This is just another confirmation of what I expected from His Electoral Highness.
Back in October I lined out what to expect from either camp in the general election: http://ranthonysteele.blogspot.com/2016/10/authoritarianism-vs-humanism-or-orange.html I thought Americans were less #MAGA. I was wrong. I then tried to explain it in plainer language so that the electoral college might understand their job: http://ranthonysteele.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-orange-hate-monkey.html They decided to pursue power for power’s sake. So I wrote a piece that explained how we would know who the Nazis were: http://ranthonysteele.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-gop-cuddles-up-to-nsdap.html Now we are in the time of buyer beware: http://ranthonysteele.blogspot.com/2017/01/caveat-emptor.html I’m planning on surviving til His Electoral Highness Donald J. Trump is powerless and penniless. Like he should have always been. We’ll see how long that takes.
Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. “I found so much obedience,” Milgram remembered, “that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.”
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Postscript
Back in 2017, when Trump’s travel ban was new and I was asked by Robert Reich “what do I think?” about Trump and the future, all I could think of was maintaining a holding pattern for as long as I could to see if I could outlast Donald Trump’s time in office. I have. Tyranny was what the travel ban was and is, as was most of what Trump tried to do in office and after being voted out of office. There is no other word for what happened on January 6th, 2021, unsuccessful though it was, like most things Trump.
The first paragraph is the first version of the description on the blog category named Trumpismo back when it was the three characters: OHM. OHM or Orange Hate Monkey. That was everything that I thought of Trump in three characters or three words. I later extended the description with references to the various Bullshit posts that I used as vehicles to disassemble the storm of misinformation around Trump and I added a link to the blog article for the Stormtrumper meme created by Berkeley Breathed, but as the end of Trump’s term in office approached I realized that I needed to alter the way I spoke about Trump and his supporters so that I didn’t continue to dig a specialized language hole of my own making.
For example: #MAGA? That means Misguided Appallingly Gullible Americans in my mind. There is another whole section of the blog that is addressed to these people under the tag MAGA. I have had Trumpists follow me on twitter just because I use #MAGA and then they discover what it means to me and they stop following me.
Time continues to move on and the average Trumpist in the 2020’s is not going to understand that back in 2016 Donald Trump was visibly orange and spewed hate like a monkey flings shit, or be willing to read articles in which their god-king is insulted with base slurs against his and their character. Never mind that the emperor is nude, that is beside the point. The point? That these idiots were still here and are still idiots and that I might need to get them to read something I wrote at some point in the future. So the language on the blog evolved and softened even though I bridle at this alteration, and time continues to move on. This record and others remain. Records of what I really thought at the time.
The TED talks “On Tyranny” were illustrative of the thought early in Trump’s presidency. There was a belief out there that if we simply explained to the Trumpists that what they were doing was anti-freedom, they’d change their course. I haven’t noticed a willingness to change course on the part of Trumpists. If anything, they simply double down on their lunacy. We’ll see if that twitch goes away with time.