[Kevin Rainbow]

It's not rude to object

It is rude to target the person instead of the person's statements/position. When you call the person "depraved", a "troll", and the like that is no longer just an objection, but rude and insulting characterizations of the person.

... a fascist who praises Nazis...

Give me a break, Roger. "A fascist who praises Nazis?" This is exactly the kind of extremist labeling the media tries to trigger in people . There is absolutely no evidence to support support such labels. It is hatemongering garbage, and you would know that if you researched claims against Trump and judged Trump directly by his own message (e.g from his rallies, interviews and the like) instead of by the mainstream media, that are trying to fuel as much hate toward him (and thereby also toward folks who support him) as possible (e.g the accusation that he refused to condemn white supremacy: This goes back to another falsehood: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/tr...-supremacists/ ) The religious commitment to spreading this lie and by extension, to demonize, condemn, and write off a serious majority of your fellow countrymen as "supporters of fascism", is an example of negative bias at its absolute extreme.

while attempting to take away health insurance from millions

He is trying to replace the current health insurance with something better and more affordable for everyone, not "take it away". I would agree that a lot has stood it the way and he has yet to make it happen, but there's a big difference between struggling to achieve a better deal for everyone - which he probably will - and attempting to take away health insurance.

Do you seriously believe someone - anyone - would intentionally try to take health care away from people? Even if someone did, you would need to make a case to prove the intention, if it is going to be more than just a paranoid suspicion about someone being bad and evil. The media trying to sell and you buying it is not proof.

threatening to put his political opponents in jail

You would have a point, if the person who he threatened to put in jail hadn't actually committed a serious crime.

Now I take it that you don't believe that Trump is fascist, but put yourself in the shoes of those of us who actually believe that Trump is a dangerous fascist creating a crisis for our country and the world. Given that belief, do you really expect that people are going to pat you on the back and give you respect for disagreeing?

Of course I don't, because there is absolutely no evidence he is. We have no more evidence to prove he is a fascist than we do to prove you are. If he supported fascism, I think we would have known long before he became a president, considering how willingly he is to let people know exactly what he thinks, no matter how controversial. Apart from there being no evidence to support the idea, considering his business background and his interests as a person, there's no context by which a fascist ideology even would seem relevant to his life, why or how he would be engaged in one. Then you have his family and friends - would they really support him if he were a fascist? Then you would need to ask why and what would make them support fascism? It is a bottomless pit of things that keep failing to support the idea.

Hating him so much that you are willing to continue with such extreme labels and bias, is a shame on all of you, a shame on your media and a shame on your country. You are engaging in a sickening level of hatefulness and demonization of someone and everyone who supports him, and an unwillingness to believe they can possibly have good intentions, are standing up for their beliefs and trying to do what they believe is the right thing just as you are. You are the ones that need to wake up. You strongly disagree with him; big deal. That doesn't justify so much intolerance, hatefulness and lies.


.

[Roger Slater]

He is trying to replace the current health insurance with something better and more affordable for everyone, not "take it away".

You are probably the most gullible Trump apologist I have ever encountered. What evidence do you have that he is trying to replace the current health insurance with something better and more affordable, beyond his constant insistence that it is so?

The facts:

(1) He has been saying for over two years that he would release he superior plan within two weeks and that it is fully formed, yet there is not a single member of his administration who has seen this mystery plan or knows even its broadest outlines. There is no doubt whatsoever, in other words, that the plan doesn't exist and he is just lying.

(2) He came within one vote -- John McCain's-- of repealing the ACA without replacing it, a move that would have cost millions their health insurance and eliminated protection for prior conditions. His disappointment led him to attack and denounce McCain repeatedly.

(3) There is now a case before the Supreme Court asking to have the entire ACA declared unconstitutional, which would also deprive millions of their health insurance and eliminate protection for prior conditions. Trump's administration intervened in the suit in order to support it and join in asking the Supreme Court to strike it all down.

(4) To repeat, Trump has not revealed his secret plan that is so much better than the ACA but has lied about its existence and tried his best to eliminate the ACA without even proposing a new plan.

(5) To add insult to injury, Trump has claimed that he is the one who gave us protection for prior conditions, when his only role has been to try his best to repeal the protection that is built into the ACA. The man just lies and lies and lies, and somehow people like you keep taking him at his word. It's an absurdity, really. Try looking at the facts.

