As I mentioned in a recent Point of View piece, I’ve turned the news back on to behold Donald Trump blame illegal immigrants for what’s at the core of what’s wrong with our country. His scapegoating certainly seems to resonate with Republicans with their going gaga over it and him. It appears to be pure red meat to them.
This is what one, waiting to hear Trump speak at a recent Alabama Stadium rally, was hoping to hear, as quoted in the New York Times: “Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill.’ That’d be one nice thing.”
To be sure, Trump is really drudging up the creepy crawler types like the two brothers in Boston who thumped on a homeless Hispanic, urinating in his face and breaking his nose and bruising up the rest of his body. According to the Boston Globe, one of the brothers said he was inspired, in part, by GOP candidate Donald Trump.
This is Trump’s initial reaction to the Boston incident: “It would be a shame … I will say that people who are following me are very passionate. They love this country and want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”
I believe today’s impassioned Republicans need to reflect hard and long on these words: “The driving force of the most important changes in this world have been found less in scientific knowledge animating the masses but rather in fanaticism dominating them and in a hysteria which drives them forward.”
And for Adolph Hitler, who crafted those words, a major component of the hysteria to drive Germany in the direction he wanted, in his bid or will to power, was scapegoating, especially the Jews. To the Germans, it became ever more self evident to them, with Hitler’s endless, bombastic speeches, that it was the Jewish people that were preventing Germany from being restored to greatness after World War I.
Face it, illegal immigrants provide a back door to exploiting deep-seated racism at the heart of today’s Republican Party. To listen to their rhetoric, in trying to outdo Trump, today’s Republican candidates are all out there trying to outdo one another by proposing their own 1935-like versions of the Nuremberg Laws that really put the German Jewish community in the vise grips of a completely gone mad German State.
I swear, if the Republican Party keeps this up, especially old Trump roiling and blasting away at those who can defend themselves least, we are going to have ourselves an American version of Kristallnacht at some border town with probably old Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Arizona’s Sahara Palin at the head of the rampage.
Are we really going to let our own worst instincts triumph over ourselves?
Illegal immigration is certainly not at the core of what ails our country: far from it. What is at the core of what ails our country is a dysfunctional Congress completely incapable of compromise. It’s as if Republicans, driven by their brand of Hitleresque fanaticism and hysteria, have thrown in the towel on democratic decorum and process.
Anyway, I suggest today’s press start immediately framing the scapegoating that’s going on for what it is. Remember, nothing is certain, much less forever in our world. To think Scott Walker just announced he’d consider building a wall between us and Canada. Is that the kind of infrastructure spending we are to expect from a Republican Administration? Have we gone, like the Germans in 1933, nuts?
Tim O’Leary
