “safe spaces”.
YOU have been telling us for years that compromise with anyone to the political left of Marco Rubio is treason and punishable by being “primaried”.
YOU have been telling us for years that the only acceptable foreign policy is war, war and more war, and that diplomacy and negotiation are for weak leaders who hate America.
YOU have been telling us for years that anyone who believes torturing our prisoners and carpet bombing entire countries full of innocent civilians is immoral and beneath the dignity of our great nation cannot possibly be a true patriot.
And now you have the audacity to wring your hands and gnash your teeth and cry out to Saint Reagan “Why? Why have you let our beloved party fall into the hands of a narcissistic asshole who PERFECTLY EXEMPLIFIES EVERY ONE OF THESE IDEALS?”
I’m an asshole on Facebook. This is not news to folks who know me. In real life I like to think that I’m a pretty nice guy but on the vast wasteland of social media I don’t shy away from expressing my opinion and I’m not always nice about it. But it seems in the Donald J. Trump era more and more folks are feeling right at home taking their racism, bigotry and ignorance offline and out into the real world.
We’ve all heard Donald Trump fans make the claim “I like Trump because he speaks his mind,” and we all know that what they like about him speaking his mind is that it has begun to legitimize saying obnoxiously racist and bigoted things in public. You may have read the story of the mostly white Indiana high school who chanted “Build a wall!” at their mostly Latino opponents at a basketball game. Or the similar occurrence at another high school ball game in Iowa where white fans chanted “Trump! Trump! Trump!” at their racially diverse opponents. Or the mother of an African-American third grader who got a call from her son’s principal telling her that her son had been singled out by some of his classmates as being one of the “immigrants” who would be “sent home” when Trump was elected president.
But it is one thing to read about this nonsense happening in another state. It’s quite another when it happens right in front of you. I live in a redneck town in northern NJ. To those of you to whom that sounds like an oxymoron, I assure you that there are as many bears in West Milford Township as there are residents. One of the local watering holes I sometimes play music at has a shooting range out back. And apparently people who have never met me before are perfectly comfortable sharing their ignorant and bigoted views with me.
A few weeks ago I was waiting on line at a local business that shall remain nameless, but whose primary function is to mail UPS packages. The man on line ahead of me was making a great show of being unable to pronounce the Middle-Eastern sounding name of the recipient of his package. After mispronouncing it several times as obnoxiously as he could he looked straight at me and stated, “Sounds like someone who shouldn’t be here.” My first thought was that if he was mailing this gentleman something then apparently his bigotry wasn’t so principled that he would refuse to do business with someone he obviously thought so little of. But then my second thought was shame, disgust and disappointment that we live in a world today where bigotry is so acceptable that this racist jerk would simply assume I would agree with him.
Just this afternoon I was at the local hardware store, where upon approaching the checkout line I overheard an older man bending the ear of the young lady who was ringing him up about how college kids today “just want free stuff.” The young man who was handling my order must have seen the mixture of boredom and revulsion on the face of his colleague and thought it would be a fabulous idea to have a go at it with me. “You wouldn’t catch me anywhere near a college,” he said, to my complete lack of surprise. “All they do is whine that they want free stuff. It’s so annoying. If I heard them I would punch them right in the face,” he continued. Now I’m not saying I’m some kind of tough guy, but this little punk was about half my size and I couldn’t help but wonder if he would be as apt to pop off about punching college students if I was wearing my Montclair State t-shirt.
And you can’t argue with a Trump supporter. Dr. Ben Carson, a person with whom I rarely agree on anything, recently published an op-ed in which he describes Trump voters as completely uninfluenced in any meaningful way by facts or logic. Trump has the worst record by far of any presidential candidate on Politifact and that doesn’t seem to faze his supporters in the slightest. When confronted by Chuck Todd about falsely accusing a protester at one of his rallies of having ties to ISIS, he replied, “All I know is what’s on the Internet,” which is a statement that should absolutely terrify anyone who has any familiarity at all with the internet.
A Trump-supporting Facebook friend of mine posted a meme by Dinesh D’Souza that shows a picture of a young Hillary Clinton sitting in what appears to be an office of some kind with a confederate flag hanging behind her, with the caption: “This is lawyer Hillary Clinton. At 27 years old she worked on the Watergate investigation and was fired for lying. Is that a confederate flag on the background?” When I pointed out to her that the flag was Photoshopped into the picture and that Hillary was not fired from the Watergate investigation, her response was, and I quote, “Who cares she still lies.” The irony of propagating a lie about someone she claimed to be a liar was apparently lost on her.
