It can definitely happen here: Trump’s proto-fascist vision of America and Europe’s wrenching...

[DonViejo]

It can definitely happen here: Trump’s proto-fascist vision of America and Europe’s wrenching migrant crisis

Trump's Jorge Ramos comedy was darker than it looked -- and Europe's deepening crisis is closer than we think

ANDREW O'HEHIR

Two seemingly unrelated incidents this week, thousands of miles apart, showed us different aspects of a moral and political crisis that has paralyzed and divided the Western world. A charismatic TV personality got kicked out of a press conference and, halfway around the world, a gruesome discovery was made inside an abandoned poultry truck. One event played out as comedy while the other was a tragedy that mortified an entire continent, but the threads of meaning connecting them are stronger than they appear.

In the week’s single most Trumpian event – a high standard these days – Donald Trump ordered Jorge Ramos, the most prominent Spanish-language news anchor in the United States, ejected from an Iowa press conference, mockingly telling him, “Go back to Univision.” Nothing about Trump’s contemptuous and condescending manner was especially surprising or unusual, and anybody who still thinks those kinds of outbursts are likely to puncture the great gaseous blimp of his campaign has not been paying attention. If anything, Trump’s confrontation with Ramos, and the mainstream media’s horrified reaction, was likely to push his poll numbers still higher.

What happened outside the press conference was perhaps more instructive. You’ve probably seen this video clip, which went viral almost immediately, but it bears a little unpacking. A middle-aged man wearing a blazer adorned with a Trump button approaches Ramos, at first admonishing him for rudeness and then stepping up to incoherent and unprompted anger. Following Trump’s phrasing to its logical conclusion, the man twice tells Ramos, “Get out of my country.” With the affect of someone struggling to awaken from a puzzling dream, the silver-haired host of the daily news broadcast “Noticiero Univision” and the weekly English-language program “America with Jorge Ramos” quietly responds that he’s a United States citizen.

This appears to be puzzling information, or inadmissible evidence. “Well, whatever,” says Angry Blazer Man, perhaps realizing a split-second too late that his moment of patriotic glory has devolved into looking like an ignorant racist ass on everybody’s Facebook page. He concludes by waving his hands in front of him, in a sort of swimming-crab gesture of all-purpose denial: “No. Univision – no.” What I discerned in that moment was a confusion, and a rejection of reality, that is widely shared among the Trump demographic and can easily be found, expressed in the ugliest possible terms, in every comments section of every news article about the Trump-Ramos contretemps.

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http://www.salon.com/2015/08/29/it_can_definitely_happen_here_trumps_proto_fascist_vision_of_america_and_europes_wrenching_migrant_crisis/

[Jim__]

1. "Donald Trump is ... not the headline attraction ..."

... One reason we don’t want to look too closely at the social and political trauma across the Atlantic is that we fear it may be contagious. If we’re this crazy now, try to imagine what breeds of goblins and demons a migration crisis on that scale might conjure up in America, especially given the decrepit condition of our democracy and our, shall we say, inconsistent recent record on human rights. Or on second thought, don’t. Donald Trump is like the aging Borscht Belt comedian who opens the show, warming up the crowd and getting us in the mood – in this case, the mood for fascism. He’s not the headline attraction, who knows better than to show his face before we’re good and ready.

[underpants]

2. I've tried to make this point as well but this is very good

He really is just using the xenophobia craze that swept across Europe 2 years ago. The refugee situation in Europe is as over looked as the tensions in the South China Sea.

[niyad]

3. k and r

[Unknown Beatle]

4. There is no immigration crisis in the US and

the repugs that claim that there is are either high or stupid, I'll go with the latter.