[John Riley]

It’s funny you say of us who see Trump for who he is that we are the brainwashed ones while all you can do is list his talking points. As I said, Trump is everything I was taught not to be. He is a hollow man with hollow values who had bullshitted his way through four years. We can only work and pray he doesn’t get four more. I can’t imagine the damage he could do.

[Mark McDonnell]

If the Channel 4 fact-check report about the hysterectomies turns out to be correct, then that's a good thing, at least, so thank you for posting it, Kevin. I found the story truly disturbing. It is still right, of course, that the allegations were, and continue to be, fully investigated. If they turn out to be any sort of deliberate pre-election shock tactic hyperbole and that becomes widely reported, I hope it doesn't backfire on the Democrats or the wider left in general. And of course, it wouldn’t suddenly make these awful places, or the notion of private for-profit prisons in general, any less abhorrent.

I do think that calling all Trump supporters fascists is probably unhelpful. Because it plays into their (your) hands and strengthens their sense of grievance. But it's no less silly than the tendency of people on the right to call all their opponents Marxists. (The difference there, of course, is that while politically implemented Marxism has led to some Very Bad Things, as conservatives love to point out, its central ideas aren't inherently evil, unlike fascism. Simply put, it’s heart is in the right place). US politics does seem utterly broken right now in its divisiveness. Instinctively, I feel that politics should be fairly boring and that government should consist of serious people quietly engaged in the difficult project of improving the lives of as many people as possible, as fairly as possible. I know. What a thought! To me this comes down to good wages, good public education, free or at least easily affordable health care, a real commitment to environmental issues, everyone having equal rights and opportunities and heavy taxation of the rich. And if we don't like the results we vote 'em out. If pushed, I suppose I'd say in my heart I'm a moderate democratic socialist, though I have a weird phobia about labels in general. Of course in my imagination the world is all kinds of beautiful utopias, but I'm a realist. I'm also a great believer in honesty, and in facts over emotion and rhetoric, in politics. I want my imaginative flights of fancy confined to literature and my own imagination, not out in the real world where the purveyors of them might negatively impact actual human beings. At the moment I feel utterly exasperated with the fantasy worlds, and insults to my intelligence, that the politics of both the right and left often seem to inhabit.

The hypocrisy and nonsense of certain ‘woke‘ worldviews sometimes annoys me, and I know I probably complain about that more here than I do about the right. But that’s because I expect nothing better of the right, and I worry that these things are counter productive to the left. What I see of the right in general, particularly in the US, positively scares me, as it always has. Not all, but far too many of them really are bullies, racists, theocrats, misogynists, homophobes, climate-change deniers and rampantly amoral scorched-earth capitalists. Trump's voters might not all be fascists, though some clearly are. And Trump might not call himself one, even in the unpleasant privacy of his own head, though he clearly courts, and has, the support of white supremacists, notwithstanding any media exaggeration of his Charlottesville comments. What is glaringly obvious to me, from across the ocean, is that Donald Trump is completely unfit to lead a country, due to the fact that he is an opportunistic, empty narcissist, a bully, and a pathological liar. Even if a policy he implemented had some positive effect (I don't know. I don't follow the minutae) I wouldn't be able to see it as anything other than purely accidental, because I genuinely believe, just by observing him, that he's incapable of thinking beyond his own self interest. As Michael put it, he is one of a long line of "the phonies, the liars, the people with a long history of cheating in business, the utter and total bullshit artists". It amazes me that anyone with any intelligence or moral compass can't see this. Getting him out in November is imperative.

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Kevin Rainbow

Give me a break, Roger. "A fascist who praises Nazis?" This is exactly the kind of extremist labeling the media tries to trigger in people . There is absolutely no evidence to support support such labels. It is hatemongering garbage, and you would know that if you researched claims against Trump and judged Trump directly by his own message (e.g from his rallies, interviews and the like) instead of by the mainstream media, that are trying to fuel as much hate toward him (and thereby also toward folks who support him) as possible (e.g the accusation that he refused to condemn white supremacy: This goes back to another falsehood: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/tr...-supremacists/ ) The religious commitment to spreading this lie and by extension, to demonize, condemn, and write off a serious majority of your fellow countrymen as "supporters of fascism", is an example of negative bias at its absolute extreme.

