Tuesday, February 9, 2021

GLIMPSING THE RISE OF HATE THROUGH THE LENS OF CALIFORNIA'S CENTRAL VALLEY

Author, and San Joaquin (Fresno) native, Mark Arax takes a hard look at the San Joaquin Valley's "conversion from one reality to the other" and it's not pretty. He presents a simple but incisive overview of why California's Central Valley is "an excellent place to study how the cult of Donald Trump came to be" and why the Central Valley is such a stronghold in Trump's cult of personality. Below are a a few excerpts. You can access the entire Fresno Bee article by clicking here.

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"The economy, I concluded, had little to do with a demagogue occupying the White House. No, what Trump was tapping into was racism pure and simple. He was both feeding the hate and feeding off it. He was like a Geiger counter the way he revealed the ugliness that had long been hiding just a few inches below the polite soil. He was playing on white America’s fear of being eclipsed, if not eaten, a deep psychological dread over its diminished status in a new country in gestation. Make America Great Again was the very essence of looking backward for salvation."

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"So there [Trump] stands, aggrieved and wounded, a messiah in the eyes of the committed. Counting the crowd of QAnon-ers, Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, militias, Christian warriors and the rest, this may be an army of 10 million, 20 million, 30 million, who knows. We can now start arguing whether or not they pose a threat to the country greater than Islamic terrorism."

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"Our native sons have played no small part in the national rise of right-wing extremism. There’s House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a world-class suck up who Trump calls “My Kevin,” and Congressman Devin Nunes, the dairyman without a dairy who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for smoking out the Russia Hoax and who swears the California drought is a communist conspiracy." 

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Again, you can access the Fresno Bee piece by clicking here.

- Mark

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