There has to be some kind of a contest going on in Trump world to see which commentator can be the most disgusting at any one time on a given topic, a sort of “Can you bottom this?” competition to see who can be the lowest of the low. Laura Ingraham had the field amply covered with her drama awards to the police officers who testified on Tuesday. As cruel and insensitive as that was, it was nothing compared to what you are about to see from Trump pardonee and wanna be Leni Riefenstahl, Dinesh D’Souza.
To @dineshdsouza and the others downplaying January 6th: you are disgraceful. pic.twitter.com/86bLnfACIf
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) July 29, 2021
Characterless, brainless, classless and clueless. That’s D’Souza. Charlie Sykes has a few more ideas:
On one level D’Souza’s mockery of police officers injured in the line of duty is just another example of performative assholery, but it also fits a pattern worth noting: Charlie Kirk mocks Simon Biles for “weakness,” Tucker Carlson cackles about critics, and Laura Ingraham ridicules victims of the January 6 riots.
None of this has any relationship to the fight for freedom, limited government, or national greatness, or anything like a coherent set of ideas. But there is a through-line here: a strutting posture of faux toughness, and the celebration of the “strong” as opposed to the weak.
We’ve seen this play before.
“What is good?” asked Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.”
What is evil? “Whatever springs from weakness.” (If the German philosopher were alive, he’d almost certainly have a show on Fox News.)….
ICYMI, here’s what I wrote yesterday in Politico:
This is also the new ethos on the right. Adam Serwer has famously noted that in Trump’s America, ‘the cruelty is the point.”
But in late-stage Trumpism, it is not just the cruelty: The lack of empathy is also the point. Insensitivity is cultivated; compassion is derided as weakness.
So, we are left with this moment of high absurdity, in which a symbol of human excellence and American greatness is being mocked by bloated white man-children for being “weak.”
They have decided that Simone Biles represents everything they oppose.
How revealing is that?
D’Souza’s take down of these men in blue is an affront to human dignity, regardless of one’s position on the political spectrum. He has no decency. Neither does Ingraham. Nor does Carlson.
Donald Trump came down the escalator five years ago. The GOP got on with him and so began their inexecrable descent into Hell. I honestly don’t know how much lower things can go and I’m afraid to find out.
OMG, that’s the sickest I’ve seen yet. ???
Put D’Sousa, Carlson and Ingraham in the same predicament as those Capitol police and see how they like it. They’d scream bloody murder and sue everbody in sight. Disgusting.
Shame on them all! I would love to see how they would protect our Capital and all the people in there.. Cowards sitting behind cameras and mocking true heros!
I’ve had enough of these vile children.
Let. Me. At. Them.
This is the type of thing that bounces me between white hot anger – and depression. In the latter case a key factor are the changes that have taken place within my character.
I’m a taller than average guy (6’4″ and people have always thought I was taller than that!) and once my shoulders and chest broadened in college big too. The Marines (not till I was 26) packed on more upper body. In my forties, I didn’t get fat, but did put on weight but even by my thirties I was someone folks would look at and think “that’s a big guy.” The thing is, despite that jarhead grunt that’s still in there somewhere (and raises up and shows at times as anyone who reads my stuff knows) for decades I was regarded by both men and women alike as a “gentle giant” or big ole teddy bear” type of person. Sure, they all know I could be forceful when necessary but they also knew how much it bothered me afterwards, not matter how justified my words or actions might have been or how glad they were for me to have been so assertive. My general nature was to be easygoing. When I got back into social services almost fifteen years ago, with mostly women co-workers I was often told I had a big heart.
Not that Depressive Disorder hasn’t been there for a very long time, even during better times in my life, and certainly the way things went off the rails after I transferred to NC didn’t help but a good psychiatrist, followed by a good therapist (both at the VA) helped me adjust to a much smaller life than I’d been expecting. Still, even the relatively few folks I got to know well down here, and friends from up where I’d lived before that I’d stayed in touch with felt I was still the gentle giant. And said so.
It was the realization that gentle giant is gone, dead and probably beyond resurrection in some new iteration that has me fighting depression and for a while now. And it was Trump and the rise of his “base” that killed it. I’m still someone who makes a genuine effort to be polite to people I encounter, even the typical stranger. I genuinely am interested in and supportive of people I know and interact with on a regular basis. I still wish for good things to happen to good people, and for those who haven’t gotten a fair shot and sometimes act out but have some goodness in them anyway to have their lives get better.
But hatred burns within me. Fierce hatred. I’ve cried more times when I think of the late John Lewis and my inability to follow his example more times than I care to admit. This kind of shit is why. I can’t feel anything but raw hatred for this asshole and others like him. People who have known me might be stunned to hear/read me saying what I’m about to say, because the guy they have known who they know (sometimes from experience) would leap in to help someone in distress or being harmed would no longer instinctively do so.
