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Regarding Trump Hatred
I have been bewildered by the intense, beyond all reason, hatred of Donald J. Trump since he became a candidate for the POTUS. Therefore, I have finally come to the Ricochet community seeking your insights. I have no reason to suspect he is any more than a normal human being with strengths and weaknesses common to mankind. So, in all seriousness, please contribute your thoughts as to why his opponents are, I believe, quite literally insane, i.e., out of their minds, in regards to him.
Published in Politics
Number 1 – he’s orange. And B – he’s not Reagan. Perfectly valid reasons for the hatred.
Kidding!
The people are sheep and are easily stirred into a frenzy by the powerful people. It has happened many times in history. The powerful people view Trump as a threat to their corruption and they view him as an existential threat on their lifestyles. Anything else an excuse.
Until I got to the “kidding”, I thought BG had hacked someone’s account. ;-)
It’s political. They didn’t hate him before he ran for office.
One of the most powerful instincts of human nature is envy or jealousy. That’s what I think drives a lot of hate oh Trump.
Media brainwashing. That’s really all I can think of.
The media refuses to report on anything that would make Biden look bad, and tells outrageous lies about the President.
I have lifelong friends who are convinced the President is a racist. Where would they ever get that idea except from the media?
Now, Joe Biden has a very long racist history, while the President has a long history of being not-at-all racist. Yet somehow it’s just become “accepted truth” that President Trump is a racist.
This is, of course, projection by the Democrats. All their accusations are projection.
We can’t repair the trust between citizens until we destroy the media — as well as Big Tech.
There is also a spiritual battle in play.
Republicans hate him because he is uncouth, doesn’t accept Beltway policy norms, rejects world government and unmitigated global trade, and he has insulted a lot of them.
Democrats hate him first because every Republican President since Ford is “literally Hitler” (for political expedience by way of tribal war) and because he uniquely has the audacity to fight back without ceding ground before negotiations even begin.
Though little of his policy breaks from ostensible Republican platforms, it breaks from the real actions of both parties.
Also, Western civilization is crumbling. We are living in a time of apostasy and tribulations. A spiritual war is being waged and madness is a part of that. Refusals to distinguish between man and woman are just the tip of the spear.
The demons were released a year or two before he announced his candidacy. This is not normal hatred. This is demonic.
Different categories of people hate (or at least strongly dislike him) for differing reasons…
1–In the days of the Holy Roman Empire, there was a small group of men called the Prince-Electors. They, and only they, got to choose who the next Emperor would be. In America today, we have an analogous set of people who, while they may not get to make the ultimate choice on the Presidency, do believe that have the right to vet who the acceptable candidates may be. Trump was not one who passed their screen, and he doesn’t even genuflect to their Prince-Electoral privilege.
2–Trump has an intuitive pattern-recognizing sort of mind. This drives people whose mental process is entirely structured and deductive crazy…Furthermore, Trump does not do a good job of putting his insights into a 1-2-3 form that would be more acceptable to such people.
3–There are a lot of urban, high-income, highly-educated people who feel great fear, contempt and anger toward people who are rural, Christian, and less-educated, especially if those people are southern. I discuss this phenomenon in detail at my post The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America.
Since Trump is positioned as the champion of such people (‘deplorables’, etc), the anger and fear is transferred to him.
4–Some people, who are far from being in the Prince-Elector class, nevertheless feel that Trump doesn’t show sufficient respect for their professions: some scientists and healthcare people, for example.
More later, possibly.
Lucifer, bringer of knowledge and breaker of chains has assured me that such hatred is an entirely human thing. Hell doesn’t need to left a finger of its body politick for humans to hate.
President Trump (and I insist on using the honorific every first mention-he deserves the respect the media refuse) is firstly an Outsider, and a Businessman, not a professional Politician. Outsiders are a direct threat to Elite Society in Washington D.C. He calls things as he sees them, and he is interested in destroying the source of DC Power, which is the Administrative State. They all know how dangerous he is to their comfortable, powerful lives, so it is imperative that they demonize him until he leaves. And they are deathly afraid that he is already succeeding, which he is. I think this is the motivation behind the Russia Hoax; the federal judiciary attempts to thwart every one of his actions, like immediately stopping any immigration rulings (DACA); cities suing to retain their federal funds from being threatened with cutoff due to riots; the temper tantrums at Supreme Court confirmation hearings, etc. Listen to Rush Limbaugh-he emphasizes this every day.
Why do they call him racist? Why do they call him anti-Semitic? Why do the call him anti-homosexual? Why do they call him a dictator? Why do they call him misogynistic? Why do they call him xenophobic? Why do they call him unfit and incapacitated? Why do they call him a pathological narcissist? Why do the call him a threat to the Constitution?
