Just a cruel darkness in America these days..... full of scared human beings armed to the teeth, that have knowingly closed their hearts so they can worship a deity that openly laughs at the suffering of others. A part of America has embraced a dark tribalism that actually feels joy in the suffering of those not part of their tribe. For them America first equals me first.
When their deity made fun of the woman who courageously came forward with her story of a once drunken teenager who assaulted her, who will now become a supreme court justice, his devotees chanted “Lock her up!” Lock her up!” If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would not have believed it. America has fallen and broken. I don’t know if anyone or anything can put it together again. Trump will eventually be gone but I don’t know if the embraced hatred and cruelty of his tribe ever will.
"The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.
We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the
#MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
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Chris Waller