In the words of Andy Borowitz, “Stopping Trump is a short-term solution. The long term solution, and it will be more difficult, is fixing the educational system that has created so many people ignorant enough to vote for Trump.” In a previous post I listed a multitude of reasons why Donald Trump should never, ever, ever be elected President of the United States, but I fear that simply defeating him at the ballot box will not be enough to stem the tide of emboldened racism and bigotry that seems to have affected our society at large.
I can think of few times in recent memory when I was so embarrassed to be an American as when I first saw this video of United States Senator Jim Inhofe, chairman of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, attempt to demonstrate his assertion that climate change is a “hoax” by bringing a snowball with him into the Senate chamber. I don’t know whether Inhofe himself actually believes the nonsense he pontificates or if he is simply pandering to an ever-expanding base of low-information voters, but both of those prospects are equally frightening. There is a growing trend in this country, ironically most often propagated by ardent and vocal supporters of the concept of “American Exceptionalism“, to reject the studies and theories of scientists, professors and other educated folks as being “elitist” and “out of touch” with the demographic of mainstream America that they see themselves representing.
Rapidly shrinking arctic ice is affecting the size and reproduction of polar bears
Let’s be clear: Climate change is very real and it is very much caused by human activity. This is the consensus of 97% of climate scientists around the world and has been accepted as truth by virtually every developed nation in the world except ours. We are already starting to see some of the effects of climate change occurring even sooner than some scientists predicted. Whether the denial that seems to be unique to America is a symptom of the blizzard of political polarization that has engulfed this country or simply the result of an increasing majority of Americans being unable or unwilling to comprehend a concept more complicated than “how can the Earth be getting warmer when it’s so cold outside?”, either way it shows a stark rejection of actual scientific research in favor of what Americans simply believe in their collective gut to be true.
Adam and Eve, by Peter Paul Rubens
Another unfortunate example of the collective dumbing down of our country is the so-called “debate” between evolution and creationsim. There has been a strong push, especially in the South and Midwest where folks tend to be more fervent in their religious beliefs, to “teach the controversy” in our public schools. Mind you, said “controversy” doesn’t actually exist. Evolution is the universally accepted scientific theory on how the human race came to be, whereas creationism is the Christian religious belief that the entirety of the human population descended from two people that a supreme being created literally out of dust. There is no debate among the scientific community as to which of those two theories actually took place, but yet there is a growing push to include creationism in the public school science curriculum. The Texas State Board of Education, which holds a tremendous influence over nationwide textbook publishers due to the volume of media they purchase, stated in a 2013 review that “‘Creation Science’ should be incorporated into every biology textbook.” Despite these blatant attempts to insert religion into a science curriculum where it has absolutely no place, our mainstream media, in a misguided attempt to appear non-partisan and unbiased, has given enough news coverage to “creationists” to make it appear as though the creationist argument is just as plausible and legitimate as the theory of evolution, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.
Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey at the “Green Our Vaccines” press conference in 2008
Probably the most immediately dangerous aspect of science denial is the anti-vaccine movement. The argument that modern vaccinations are to blame for a wide range of health problems first came about when former British doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study in the medical journal The Lancet that supposedly linked the MMR vaccine to autism, aggressive behavior and irritable bowel syndrome. The Lancet subsequently retracted this publication and Wakefield’s medical license was ultimately revoked when it came to light that Wakefield was being paid for damaging information by trial lawyers who intended to bring a lawsuit against the vaccine manufacturer, that he co-owned a company that stood to make millions of dollars a year testing vaccinated children for the non-existent condition “autistic enterocolitis“, and that he falsified the data in his experiments to achieve the desired conclusions.
Despite the fact that Wakefield’s study has been thoroughly debunked as “an elaborate fraud,” the false notion that the MMR vaccine and other vaccines can cause autism and a host of other health problems continues to be propagated by celebrities such as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey and remain widespread. These misguided fears have led to such an increase in parents refusing to vaccinate their children that last year a woman from Washington state actually died from pneumonia caused by measles, the first measles-related death in America in over a decade.
There is a video clip from the HBO series The Newsroom that has been making the rounds on social media in which a character played by Jeff Daniels is asked what makes America the greatest country in the world, and his surprising answer is, “It’s not.” Although Daniels plays a fictional character in the show his words lay bare an uncomfortable truth. If America is to continue to identify as the “greatest country in the world” then we as a people need to stop rejecting science and education as “elitism” and stop embracing and pandering to ignorance. In 2014, award-winning science educator Bill Nye and best-selling Christian author Ken Ham engaged in a debate on the merits of evolution vs creationism. When asked the question: “What, if anything, would ever change your mind?” their answers were telling.
Ham’s answer: “No one is ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true.”
Nye’s answer: “Just one piece of evidence.”
If we are to undo the self-inflicted damage we’ve done, America needs a lot less of Ham’s attitude and a lot more of Nye’s.
The Angry Liberal 