People support Trump because they project their own fears and hopes on him. Note that I use the clich̩ in reverse order Рthey are first motivated by fear, and hope is secondary.

NYT: No Deal Breaker For Trump Voters

Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to a high school senior who could “walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place.” That is something that the “nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria,” could never do. Mr. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table.

“The guys who wouldn’t like me wouldn’t like Trump,” he said. “The guys who were condescending to him were condescending to me.

Mr Laughlin is literally projecting his own experiences (coming from the justifiable fear of being bullied) onto Trump. Yet in actuality, in high school (or the military academy he attended) Trump was a jock.! He had a reputation for being a jerk, too.

Ms Parson Hicks, quoted at the top of the article and pictured, lives in Boston. As a black woman, would she have felt safe attending yesterday’s huge anti-Nazi “free speech rally?” Yes, as long as she stayed in the huge crowd of counterprotesters, who were dancing, singing, and adopting baseball cheers.

Once she crossed beyond the line of weaponized tubas and trombonists and crossed to the Sad Rotunda of Lonely Sturmtroopers, though, she would have not been welcomed.

Source: A Deal Breaker for Trump’s Supporters? Nope. Not This Time, Either. – The New York Times

This experience passed along by Crooks and Liars from a Facebook post (with author’s permission) gives the lie to the “both sides do it” argument… including the one used by the current resident of the White House.

I’ve spent the week since Charlottesville grieving, angry, and spending far too much time sifting through Twitter and news feeds, trying to make sense of it all.

The only conclusion I can reach is that Nazis and fascists must be opposed, without violence if possible. They may make it impossible to avoid confrontations, though, in future actions. They crave conflict because without opposition, they melt away like the filthy, polluted slush at winter’s end.

They march bearing the flags of the defeated enemies of this nation. They must be defeated, too.

I rarely post politics or anything else on Facebook …. But let me be clear. I was acting as a medic in Charlottesville. “Both sides”-ing about it is absolutely unacceptable. Content note: I’m going to get quite graphic here, because while I understand that there’s quite a range of political viewpoints among my Facebook friends, I want to *get this point through to everyone whatever your politics*.

In the run-up to that weekend, some local counterprotest organizers’ families were forced to flee their homes because of violent threats. Some of them had “bodyguards” – friends escorting them everywhere they went that week, even to the grocery store, work, all the mundane places that people go in their normal lives.

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Twitter has hacked my brain. Years ago I was capable of blogging long essays. Now I think in 140 character bursts. This must stop.

I have New Age music playing, I’m not looking at Twitter, I’m not reading item after item in Feedly, I’m not curating links endlessly in Pocket or del.icio.us (or whatever linkhoarding tool is current now).

It is late evening, it is calm, and I had a pleasant day of errands, eating out with family, playing board games, and laughing. I ate out twice, in fact. Lunch and dinner, spent with family. An older couple, a middle-aged couple, and a young couple went out to dinner and enjoyed each other’s company. We shared old memories and made some new ones.

On our way out to the car, we passed a beautiful bronze statue, symbolic of culture and history and of remembering how good things should be even if there’s a tragic history.

This is culture worth preserving. This is history worth remembering, This is beauty worth contemplating.