Demonization Leads To Extermination

Understanding Trump Derangement Syndrome

Recently, a long-time liberal reader of WND emailed me the following message – under the subject line, “The Real Republican Agenda.”

“Hello Mr. Kupelian! I just found this on Facebook, and it’s a perfect description of Donald Trump, his administration and the Republican Party. It shows why so many Americans are appalled and horrified by Donald Trump and his minions:

“You can’t round up the ill, the disabled, the undesirables and kill them in gas chambers. But you can take away their medicine and let them die.

“You can’t lynch a black man under a burning cross. But you can shoot him with a policeman’s gun.

“You can’t force a woman to wear a burqa and beat her if she steps outside. But you can rape her, fail to prosecute the rapist and deny her health care for the pre-existing rape, deny her an abortion for the resulting pregnancy, deny her maternity care, deny her maternity leave and pay, and block her avenues to rebuild her life.

“You can’t round up the foreign-born, confiscate their property, and imprison them in detainment camps in the American west (again). But you can block them at the border and deny them re-entry, deny them reunion with their families, homes and lives, even though they have legal immigration status.

“You can’t put the poor in labor camps. But you can tax them so heavily, and make the cost of education so burdensome, that they and further generations can never ever escape.

“You can’t go back to ‘separate but equal’ schools. But you can appoint Betsy DeVos and let her do this through funding.

“You can’t own a plantation that profits off the backs of little children. But you can look at the budget and say, ‘Oh, there’s no money for food stamps for hungry children, but there are bottomless tax cuts for the wealthiest white men.’

“You can’t appoint a Klansman. But you can appoint Jeff Sessions.

“You can’t appoint a Nazi. But you can get right up in the presidential administration as ‘Alt-Right.’

“The Republican Party is Evil, re-branded to succeed in our legal environment.

“You can’t be Hitler. But you can be Donald Trump.”

The sender, who has debated with me via email for years, signed off by saying, “Don’t like this? Well too bad. It’s absolutely true!”

Well, what’s “absolutely true” would be one of two opposing propositions: Either Donald Trump is a modern Hitler and his supporters the equivalent of Nazis, slave-owners and Klansmen as depicted in this colorful but basically accurate characterization of the left’s view of Trump’s presidency – or else the people claiming this are not just staggeringly delusional, but reckless as well.

First, let’s agree on what is indisputably true: The left frequently compares Trump to Hitler, and I’m not talking about just Facebook rants and anti-Trump protest signs. The Washington Post, as I documented last October in a pre-election article titled “5 Washington Post writers liken Trump to Hitler,” spent 2016 explicitly and continually comparing Donald J. Trump to one of history’s most evil and universally reviled genocidal monsters.

Specifically, five different Post writers, one after the other, cited Trump’s “Hitlerian thinking,” claimed his rise was “uncannily reminiscent” of Hitler’s, evoked “Nazi sympathizers,” called Trump a Hitler-like “megalomaniacal demagogue,” and, of course, pegged him as a dangerous “sociopathic liar” in the tradition of Hitler.

In reality – and I wish I didn’t have to keep pointing this out – Hitler murdered 11 million innocent people, while Trump, a billionaire New York real estate developer who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time and got himself elected president, has never killed anyone.

By why quibble over details? Those on the left – including the Democratic Party, its propaganda wing (the “mainstream media”) and many in the permanent federal bureaucracy (the “deep state”) – feel so threatened by Trump’s presidency they are engaged in an ongoing do-or-die campaign to destroy him in multiple ways, including by spending almost a year falsely accusing him of being a traitor who colluded with Russia to rig the election.

To accomplish all this, they must seriously demonize him.

But constantly likening Trump to Hitler (and his supporters, administration, policies and political party to Nazis, Klansmen and slave-holders) is not merely totally insane. It’s also extremely dangerous to American society. Not only does it further polarize and divide a once-unified nation, but worse, it gives implicit permission to members of “the resistance” to commit whatever lawless and/or violent acts might occur to their enraged minds in hopes of overturning, at all costs, what they see as America’s new Nazi regime.

Let’s examine more closely what is at the very heart of this ongoing attempt to overturn the 2016 election.

Trump accused of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

It’s no coincidence the word “mad” is used to mean both angry and insane, for being angry enough can make you insane. As I write in “How Evil Works”: “Intense hatred has a way of morphing inexorably into full-blown, epic madness. Indeed, hate is like spiritual plutonium, possessing bizarre, explosive, and transformative qualities of which we are largely unaware. It is the means by which evil itself blooms on this earth, especially when rage is focused and magnified by a malignant worldview.”

The worst, most depraved acts of evil you can think of – war, mass-terrorism, genocide – are preceded by the total demonization of the adversary, just as we’re seeing in the left’s hysterically evil characterizations of President Trump.

In a Jerusalem Post op-ed headlined “The Genocide Mechanism,” Israeli counterterrorism expert Itamar Marcus showed how effective demonization can lead to unthinkable, society-ravaging extremes of violence. All that is required to erase the last vestige of conscience and restraint from an angry segment of the population already prone to violence is to engage in “a very specific kind of demonization.”

As an example he cites Rwanda, which in 1994 saw its majority Hutu population massacre some 800,000 minority Tutsis – basically neighbors slaughtering neighbors, mostly with machetes – in the space of three months. That’s close to 9,000 men, women and children slaughtered every single day between April and July of that year. How could such an otherworldly and hellish genocide occur?