Why do they scream at the sky? Why do they video themselves screaming at their phones? Why do they shout at diners on the sidewalks? Why do they knock down old people minding their own business? Why do they jump on cars? Why do they set buildings on fire, and lock the doors in case people are inside? Why do the shoot people in cold blood?
It’s irrational. It’s spiritual. It’s evil.
Basis for one of my favorite board games.
Screwtape would probably agree.
I’m serious. You’re not.
This man is serious.
On hatred
I think people fundamentally need to hate other people. They seek out people to hate based on how satisfactory hating them makes them feel. Last night an old liberal told me, I hope an Earthquake swallows Georgia and Alabama and Louisiana whole. There is nothing but horrible racists there. There are 50th in education, 50th in doing something for people. They are horrible.” A multitude of questions formed in me. Would he have said the same thing for the Somali people whom are more ignorant than poor Georgians and far more incapable of establishing a decent government. Would he have said the same thing of Afghanis or Nigerians?
For that matter, would he have said the same things of black Southerners? Whom, according to Thomas Sowell do equally poorly in regard to education and whose politicians are a little more corrupt than the whites? (Though gerrymandered American laws have a lot to do with that.)
Furthermore, black run cities such as D.C., Chicago, and especially Detroit are usually much much worse than white run cities. Still such hatred against blacks would be unthinkable on the part of my liberal friend. Showing contempt towards blacks threatens his virtue but showing contempt towards whites makes him virtuous.
Additionally, Southern Blacks vote democrat and thus are not a rival group to the aforementioned liberal. I will cover more about this when I reference how competition is part of hatred.
The four ignoble reasons why people hate others.
1) The particular group that is being hated have to be outsiders. The hated group has to be different from them. Now, let me emphasize that the categories of being an outsider can be incredibly small. Southern Blacks and Southern Whites had huge culture similarities in terms, of food, folkways, religions, and even philosophical outlook. But their hatred for each other is still ongoing. Quite often, Catholics and Protestants hated each other more than their Muslim neighbors. Someone just needs to be a “little bit foreign” to become the other.
2) Threat and competition. To be hated, an outside group has to threaten the group. This threat can be real or or not, that doesn’t matter. Osama bin Laden said that the West was anti-Islam and that the West and Islam could not coexist because they so fundamentally opposed different things. He views Western Civilization as a rival to Islam that must be defeated.
3) Proximity. One of the sadder findings of social science in recent years is that different groups of cultures that live next to each other naturally don’t like each other very much. According to Robert Putnam, ethnically diverse societies have a harder time building up social capital. More diverse societies are more likely to join local charities or business groups.
The Srik Lankan Tamils and the native Sinhalese along with the Hutus and the Tutsis and many other examples seemed to have the most intense hate for people who were right next to them. Lebano, India and Burma are entirely normal examples of different groups of people who have hated each other for centuries. As the saying goes, out of sight out of mind. After all, if the Rohingya didn’t live near the Burmese, the Burmese wouldn’t think about them.
4) Your enemies must be evil. The fight against them reaffirms your own groups morality.
In nearly every super hero story, the Villain is bad in some way the shows the decency of the hero. In Batman: The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill the Joker because he has to show that he holds to certain moral principles against all odds. That even in the most trying circumstances certain orders of morality is not to be abandoned to chaos. In the movie, Captain America, Red Skull says, the powerful should rule the weak. Captain America responds that the strong should protect the weak and then they punch each other in a most satisfying morality affirming way.
A few years ago, gay marriage was voted down in California. Many Mormons voted against gay marriage and and according to some demographic number crunchers if it weren’t for Mormons the initiative that would have legalized gay marriage would have passed. Many liberals were very very angry at Mormons for voting the way they did. However, blacks voting in a similar pattern and where almost completely ignored by the same liberals who were angry at Mormons. ( http://religionblog.dallasnews.com/2008/11/ny-times-says-mormons-tipped-s.html/)
I believe the reason for this is that liberals cannot feel any moral affirmation when they point to black American’s unusually strong antagonism towards homosexuals. There is nothing for them in that particular indignation.
No. I read the Screwtape letters. Screwtape did nothing but try to make humans cruel to each other. As pleasant a belief it would be that Satan needs to lie to us to get us to hate one another, it makes more sense to assumes that humans love to hate because that is simply what humans do.
4 -a) Pleasure
I cannot improve upon the writing of Theodore Dalrymple. For this category, I will defer to him.
As men are built more lustful than they ought to be and women more emotional than is sensible. Human beings are made for hatred in a similarly tragic fashion.
I surmise that the pleasures of hating another group deeply distorts one’s logic and the capacity for one’s decency. To very slightly paraphrase Andrew Klavan’s address to a center right conservative audience in America.
