The neocons are talking about using kids as human shields. Non-neocons are saying it’s just well-deserved payback. The video above is no minor exercise in scatology. It’s confronting. The internet news sites are foaming at the mouth, for and against. It’s also a reflection of how much the many conservative racist bandwagon riders are offending a lot of Latino Americans. They’ve even added a $5,000 payout for shouting “Trump is a racist” when he hosts Saturday Night Live.
Trump has hit a large demographic with a big stick, and they’ve responded with a baseball bat of their own in this video. The “kids as human shields” thing is more than a bit wide of the mark, too. The 14th Amendment, which gives U.S. citizenship to those born in America, relates directly to these kids. Trump’s statements about the Amendment and Latinos are basically pointed at them and their rights as US citizens.
Exactly why a presidential candidate would want to stir up a racial problem at the start of a presidential campaign is debatable. Latinos have been part of the U.S. since it became the U.S., especially in the electoral high value south and west. Anyone who knows US history knows that. Maybe the theory is that Latinos won’t vote GOP anyway, so they’re an easy target.
Branding your own party as an enemy of 20 percent of the population, however, isn’t a smart move. Add to this the standard neocon current model, with its typical anti-black, anti-Asian, anti-Semite, anti-poor flavoring, and it’s starting to look like the GOP only thinks there’s one voter demographic involved.
In fairness, most experienced Republicans don’t think that. Bushes 1 and 2 and Reagan weren’t elected on a rich-whites-only basis. The party may have stuck to its absurd Us and Them rhetoric since forever, but it didn’t specifically target racial groups. The constant attempts to create a Disunited States with polarizing rhetoric weren’t based on your race, color or demographic. They stuck to “Us fabulous conservatives vs Them awful liberals” basic spiel. Absurd, yes, but it works, particularly with the FOX audience and others.
Trump has managed to attract voters by hitting hard subjects, but this one he’s done extremely badly. Antagonizing such a huge sector of the population, and their friends, is just plain dumb.
The other, imponderable issue is how the Deport Racism 2016 approach will evolve. There’s no doubt that Trump has managed to push the buttons of a very deep level of resentment. How is that resentment going to apply itself? Hopefully, not in some of the more “newsworthy” ways.
Compared to the almost legendary hate campaigns of US politics, Deport Racism is relatively mild. It’s a comment from those affected, and Trump basically asked for it. Forget the swear words; focus on the realities of mobilizing a large section of the US population against a political party. 2016 could be a major historical event for the GOP, and for the US.
