“We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other. They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable … I’m sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.
“Well, people like that who want to share our freedoms must know that their bitter words can have consequences.”
Sound familiar? Sound like a good description of our modern-day right wing, who seem to care less about accomplishing anything than just making their opponents on the other side feel bad?
I suppose it is related, but only in the way an ancestor is. The quote is from 1995, President Bill Clinton describing how right-wing hate radio helped create an atmosphere in which Timothy McVeigh could set off his bomb and blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Rush Limbaugh was outraged that Clinton would accuse him of stirring up hatred. This was the same Linbaugh who had pretty much always been a dog-whistler toward the racists. The guy who told a black caller to “get that bone out of your nose and call me back.”
The guy who said the NAACP should buy a 7-11 so its members could practice holdups.
The guy who called African-American Mayor Ray Naygin of New Orleans “Mayor Nay-ger” after Katrina.
Where it really started getting worse — with Limbaugh and others like him — was when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Americans had done a wonderful thing, becoming the first country to freely elect a leader who was party of a 15 percent or less minority.
The haters and racists tried to have it both ways. They argued that the election of a black president proved racism was over, and then they attacked Obama for all sorts of ridiculous things.
This was where Donald Trump first came into the picture as the foremost of the birthers, people who argued Obama was ineligible to be president because he wasn’t born in this country.
And when he ran for president in 2016, he ran the most negative campaign of any successful candidate in American history. In 2020 he was even worse, and in the current campaign, half his talk is racist and the other half is how the 2020 election was stolen from him.
And of course, his main challenger for the Republican nomination — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to have based his entire campaign on hate.
Both Trump and DeSantis seem to be battling for the support of life’s losers, telling them their failure to succeed isn’t their fault. It’s the fault of the liberals and the gays and the Mexicans.
And how do those losers react?
“HEY! THEY GET ME.”