Most of us would agree that Trump and his support base are “weird,” in the sense that everything these people stand for: the pathological hatred of immigrants, the rejection of science, the peeling back of human rights, etc. represent giant steps backward into the Dark Ages.
Most people would say that it’s a weird direction to be taken by a large segment of American society. Yet the word doesn’t begin to capture the essence of what we are encountering here.
To call a person or a group “weird” means little else than that they don’t conform to our cultural norms. I may say that my neighbor is weird because he comes outside in his underwear, or that a certain religious cult has weird beliefs.
But what we have here is better described as evil than weird. Did any of the survivors of Hitler or Stalin describe their tormentors as “weird?”
Is this the best we can do to describe pure Trumpism? Is it proper to say that an attempt to overthrow the United States government is weird?
Sad that it came to this, but not nearly as sad as I would if he gets away with all this criminality, and the rest of the world writes us of as avid supporters of crime and apathetic to rule of law.
At left we see illustrated the core problem with the world’s theistic religions, i.e., that adherents are so certain of the rightness of their beliefs that they have no problem destroying the world.
FWIW, I have a friend who takes this even further: he is actively rooting for the apocalypse, and the prospect that all believers in God’s son Jesus will be raptured up to heaven to sit at the right hand of God.
He knows that I don’t believe any of this, but he remains confident that I’ll come around. As he told me, “God melts even the hardest of hearts.” He thinks I’m doing the devil’s work with my compassion for others and the effort I put out to achieve a peaceful and sustainable civilization.
We’d be living in tough times even without these fanatics, but religious dogma, especially of this sort, makes it all that much more difficult.
We read a great deal about people who think that repairing the damage caused by Trump is going to be quick and easy.
Others are not nearly so sanguine, pointing out that many nations have gone to great lengths to create new trade relationships in their effort to cut the United States off without a penny.
Another question is how the people in other countries have come to regard Americans, as people of extremely low moral character–as crackpots, as racists, as gullible morons, as people incapable of critical thinking. That’s not going to change overnight, if it changes at all.
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