You are technically correct, Kevin, that Trump did condemn white supremacy, on the Monday after his vague Saturday "very fine people" remark about the Charlottesville protests (after a self-proclaimed white supremacist killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others by deliberately assaulting a crowd of protesters with his car).

However:

Trump's very tardy and patently un-enthusiastic disavowal was so obviously scripted for him, rather than spoken from his heart, that it was widely regarded by the white supremacists themselves as designed to assure them that he was only giving lip service to the disavowal, and that his true sympathies lay with them and their cause.

If even the white supremacists and neo-Nazis and Klansmen who were supposedly being condemned thought that Trump's belated Monday statement was insincere, why should the rest of us have to take such an ineffective disavowal at face value?

So I think Roger's characterization of Trump praising neo-Nazis--or at least of giving neo-Nazis the impression that he was including them in his "very fine people" remark on the Saturday--is absolutely spot-on.

Here's one source (of many) supporting my (and Roger's) interpretation of Trump's statements after Charlottesville:

Trump plays both sides with Charlottesville response:
His delayed rebuke of white supremacists is seen as a way to placate the alt-right — and then douse the ensuing media storm.
Eliana Johnson in Politico (August 14, 2017)
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/...esponse-241633

* * * * *

President Donald Trump caved to pressure from his senior advisers on Monday when he rebuked neo-Nazis and white supremacists for their involvement in the rally that ended in the death of a 32-year-old Charlottesville woman — but it may have been a Pyrrhic victory.

His remarks on Monday, authored in part by chief speechwriter Stephen Miller, put some of his most ardent supporters in the cross hairs, and quelled the outrage sparked by his initial statement, which was widely considered weak and equivocal.

[...]

But the White House’s slow-footed response, which played out over three days, fit a broader pattern that has hobbled the president before. Pushed to condemn some of the ugly factions of the alt-right made prominent by his candidacy, Trump has fallen back on the same tactic: delay, delay, delay.

In fact, Trump had a written statement on Saturday that was similar in tone and substance to the one he delivered on Monday, according to a senior White House adviser. But the president veered from those prepared remarks.

Political analysts said Trump’s drawn-out response was part of a double game — an effort to avoid alienating part of his base followed quickly by a pivot to tamp down the outrage.

“He feels he can keep his base happy by being mute for 48 hours, and then he can come in and mute the so-called mainstream media world,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.

[...]

Richard Spencer, an organizer of the Charlottesville rally, told reporters that Trump had not condemned his movement. “His statement today was more kumbaya nonsense,” Spencer said. “Only a dumb person would take those lines seriously.” David Duke credited the president with inspiring Saturday’s rally[.]

[...]

The white supremacist website the Daily Stormer celebrated the president’s response over the weekend.

[...]

The president's name was not attached to a statement circulated by the White House to reporters on Sunday indicating that he condemned the hate groups behind the rally, which exacerbated the situation.

[...]

Politicians and editorial pages across the political spectrum condemned Trump’s mealy-mouthed response over the weekend. National Review’s editors called it “vague and equivocal.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page labeled it a “missed opportunity.” And the New York Post, the president’s favorite hometown newspaper, declared, “It shouldn’t be that hard to summon up a few Trumpian terms like ‘losers’ and ‘really, really bad people’ to describe the hundreds of neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white supremacists and the like who descended on the college town — not after one of them has killed an innocent.”

[Roger Slater]

While it's astonishing that anyone would need more convincing that Trump is a fascist and white supremacist, how about what he just said in a rally in Minnesota, speaking to an almost entirely white audience:

You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota."

If you substitute the word "Bavaria" for Minnesota, and translate this into German, it could just as well have been Hitler speaking. And yes, I used the H-word, because when a leader praises the genes of his constituency, holding them up as superior to other people's genes, you'd have to be willfully deaf not to hear the echo of past fascist leaders.

And the context also leaves no doubt. He was in the middle of making the explicit point that if Joe Biden is elected, he will flood Minnesota with Somali immigrants. I suppose some people can't recognize fascism unless it is spoken in German, but the idea ought to be just as clear in plain English.

[Aaron Novick]

Why is it astonishing that an evil fool would believe stupid things, when believing said stupid things will help bring about the abominable hellscape he so ardently desires?