Originally posted by Surtur
You make some excellent points here, and I wonder about the impact Trump had on this increase in hate. Don't get me wrong he has said some messed up stuff, but IMO they played him up almost as the second coming of Hitler. People keep calling him a white supremacist and it is silly. But I wonder if people saw the rhetoric, believed Trump was as hardcore as they are, and took it to mean it was okay to lash out and be more hateful. Because he never said to discriminate against anyone. Even stuff like what he said about illegals gets turned into "he said all mexicans are rapists".
There's a lot to unpack here. What I'll say is that I don't think Trump quite grasps how much his words affect this stuff. He just knows that talking about illegal immigrants gets his base into a frenzy, and he likes the attention. I don't think Trump's a white supremacist, or Hitler-level discriminatory (though, let's be honest, there's some legit racism in there), but I think he's willing to use ambiguous or potentially inflammatory language that will play to his base, some of whom do see that as an endorsement of their own prejudice. The frenzy of hate speech that hit towns, cities, internet etc. right after the election was part of this as well.
So I think Trump is culpable for a lot of this, but not necessarily for the reasons people will point to, many of which you correctly criticize. The Charlottesville response from Trump was a great microcosm of this. No, I don't think he supports Nazis. But you could see him equivocating in his words, knowing that too much of a response in the other direction would be an abandonment to the left. But it became a celebration for the actual Nazis, who ate it up with glee.
He might also just be kinda dumb. For example, according to some White House aids, he apparently didn't fully understand the implications of rescinding DACA, which was the rare Obama-era action that has support on both sides of the aisle and would cost the country billions to get rid of (deportations are expensive af). He may have just seen the words "illegal immigrants" and "Obama" attached to it, and decided it needed to go. Which, again, is enough for some (but not all) elements of his base. But in all likelihood, he's not actually as anti-immigrant as rescinding it would make it seem.
Originally posted by Surtur
Interesting, have you written any books?
No, actually. Pretty much all of my writing has been for various jobs I've had, which have been writing-intensive communications positions; collectively I've written hundreds of articles for magazines, newsletters (both online and in print) and for web use, but it's all fairly specific to those companies or industries. I was also a freelancer for a while to supplement my income, but it was again all business pieces for various companies' websites and such. I don't really write for myself. That may change, eventually. But I'm the rare professional writer who doesn't have an unfinished novel on his hard drive.