If this asshole were being beaten to a bloody pulp on the street, or trying to drag himself bleeding and severely injured from a wrecked car and crying for help I wouldn’t do a fucking thing to help him. I wouldn’t go so far as to actively physically hurt him more than he already was, but I wouldn’t help him either. I wouldn’t even call 9/11. If he called out to me for help what I would do instead is tell him karma is a motherfucker and his bill had come due. After seeing his little “performance” I might (oh hell, I WOULD) engage in some verbal cruelty, asking him if he was hallucinating because I was fake and wasn’t really there! Or asking how I could be sure those people beating him to death were really hurting him, if he and they weren’t role playing? I wouldn’t interfere with anyone else trying to help him, or take his phone away if he had it in hand and tried to dial 911. But I wouldn’t help. I might not even walk away. I might just wait to see if he lived or died. Yes, that’s fucked up but it’s how I am now when it comes to someone like this.
That’s what this motherfucker and so many others in Trump’s MAGA-land deserve. That is the level of my hatred for them, augmented by the hatred I have of myself for feeling that kind of hate. I realize it’s like a corrosive acid eating away at my humanity but I have been unable, despite attempts to lay it down. Trying to do so only makes the hatred worse, because THEY are the ones that placed it in me in the first place.
I can still be a good person, and good to others and I try to do so. And most of the time am able to do so. But not always, and not with people like this. The combination of anger and depression I sometimes experience at the same time over wanting the worst to happen to someone like this asshole and his cronies chortling their vile shit on the air and social media is something I can’t properly articulate. The only good thing I can take from all this is that I do in fact feel sick inside over the change in what’s happened to me. The fact that I wouldn’t do anything to help this guy or others like him. I still have some humanity and decency left within me. But not for this guy, or others of his ilk.
I’m truly sorry. I think I understand where you’re coming from. The way people have been behaving has had a profoundly negative effect on me as well. I don’t feel like myself anymore. The hatred is difficult to come to terms with for me. I’ve always been a peaceful person. I don’t know what to do with it. I cry often… & just pray that it gets easier.
I still have some hope left. I try to nurture it enough to keep it from dying. However, I work even harder to keep it from growing because I (hopefully) have plenty of years left on this earth and have had hopes (for important things) crushed and it’s devastating. Seeing a small amount, which is all the remaining hope I have crushed is an almost unthinkable tragedy to consider. I’m not sure how I’d managed if it happened. So, I’m not willing to take the chance on allowing what hope I have to grow because I no longer believe I could deal with seeing the kind of hope I once had extinguished. I always loved that line from The Shawshank Redemption – in Andy’s letter to Red he says to remember that “Hope is a good thing; and no good thing ever dies.” I used to believe that with all my being. I want to believe it that way again, but the rational part of me says to hedge my bets on the matter.
Any man who can look as happy as you do and whose furbabies, with whom you are pictured, are equally as joyful still has hope in his heart and soul. I always enjoy reading your articles, Mr. Elliott, and I feel sad that you have, and anyone else so affected by these horrible people has, such a feeling of despair.
The last of my “boys” crossed the Rainbow Bridge in 2005. For years I simply didn’t have the heart to get another one. By the time I started giving it serious thought (many years later) I’d also decided to move from the farm. That would mean an apartment, and since I was looking to advance there was the added uncertainty about how much I’d actually be home. Things went to hell not long after the move to NC, and I wound up forced into early retirement on SSDI in my late fifties. At least I had time to devote to a new four-legged partner, but it’s a significant financial commitment and I felt (and still do) that given how I need to watch my money and have an old car (which has eaten up every dollar of stimulus money from round 2 – and then some!) it’s just not in the cards. I’m sure I could make some changes to afford good pet food, shots, heartworm meds etc. but if something serious were to turn up I wouldn’t be able to afford a sudden, large vet bill. And you know what that would mean. That’s a heartbreak I can avoid.
But yes, both my spaniels were awesome and provided more love and joy than one could ever hope for. As did my ole mutt Ruff back when I was a teen and into my college years. I can bore anyone to tears with stories about each one of them!
Why? To what purpose do they spout their b.s.? What’s the end game? Currently, division, doubt and chaos are a given. What’s the effing end game to their b.s.?
Their “rapture” is the point. They won’t be happy until the rest of us are dead.
It certainly meets the criteria for a death cult.
Thing is, these idiots do not look or sound “strong”. They, like the orange sh*t-gibbon, sound like spoiled little children bullying others because they think they can get away with it. What they are doing we all saw in the school yards over the years. What I remember however is it always came back on them and bit them in the a*s. I am just waiting in anticipation for some real a*s biting. Trump’s is coming and in fact looks like it’s just around the corner if D.O.J.’s order about the returns carries any weight. And every day we get more examples of who exactly was attempting to steal the election, AGAIN (thought we forgot about 2016 didn’t you?).
Karma’s a real bitch and she’s gaining ground on these a-holes every day. I think these people would rather be attacked by bullies than by Karma.
Astounding! Take these pieces of processed chicken shit, give them some makeup and a show and they are deified by every fucking idiot on the planet. One does not want to waste their life even killing them. May people piss on your graves for eternity.
Isn’t there some way that some anti-hate speech or other law can be applied to criminally charge all these offenders? Maybe there should be an anti-assholery law or bring back horse whipping or even oil up the guillotines? I know this sounds extreme, but these freaks have no shame.
How about you giving me this cupcake for a few hours and I can give him the riot treatment these police officers are testifying about. One would be equally mortified to learn that one of those officers committed suicide a couple days after giving his deposition. Make a joke about that you piece of shit.