Trump in town

13 July 2018

I see 250,000 Brits have taken to the streets of London to protest against the orange gimp with little hands.

Amazing turn out!

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

To recognise this great event I’d like to share a piece about Trump, which also looks at the broader picture.

Fintan O'Toole for The Irish Times:

“To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist" – what we are living with is pre-fascism.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities.

Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about forty percent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your forty percent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too.

And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts" impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery.

Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

People have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group.

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake" by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest" the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin".

And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious?

Continued below...

comment by Tyler Durden (U21874)

posted on 19/7/18

comment by Just Shoot (U10408)
posted 1 hour, 45 minutes ago
comment by Dave NotSo (U11711)
posted 2 hours, 52 minutes ago
comment by Kung Fu Cantona 🙏🏼 🇵🇸 (U18082)
posted 1 hour, 13 minutes ago
comment by Tyler Durden (U21874)
posted 3 hours, 45 minutes ago
comment by Kung Fu Cantona 🙏🏼 🇵🇸 (U18082)
posted 11 hours, 30 minutes ago
No actual reason then, you just don't like more brown babies being born.

Say no more!
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Stop try8ng to make it about colour you bloody victim
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1 in 3 UK births to mothers bir utside UK.

I'm assuming that's supposed to say "born out side of the UK"

??
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Really is quite amusing how bad his English is when he seems to have issues with foreigners.

There's another poster who often complains about foreigners yet English proficiency is about 7 year old Thai child level. The irony...
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Would you like us to correct your English in that post?

Really, this is a forum where people are on phones typing with autocorrect and tiny touch pads. Pointing out mistakes is a little... meh.
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Very well said dude

comment by Mr. Unsubscribe (U1110)

posted on 20/7/18