One need not be a fan of Mr. Reagan’s to find such vitriol unusual and curious. Andrew Klavan’s father was an atheist Jew so that Hitler reference has a bit more venom than the usual Hitler comparisons.
Evolution and the shaping of our hatreds. Our ancestors were effective in their rape and slaughter of the weak. We are alive today because our ancestors slaughtered the neanderthalls and denisovans who competed against them. We are made to hate those who don’t share our DNA and who compete with us for power. It is evolution that made so cruel. Satan watches with fascination as he debates with Uriel and Samael.
I think it results from a confluence of several group forces with somewhat differing underlying motives but all of whom had joined in the selection of the path forward that included Obama and then Clinton or some other acceptable Republican alternative who would not really threaten the leftward trend.. The common elements are money, power, and globalism. Obama was our first POTUS with a Marxist background. There were numerous members of his administration who were very comfortable working with the Chinese Communist Party. Academia, mainstream media, and the large government bureaucracy are established parts of our society that were moving us to the left. Trump’s election in 2016 interrupted that path. So there were various element that make up the collective members and then there were the individual club members interested in power who make up the swamp. They had some mechanisms in place, the Russia Collusion Hoax was one, that they thought would bring him down, but they failed. Trump’s support grew and with it the hatred from his opponents. Possibly the fact that he was doing this without having had a lifetime of experience in the political arena infuriated the experts as they think of themselves. The tech giant leaders using the power of their monopolies add to this effect.
It can also be sheer stubbornness.
It’s still hard for me to believe Trump is truly conservative, but his policies have been consistent. Before he was elected, I could only look at his history as a lifelong Democrat by convenience and not by ideology. That history does not explain his presidency, except perhaps for his comfort with insulting opponents.
But I wasn’t set against him from the start. I preferred Ted Cruz, but acknowledged that his manners and likely flexibility were not worse than any Democrat. People who were especially riled by his manners and his ignorance were often trapped in emotion, it seems; and after that, willfulness.
However it might be worded, personalities seems to play a role and not just politics or self-interest. A lot of otherwise reasonable and respectable people have been caught up in that madness.
President Trump does not ‘go along to get along.’ Not in his DNA.
The international globalists, America’s geopolitical rivals and enemies, and our own elites in the media, politics, the academy, and the administrative state all know he poses an existential threat to their cushy, corrupt system as it has evolved over the past, oh, say, 45 years, putting trillions of dollars at stake.
President Trump threatens them all in a unique way, unprecedented, as is their hatred, ire, and venom. And he has tens of millions of supporters, which the anti-Trumpers simply cannot fathom, so they too must be condemned as irredeemable.
There’s a catholic priest, starts with a V… vigano? Was that the one? Who wrote about the spiritual warfare dimension. It’s amazing. It was quite good. A number of our local catholics can probably pinpoint it and know where to find it.
@westernchauvinist
@dougwatt
Trump is from Queens, and he dared to succeed in Manhattan. That failure to abide by settled class – even caste – rôles made him a legitimate target of establishment derision. That has followed him into all his endeavors (which he knows and plays upon). It emboldens everyone from the bluest of bloods to the Bill Kristols to the pussy-hat wearers to Antifa to say the most outrageous things about him because by doing so they are bolstering, not opposing, the establishment. Deep down, almost everyone wants to belong.
This must be why I like him so much. We have that
Oh! I love him!
The hatred arises because of his lack of political correctness. All other Republican politicians tiptoe around the politically correct minefield. This tells the liberals that they really have some control over conventional Republicans. They don’t have that power over Trump and that scares them. They believe that power belongs to them by moral right because they’re good people. Losing power to someone like Trump is a rip in the moral fabric of their universe.
Look at the flip side. Imagine AOC or another squad member becomes president. Just think of all the sentimental, childish liberal garbage you’ve ever heard spewing from this president’s mouth with no nuance or filter. And you have to listen to it every day for four years. Now you know what liberals feel like with Trump. I almost feel sorry for them.
I come at it from a non-denominational Christian perspective. To my eyes I’ve been watching other Christ followers fall into dangerous alliances with movements like BLM and ideologies counter to what scripture teaches about right living. People who know better are afraid to stand up and call evil evil and good good. I’ve seen this within my own circle of Christian friends and even among pastors. Its scary how quickly some of theses people have become ensnared by the worlds agenda at the expense of certain transcendent values, so the spiritual battle is very much art the heart of this.
For the past 40 years, Democrat politicians could stay above the fray, knowing the media would do their dirty work for them. Republicans stayed above the fray, and got creamed. Trump isn’t afraid to give as good as he gets, and the media can’t handle it. They’ve never had to deal with a Republican who fights back.