“In Rwanda,” explained Marcus, “the Hutus taught that the Tutsis were cockroaches and snakes. Tutsi women were portrayed as cunning seductresses who used beauty and sexual power to conquer the Hutus.” Moreover, he added, “Radio Rwanda repeatedly broadcast a warning that Hutus were about to be attacked by Tutsis, to convince the Hutus that they needed to attack first to protect themselves.”

Preparing For Persecution in the Western Church

So “this demonization,” he said, “included two specific components:

“First, the victims had to be perceived as a clear and present threat, so that the killers were convinced they were acting in self-defense. Second, the victims were dehumanized, so that the killers convinced themselves that they were not destroying real human beings.”

With this in mind, consider all the feverishly evil characterizations we encounter daily regarding America’s 45th president, including recently a Philadelphia bishop for the United Church of Christ who, at a public rally, declared that Trump’s new budget proposal was designed for “ethnic cleansing” – something very close to genocide.

And what about the anti-Trump diatribe at the top of this article? You’ll notice it both dehumanizes the president and his party, and also portrays them as posing an imminent threat to millions of innocents.

Then ask yourself: If this description were actually true – if Trump were today’s Hitler and his policies the modern equivalent to “gas chambers,” “burning crosses,” “detainment camps,” “labor camps,” “plantations that profit off the backs of little children” and Ku Klux Klan “lynchings” – what kind of desperate revolutionary violence wouldn’t be morally permissible, even morally imperative, to stop it?

As I reminded readers in last October’s article on the Washington Post:

There were at least 16 different plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler, including most famously “Operation Valkyrie” (the so-called “20 July Plot”), which was made into a blockbuster movie starring Tom Cruise as the heroic German army officer, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. Even the revered Lutheran pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was executed by German authorities for his role in this particular plot. The people who attempted to assassinate Hitler – to slay a psychopathic monster, to stop a genocide, to end a terrible war – are rightly regarded as patriots and heroes.

So, what does this say about the Washington Post – and others in the “mainstream media” who consider themselves America’s arbiters of truth – continually comparing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with Hitler? Does such “journalism” legitimize threats and violent attacks on Trump and his supporters?

I arrived at this chilling conclusion: “If someone, God forbid – convinced he is a modern-day von Stauffenberg, heroically attempting to rid the world of this generation’s Hitler – were to shoot Donald Trump, would the Washington Post deserve any of the blame? I say yes.”

At War with Reality

Beyond the left’s post-election meltdown and its ongoing campaign to overturn voters’ decision by demonizing Trump in hopes of crippling, impeaching and prosecuting him, there is yet a second reason the left hates the right – a reason even more vexing and profound.

It’s often correctly observed that although the right regards the left as misguided, naïve and wrong, the left sees the right as not only wrong, but malicious and evil. Why would that be?

To unfold this mystery, ask yourself why the left is so perpetually enraged when – to pick a few examples at random – ordinary Americans:

call for limits on the number of Muslim immigrants from terror hotbeds entering the United States;
demand that taxpayer funding be cut off from Planned Parenthood; and
oppose “transgender bathroom” policies that allow men to enter women’s restrooms.

It’s because these positions represent reality, truth, common sense. Muslim immigrants represent an obvious risk to America as terrorism today is committed overwhelmingly by this one group. Planned Parenthood is America’s largest abortion business – by far – and as such has no earthly business being funded by taxpayers. Transgenderism is a serious mental disorder resulting in a shocking 41 percent attempted suicide rate, and endangering little girls by allowing men into their restrooms is not a sane solution to anything.

A generation ago, virtually all Americans would have agreed wholeheartedly with such obviously common-sense statements, but to today’s left they represent bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and hatred – in a word, evil.

Next question: Why do you suppose left-wing mayhem erupts on college campuses when conservative speakers like Ann Coulter are scheduled to lecture? What is so offensive about Coulter’s (and other conservatives’) advocacy of sane immigration policies that riots, criminality and totalitarian attacks on free speech should inevitably result?

If you look carefully, you’ll discern that in almost all cases, it’s somebody speaking sensibly and truthfully that inspires the holy rage of the left. No such outrage accompanies college appearances by dangerous lunatic anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan who has publicly advocated the killing of white people, or Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer who has long supported infanticide, or communist (and Obama pal) Bill Ayers, who summarized the message of his Weather Underground terror group by saying, “Kill all the rich people. … Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents.” No, it’s almost always a conservative and/or Christian speaking common-sense truth that reliably elicits the now-familiar hysterical, shrieking, violent response of the left.

Let’s put this strange phenomenon under a microscope with one final example, to bring what is really at play into sharper focus:

For decades, pro-life “sidewalk counselors” have stood outside abortion clinics, speaking in a respectful, persuasive manner to women entering these killing facilities intent on ending the little life within their womb. Many women have been penetrated by these words and changed course; if not, pro-lifers wouldn’t engage in this kind of intervention day in and day out, year after year, decade after decade.

But occasionally, the woman entering the clinic becomes enraged at the sidewalk counselor’s plea that she spare the life of her unborn child. The woman may later swear that the sidewalk counselor was abusive, threatening, intimidating, screaming – perhaps even violent.

It’s not true, of course. But the psychic shock the woman experienced from having been confronted, however lovingly, with the truth she had been running away from felt to her like an act of great cruelty. After all, she felt awful after encountering the sidewalk counselor, so therefore the sidewalk counselor must have done something awful. Right?

Wrong. All that happened is that the conscience she had worked so hard to deny, suppress and evade popped out and spoke to her from within another person. (If you think about it, this is a key reason for Christian persecution.)