7/21/2021 Note to my Mother, by Hope Underwood, quoted on Quora
Note to my Mother:
I am unconcerned that we have different politics. I do not think less of you because you voted one way and I voted another. We need people to vote and the candidate we select is not always going to win. It is hoped that we will have someone who is competent enough to run our country. That didn’t happen in the last election. We got a thin-skinned egomaniac who has never been held accountable for any atrocities he has committed.
Let me be clear. I think less of you because you watched an adult mock a disabled man in front of a crowd and you still supported him. I think less of you because you saw a man spouting clear racism and you cheered for him. I think less of you because of your willingness to support someone who openly admires dictators and demonizes the press and anyone who criticizes him. I think less of you because you heard him advocate for war crimes and you still thought he should run this country. I think less of you because you watched him equate a woman’s worth to her appearance and you thought that was okay. I think less of you because you’ve seen his appointees systematically destroy legal protections and loot the tax payers money and you are ok with that. You watched, along with the rest of the nation, as he separated families and locked innocent children in dog cages and you were not horrified as the rest of us were. You refuse to accept the fact that this man wants to work with dictators but has alienated our long standing allies. I think less of you because you refuse to review the facts and accept that this man is lying to you on a daily basis.
It isn’t your politics I find repulsive. It is your willingness to support racism, sexism, misogyny, and cruelty that I find repulsive. You supported a tyrant and bully when it mattered and that is something I will never forgive or forget. Your lack of morals and basic humanity are devastating to me.
There are some things I can never be civil about: concentration camps, genocide, white supremacy, misogyny, harm to children, mass trauma, state violence, rising fascism, to name a few. There is NO civil discussion with someone who agrees with putting children in dog cages.
So, no...you and I will never be “coming together” to move forward or whatever. Trump literally disgusts me and I hate the sound of his voice spewing hate and dividing the country, but the fact that he doesn’t disgust you is something that is going to stick with me long after this presidency. You have shown me who you really are and the fact that you still support this monster and rush to justify everything he does makes me feel that we have nothing to discuss.
2/5/2021 Column: What can you do about the Trumpites next door? by Virginia Heffernan, Los Angeles Times
You might end up like the upper-middle-class family I stayed with in France as a teenager. They did not attend a citywide celebration for the 100th birthday of Charles de Gaulle, the war hero who orchestrated the liberation of his country from Nazi Germany in 1944. They did have several portraits of Philippe Pétain, Nazi collaborator, on their wall.
When I screwed up the courage to ask how it was for them during the occupation, the lady of the house replied, “We were happy because the Nazis were very polis.” I didn’t know the word, so I excused myself to consult a French-English dictionary. I was in tears when I found the entry: “polite.”
The majority of Northfield Township, my neighbors, supported a man who showed near-murderous contempt for the majority of Americans.
You kept him in business with your support.
4/7/2021 Opinion: The GOP can’t be saved. Center-right voters need to become Biden Republicans, by Max Boot, The Washington Post
Most Republicans don’t care that Trump locked up children, cozied up to white supremacists, tear-gassed peaceful protesters, benefited from Russian help in both of his campaigns, egregiously mishandled the pandemic, incited a violent attack on the Capitol and even faced fraud complaints from his own donors. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds that 81 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump. Wait. It gets worse: 60 percent say the 2020 election was stolen from him, only 28 percent say he is even partly to blame for the Capitol insurrection, and 55 percent say that the Capitol attack “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.”
This is a portrait of a party that can’t be saved — at least in the foreseeable future. The GOP remains a cult of personality for the worst president in U.S. history. It has become a bastion of irrationality, conspiracy mongering, racism, nativism and anti-scientific prejudices.
