Well, if collective punishment for Palestinians, and Muslims generally, is acceptable, why not for pro-Trump Americans?
America’s flagship voice of disloyalty, Israel-First, and Neoconservatism — Commentary Magazine — has unleashed one of its key staff Gauleiters, a man named Herr Garbriel Schoenfeld, to demand that all Americans supporting Donald Trump be held “accountable” for disagreeing with their Israel-First superiors.
Herr Schoenfeld characterizes Trump as “this creature from the cesspool” and Trump’s voters as losers who are “beleaguered economically” and have been left behind by “globalization” and “de-industrialization.” (NB: The only U.S. human cesspools I know are the three found in meetings of the writers, editors, publishers, and owners of Commentary, Weekly Standard, and the post-W.F. Buckley National Review. I strongly suspect Trump is not invited to those events, and so he could not have come from America’s only known human cesspools. Mr. Schoenfeld, of course, swims in that stinking pool among his fellow champions of the republic’s demise.)
This is just the start of Schoenfeld’s barely disguised wish — apparently shared by the editors, publishers, and owners at the New York Daily News, which printed his essay — to visit some kind of a holocaust on Americans holding views not approved by Israel-First. The following is from the Gauleiter’s diktat. It calls for the collective punishment of pro-Trump, legal, and loyal U.S. citizens — perhaps bulldozing their homes or smothering them with pillows, a la another nation’s security service? — who refuse to repent and intend to vote other than as demanded by Israel First.
Yet however much Trump voters have grievances, this does not absolve any one of them of personal responsibility for their political choice. We are not only speaking here of those who engage in violence or shout vicious chants at Trump rallies, or the innumerable others who spew anti-Semitic and racist bile across the Internet.
All Trump voters can and should be held to account for embracing a candidate whose character is so dubious, and whose plans for the country — among them, singling out a religious group for a ban on an entry to the United States — amount to an assault on the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.
Followers of notorious dictators of the past also no doubt had legitimate grievances, yet this hardly spares them from the condemnation history has rightly heaped on them.”
It is particularly rich to attack critics of Trump supporters as “condescending intellectual snots” — [Dennis] Saffran’s words — when Trump himself flagrantly treats his acolytes with condescension and contempt. He has exulted in their low attainments, declaring after his victory in one primary that “I love the poorly educated.” Remarking on his disciples’ mindless loyalty, he has said that he “could stand in the middle of 5th Ave. and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
As a practical matter, Republican political candidates may need to court Trump voters. As a moral matter, the rest of us should not close our eyes to the fact that those who pine for a strongman, and who would have us all follow Trump into the abyss, are in the best case willfully ignorant, and in the worst case knowingly endorsing a dangerous demagogue.
If you read this Goebbels-esque quote again slowly, you may hear a chorus quietly singing behind the Gauleiter as he writes the words and feels the pain caused by those who disagree with his genius, the whole story of which he surely must be jotting down in a diary likely to be entitled “My Struggle.” I could not tell if the words were being sung in German, English, or Hebrew, but the melodies seem to sound very much like “Die Wacht am Rhine” and “Das Panzerlied.” Which tune, do you suppose, would go better with the physical punishment Schoenfeld apparently wants inflicted on all “Trump voters [who] can and should be held to account”? (2) One wonders what Schoenfeld knows about the activities of his Neocon and Israel-First friends — perhaps on the Internet or at rallies? — that are meant to identify Trump voters. Whatever they are up to, Schoenfeld writes with certainty that the ballots of pro-Trump voters will not be secret, so they “can” be identified and “held to account.”
What the Gauleiter is suffering so much angst over is not, of course, Mr. Trump, but rather his and his kind’s growing awareness that Trump appeals to many Americans of all races who work for a living, raise families, pay for their kids’ schooling, are good, community-minded citizens, and who deeply resent that they are the half of Americans who pay income tax to support the idleness of the other half of their eternally freeloading fellow citizens. Herr Schoenfeld and his disloyal associates are even more alarmed to be learning that these same Americans hate having their exorbitant taxes, and often their soldier-children’s lives, given to worthless-to-America foreign entities — which also are often America’s enemies — including Israel, Saudi Arabia, other Arab tyrannies, any number of the thieving tyrants who govern in Africa, and the galaxy of tax-eating/wasting international organizations.
People like Schoenfeld, the Neocons, most senior Democrats and Republicans, and the Israel-Firsters have no patience with the temerity of those they snidely look down on as left-behind and under-educated Americans. How dare this ignorant American rabble, think Schoenfeld and his stern gang of fellow haters, challenge their au courant and Ivy League-educated betters?
Well, whether or not Schoenfeld and his gang like what they are hearing, the American citizens they hate are demanding that their voices and votes be heard and counted, and that their taxes be used not to support domestic slackers, illegal aliens, and war-causing foreigners, but to rebuild the republic’s infrastructure, feed the 25-percent of American kids who are hungry, find shelter for the homeless, control borders and end illegal immigration, and begin reducing the ever-growing national debt, much of which is the product of the bipartisan U.S. governing elite forever giving away their tax payments — and with them their kids’ future economic welfare and the nation’s security — to slackers at home and utterly expendable nations and organizations abroad.
Gauleiter Schoenfeld, et al. ought to listen intently to what Mr. Trump and his supporters are saying. And they should keep in mind that however much they dislike what they now hear, they will like much less what they will hear if they, the rest of the arrogant and corrupt governing elite, and the media block Mr. Trump from getting the nomination by procedural tricks, delegate stealing, the denial of citizen voting, election-night misinformation, media lies, or simple bribes. I would suggest that if Mr. Trump is defeated in that manner, the angry words Herr Schoenfeld and his fellow Brownshirts will hear are nearly certain to be accompanied by the lilting, but subtly ominous strains of “The Chambering of Rounds Concerto in F.U. Major.”
Endnotes
- New York Daily News, 9 April 2016
- My bolding and italics.