“Hate Is on the Ballot Next Week”

By James M. Wall

If you are an American voter and your ballot is not cast by closing time on Tuesday, November 6, you will have missed participating in the most momentous political event of modern times.

Don’t just take my word for it. Take the word of President Donald Trump, who has campaigned in rallies across the nation—to highly partisan crowds—with the cry that a vote for Republican candidates is a vote for Donald Trump.

It is also a vote for hatred, which Trump has promoted in a steady venomous stream of lies that demonize those in the world who are not White and Christian.

He says of himself, “I am a Nationalist”. His devoted followers insert the White because they know how to read and hear, “dog whistles”.

This is a man who lies about marchers still a thousand miles away, who seek asylum within the United States. He tells his rallies these marchers are an invading army seeking to destroy us.

His personal house organ, also known as Fox News, joins him by reporting the marchers will bring diseases, some of which have long been eradicated. That was such a provable lie, that even Fox had to quietly acknowledge that leprosy and smallpox no longer exist.

Those who largely ignore politics, do not hear the denials. They hear and feel the fear and hatred their leader wants them to fear.

The mid-term election November 6, is momentous because if both the House of Representatives and the Senate, remain in Republican control, this nation will be led by Trump and a distressingly compliant Republican Congress for two more years.

And if you are still not convinced of the momentousness of this election, turn your attention to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman whose warning reached us through his Sunday column with the headline,

“Hate Is on the Ballot Next Week: Don’t let the whataboutists and bothsiders tell you it isn’t.”

Who? You read that right, “the whataboutists and bothsiders”, two words we must examine and think about in this momentous election.

 Krugman gets right to it:

In America 2018, whataboutism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and bothsidesism is the last refuge of cowards.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a wave of hate crimes. Just in the past few days, bombs were mailed to a number of prominent Democrats, plus CNN. Then, a gunman massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Meanwhile, another gunman killed two African-Americans at a Louisville supermarket, after first trying unsuccessfully to break into a black church — if he had gotten there an hour earlier, we would probably have had another mass murder.

All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media.

It cannot be put more directly. This is not a partisan statement. It is a connecting of hate crimes to their immediate source, killers already sick and warped enough to hate and kill others, currently stimulated by the hateful lies espoused daily by President Trump.

The alleged killer of 11 Pittsburgh Jewish worshippers believed he was attacking those who belonged to the religious and ethnic community who organized the marchers  headed for our southern border.

That is a lie put forth by Trump and his allies. The man who lied about the size of his inauguration audience, now tells dangerous lies for votes. He cares not for the evil those lies evoke.

Krugman expands:

The man arrested at the Tree of Life synagogue has been critical of Trump, who he apparently believes isn’t anti-Semitic enough. But his rage seems to have been fueled by a conspiracy theory being systematically spread by Trump supporters — the claim that Jewish financiers are bringing brown people into America to displace whites.

This conspiracy theory is, it turns out, a staple of neo-Nazis in Europe. It’s what our own neo-Nazis — whom Trump calls “very fine people” — were talking about in Charlottesville last year, when they chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”…

False equivalence, portraying the parties as symmetric even when they clearly aren’t, has long been the norm among self-proclaimed centrists and some influential media figures. It’s a stance that has hugely benefited the GOP, as it has increasingly become the party of right-wing extremists.

You might have thought that the horrifying events of recent days would finally break through that norm. But you would have been wrong. Bothsidesism is, it turns out, a fanatical cult impervious to evidence. . . .

This needs to stop, and those who keep practicing bothsidesism need to be shamed. At this point, pretending that both sides are equally to blame, or attributing political violence to spreading hatred without identifying who’s responsible for that spread, is a form of deep cowardice.

This is no time to waste on whataboutists and bothsiders.

The evil of this moment, before the November 6 election, and the compounded evil that awaits if President Trump and his Congressional allies remain in power, demands a change in national leadership.

There is evil rampart in the world, which is what the “whataboutists” say to deflect your disagreement with our homeland evil. And those “fair-minded” among us will whine “there are two sides to every issue”.

Not this time, is the right answer to the “bothsiders”. The man we elected President in 2016, is unfit for the office,

If you were born and bred to be a Republican, and you know your grandfather expects you to remember your promise to never leave the party, tell him, “this Trump-compliant party, is not your Republican party, Granpop”.

Paul Krugman ends his column:

The fact is that one side of the political spectrum is peddling hatred, while the other isn’t. And refusing to point that out for fear of sounding partisan is, in effect, lending aid and comfort to the people poisoning our politics. Yes, hate is on the ballot next week.

 And never fail to vote and get others to vote. A non-vote in this election is a vote for hate.

The picture of President Trump at a rally is by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty