No, Mr Trump, we're not the same as the neo-Nazis. By Emily Gorcenski // The president of the USA is a neo-Nazi sympathiser. By Richard Wolffe
The president of the United States called a mob of people marching with torches
and chanting Nazi slogans “very fine people.” Fine people don’t chant Nazi
slogans. Fine people don’t surround and attack college students. And fine
people don’t stand with those who do. I was there that night
in Charlottesville. I can say with certainty that the only fine people I saw
were the young students who stood outnumbered and ready to defend their campus
and their beliefs against an onslaught of demagoguery. I know some of those
students. They were ready to die for what they believed in. I was prepared to
die, too. A man wearing a swastika pin shouted transphobic and racist vitriol
at me, inches from my face.
The only fine people
that night were those sprayed with mace and doused with lighter fluid from the
torches that they were beaten with, afraid of being burned alive. Fine people
don’t wear swastikas. Yet President Trump blamed both sides, despite the fact
that only one side was run down by a terrorist. I was there when the
attack happened. Despite the president deeming me – a transgender woman – unfit
for military service, I ran towards the attacker with a weapon. I was ready to
engage him if he tried to hurt more people. I reached out to
groups attending this event from the left, right, and center to urge
non-violence. Meanwhile, the Unite the Right marchers said things like “we’ll
fucking kill them if we have to” on
camera.
The president can
think “both sides” are to blame as long as he wants – but only one side beat a
black man nearly to death with poles in a parking garage while hurling racist
insults. It wasn’t our side. So why is the president blaming us along with the
neo-Nazis?
It wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan and those who wave flags from the Third Reich who were urging nonviolence and trying to save lives in Charlottes-ville. It was leftist activists like me. There is no room at the table for both you and decency, Mr President. As someone who stood face to face with men bearing torches and swastikas shouting “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” as someone who saw the blood spilled in Charlottesville first hand, I can tell you this: you aren’t on my side. You aren’t on America’s side. You are on the wrong side.
It wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan and those who wave flags from the Third Reich who were urging nonviolence and trying to save lives in Charlottes-ville. It was leftist activists like me. There is no room at the table for both you and decency, Mr President. As someone who stood face to face with men bearing torches and swastikas shouting “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” as someone who saw the blood spilled in Charlottesville first hand, I can tell you this: you aren’t on my side. You aren’t on America’s side. You are on the wrong side.
The president of the USA is a neo-Nazi sympathiser
What drives Donald
Trump to such extremes? Yes, we know he has a long history of racism: from his
belief in the guilt
of the Central Park Five to his announcementspeech
riff about Mexican immigrants as rapists. Yes, we know Ivana Trump said he kept
a copy of Hitler’s speeches by
his bedside.
But it would be an
omission to leave out the driving force of his candidacy and his presidency:
his visceral hatred of Barack Obama. Trump has no clear ideology and no clear
purpose to his presidency, other than his obsession with overturning everything
Obama stood for. His presidential campaign began with a racist lie about Obama’s
birth certificate; his presidency continues to smolder with resentment about
the enduring life of Obamacare.
As they say on
Scandal, and in too many American homes for too long, you have to be twice as
good as them to get half of what they have. How it must pain Donald Trump to
know that his predecessor was twice as good at everything from inauguration
crowds to legislative victories.
Let’s be honest.
Trump’s sympathy for neo-Nazis is no more shocking than his pussy-grabbing
boasts, his continued profiting from the presidency, his coddling of (and
alleged collusion with) the Russians and his obvious obstruction of justice by
firing the FBI director. There is, amid all the
random tweets and undisciplined press comments, a remarkable consistency to
Donald Trump. He is the very man Hillary Clinton warned us that he would
be. How he can continue as
commander-in-chief of the world’s most diverse military force is something of a
mystery. How he can continue as the leader of a big tent Republican party is
inconceivable… read more:
The law of killing - a brief history of Indian fascism
The president won’t condemn white supremacy because he has no appreciation for America’s tragic history. By JEFF GREENFIELD
Trump equates white supremacy and liberal identity politics
