I turned on PBS and, before I could shut it off, I hear him (Judy Woodruff betrayed her viewership last night and had him on however briefly three times) say the Chinese, UN, and WHO are all responsible for everyone dying (yesterday I read Trump gave himself an A+ for his handling of the virus -- maybe he heard the 200 bell rings from the Washington Cathedral memorializing the now 200,000 dead); when I say, I hear Trump saying Chinese, UN and WHO developed and sent every where "wuhan flu" and so he is stopping all funding wherever he can. He is not going to cooperate with anyone, anything "American first." Etc.
No one objected to what he said and there are people who want to get out of the UN -- loathe the WHO because the man is a decent public health person (Ph.d in the area and has worked effectively to rid areas of Africa from malaria), a social democrat, and wants to spend public money to improve public health -- using low tech whereever possible and that includes masks, social distancing, washing hands.
But the pretense is important. If you can say anything and people exploit it for their own purposes, you could say anything to something else and far more heinous things are NOW occurring. So all Jews are evil, vermin and we must murder them all -- and German Nazis did. So all African-Americans are thugs and criminals and we must put them in concentration camps (oops! prisons, or allow cops to kill them with impunity). Governor of Florida says people who protest are felons &c and he is passing low to put anyone who protests in prison - and police obey him. The "logic" or "line of argument" to the action proposed and then obeyed is the same. I suppose this is Brexit. EU, says Boris J, a horrible terrible organization trying to destroy Britain, so we must get out -- all the while those doing this know it's not so and others pretend to believe it because they have other hideous feelings and motives (bigotry, fear, stupid ideas that foreigners are ruining their lives.
Read Masha Gessen on Surviving Autocracy and how the language of autocracy works, what it attacks and the danger of the press behaving as if this is business as usual and never rising about the lies to say the emperor is egregiously naked. Trump's continual vicious attacks on anyone who rises to tell the truth about our laws say on immigration (AOC) or enunciate a moral principle we are not obeying and must (John Lewis, Elijah Cumming). Biden did say this picking of a supreme court justice inside 3 weeks is an abuse of power. But did any repeat this much?
This kind of thing has been going on for more than 4 years now -- it's not about to happen -- it is happening before our very eyes -- we are not recognizing this as montroust and right now because it is right now. We mythologize the Nazis into some impossible evil. No. The experience was just like this (see A French Village). And it's been this way and more areas of our lives taken over since Trump came to dominate public discourse.
Absentee balloting and mail-in ballots are fraudulent, says Trump, so what shall we do -- as in what happens when he sees himself losing, what then, and what will his millions of followers and fascist militias do then? Why do newspapers hang on to idea that if he does not concede, then maybe he need not leave office if he loses? Are they helping him to make this kind of false logic, lines of argument succeed? Yes. He must be contradicted. He must be called a liar. He and his sycophants must not be obeyed.
Guiliani
It distresses and upsets me when Trump is allowed to say bizarre nonsense, is put on TV saying it, and then obeyed ...
Miss Drake