Donald Trump’s echo chamber
Along with all the usual reasons, my principle reason for opposing capital punishment is that it’s the favorite recourse of tyrants. Judicial murder follows totalitarianism like sunny days follow foggy mornings. There’s a certain chilling inevitability to anti-democratic sentiment. The louder and more obnoxious they are, the more they hate democracy and love to see their victims fry.
So (speaking of loud and obnoxious) is anyone surprised when Congressman Jim Jordan echoed Donald Trump’s sentiment that members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff should have been executed? Of course not. If they were wondering anything they were wondering what took him so long.
Jordan recently asserted on Fox & Friends that the former president was “right on target” when he accused Clinton’s aides of spying on him, and that at another time in US history their “crime would have been punishable by death.” Actually, at no time in US history was political spying ever punished by death. There is no instance of such a thing ever happening. Keeping an eye on what another candidate is up to, particularly when the other candidate is a known criminal like Donald Trump, just makes good patriotic sense. Only a candidate who has something to hide would be worried. Or outraged. Or, in Jim Jordan’s and Donald Trump’s case, murderously outraged.
Oren Segal, vice-president for the Anti Defamation League’s center on extremism, thinks such talk isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous. “That sort of language about [how] people should be put to death, or that there should be violent consequences to people’s actions, is quite common among extremist circles. It’s the lifeblood of social media, the propaganda we see in so many different spaces,” Segal said.
Jordan appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss the filing by justice department special investigator John Durham, a Trump appointee, that alleged operatives paid by the Clinton campaign had accessed White House servers in an effort to “dig up dirt.” Of course, any candidate who had no dirt to dig up would laugh off such an effort. But a party that is known for ignoring crimes and going after whistleblowers is undeterred by such logic.
The promotion of this latest irrelevancy, living as it does in the giant shadow of Donald Trump’s innumerable crimes, is just another example of how the mainstream media is failing the spirit of the truth. No one can fault Hillary Clinton, or any candidate, for wanting to keep an eye on a known criminal. That it is being reported as something substantial and something to be ashamed of is the real scandal.
The country is being torn apart by conspiracy theories, chief among them is the nonsense that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. That this political spying poppycock is being given wings at all by the mainstream media is absurd. We don’t need any more phoney scandals. We need unity. We need justice. We need to see people like Donald Trump go to prison. More fake outrage from Jim Jordan, Donald Trump’s hateful echo chamber, is what we most emphatically do not need. 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.