Cucks and chaos: How Trump sets conservatives at each other’s throats
Cucks and chaos: How Trump sets conservatives at each other’s throats
As the leader of what we once called the Free World, now the Land of Indefinite Airport Detention, issued his executive order banning travellers, immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries, the rest of the globe reacted with a mixture of shock and dismay.
Protests sprang up in America and abroad. A petition asking that Trump be banned from visiting the U.K. picked up over 1.5 million signatures (still counting). Tech companies set up multi-million dollar funds to fight the travel ban. And lawyers flocked to airports with hand-lettered signs offering to work for free (now there’s something you don’t see every day).
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., Trump’s spokesperson, Sean Spicer, cited the deadly attack on a mosque in Quebec City as proof that the president needs to be proactive to keep America safe. The president’s adviser, Kellyanne Conway, had more pressing matters on her mind — like bemoaning the fact that none of the journalists who “talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go.” And Trump himself continues to insist his Muslim ban is not a Muslim ban, despite having campaigned on a Muslim ban and asking supporter-in-chief Rudy Giuliani to come up with one.
The world has turned upside down, backwards and inside-out. It’s as if we have fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged in some bizarre dystopia where facts have “alternatives,” only the president can be trusted to tell the truth, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seems more like prophecy than fiction.
And until the violence in Quebec City, it seemed like Canada was one of the few sanctuaries of sanity left. Now the ugliest incarnation of prejudice — an armed attack against defenceless people — has shattered that image as well.
Some have been quick to blame the attack on Trump’s rhetoric south of the border, bleeding into Canada.
“I believe it cannot be isolated at all,” said MP and Conservative Party of Canada leadership candidate Deepak Obhrai. “I do believe … that the anti-Muslim feeling has arrived in Canada. When you start politics, play divisive community-based politics, the consequences are what we saw in Quebec City.”
Until we know more details about the accused shooter and his motivation, we cannot make that link with certainty. We know more today than we did yesterday — that, according to those who knew him, shooting suspect Alexandre Bissonnette liked Trump a lot. He was also known to a local immigration group for taking positions in favour of French anti-immigration politician Marine Le Pen and against feminists on social media.
The charged nature of our political climate, particularly in the past few days, will naturally lead people to speculate to those ends. A cursory glance at social media show that Trump’s policies do find some support in Canada — support that is being actively courted by some of Obhrai’s fellow candidates.
That act took a vulgar turn this weekend when Kellie Leitch’s campaign chair, Nick Kouvalis, called Emmett McFarlane a “cuck” on Twitter in response to McFarlane’s charge that he is “mimicking Trumpisms” in an “atrocious campaign.” “Cuck,” of course, is short for “cuckservative,” the new favourite insult of the American alt-right to describe conservatives who ingratiate themselves with liberals, thus becoming “traitors” to their cause.
Cucks and chaos: How Trump sets conservatives at each other’s throats - National | Globalnews.ca
