I hate the followers of Donald Trump
My favorite climate scientist Catharine Hayhoe retweeted the following (obviously sarcastically intended) fictional declaration, which she prefaced with, “A climate scientist’s life on Twitter in one tweet.”
Excuse me, I watched a 20 minute YouTube clip by some guy who works at a car dealership. I literally know more about climate science than anybody else on earth now. Go ahead and argue with me, it’s just going to make me more sure that I’m right and you’re wrong. Lol.
Let he who has no sin among you cast the first stone. That is, let us not be too quick to celebrate our clear superiority to such people (even though the above person is clearly fictional) before checking (and rechecking) our own credentials, or doing a purity test, as it were, on ourselves. The internet in general and social media in particular is the go-to place for notions like “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge,” and many on the left are guilty of applying those same low standards. But, I hasten to add, to say that “we are all guilty of it to one degree or another” is too much like saying “all politicians lie.” It’s too facile, too dismissive, too lazy-minded. There’s a big difference between jaywalkers and serial murderers and that difference also needs to be acknowledged. The most immoderate abusers of logic and rules of evidence among you — I’m talking to the serial murderers and not the jaywalkers — need to make a conscious choice to stop it, now. You know who you are. At least, I hope you do.
End of speech. I needed to clear the decks for why I hate Trump supporters by first doing a little finger wagging and house cleaning. Nine tenths of all idiocy is committed by the Trump camp. The solution, contrary to popular opinion, is not for us to catch up by committing more idiocy. The solution is for us to stop committing the other tenth. We must not be merely morally better than they are, we must also be different in our methods. Because if we practice their methods we will, sooner or later, make their exact same mistakes. (Think otherwise? Think how far Republicans have fallen in 50 years.) Even worse, if we don’t clean up our act we could still lose in November, and Trump and his medieval claque of mental dropouts will party like it’s 1499.
Before we proceed, it should be noticed that it took Donald Trump 24 hours to issue a declaration of total warfare on Twitter.com with an executive order. He did it because Twitter hurt his feelings. Twitter actually fact checked one of his tweets about voter fraud and warned readers that the president of the United States was lying. In retaliation Donald Trump wants to destroy the company.
Let’s be clear here. Trump doesn’t want to actually destroy Twitter any more than he actually wanted Volodymyr Zelensky to open an investigation into Burisma. Trump only wanted to create a perception so hostile to Twitter that his fan base would hate and mistrust them. Trump is too much an addict to ever give up Twitter. Trump spends far more time on Twitter than he does doing his job as president of the United States. In fact, I will tell you how much Trump actually loves Twitter: he spends more time on Twitter than he does playing golf.
And yet, while Trump has acted with such haste and energy against Twitter, nearly five months into the coronavirus pandemic he still hasn’t created a national program for COVID 19 testing or contact tracing. Because he’s too busy tweeting. As I write this, 103,300 Americans lay dead with an average total of a million people devastated by those deaths and mourning those losses. Nearly 1.8 million Americans are now infected by coronavirus — that we know about. But Twitter dared to fact check Donald Trump and everything else must be swept aside. Good thing Trump has his priorities straight!
That is why, in a nutshell of an admittedly rather large nut, I hate Trump’s followers. I hate them because they not only let Trump get away with this outrageous, flagrant, insane abuse of rational priorities, I hate them because they encourage him in it. I hate them because of their uncritical, unethical, irrational acceptance of everything he says. I hate them because they celebrate ignorance, and Trump’s openly despotic assault on a company for daring to contradict him is the logical consequence of that celebration of ignorance. I hate them because they encourage Trump in his despotism even while Trump murders their parents, their grandparents, their wives and husbands. I hate them because they have the same blood on their hands that Trump does, and they glory in it.
The Trump supporter is what you get when standards of evidence slip, when absurd conspiracies are swallowed lizard-like, whole and untasted, without due diligence, without fact checking, without question. Indeed, Trump has now taught his witless gaggle of cretins that even to fact check him is disloyal. He has taught them that questioning Trump is unamerican. His low-information booby-hatch escapees have signed off on the idea that fact checking Trump should result in the death of an entire company, a company that employs nearly 5,000 human beings and supports their families.
I hate Trump’s fan club of whiny children because they don’t care that a “peace officer” murdered a black man by kneeling on his neck for five minutes, while they jeer at Colin Kaepernick, while they join their president in calling Mr. Kaepernick a “bastard,” for using his knee to peacefully protest that murder. I hate them because they need an AR-15 to go to Walmart, or a rocket launcher to buy a sandwich at Subway. I hate them because they will happily accuse an innocent man of murder because they disagree with his political point of view. I hate them because they hate science and they love ignorance. I hate them because they are bigots. I hate them because they are such open and obvious cowards that everything they are is defined by the root word for fear: homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia.
And I want you to hate them too. I want you to hate them so much that you will be motivated to get up and vote Trump and all his vile, evil, hateful, corrupt and grifting Republican cohorts the hell out of office, and you will drag all your like-minded friends with you when you do it. The child rapist and murderer Donald Trump, his pirate ship White House, his Republican hate machine of closet Nazis and his low-information dupes want to divide us. Don’t let them. Truth is on our side, and truth will carry the day in November if we make truth our guiding principle. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.