Snide, smug, simplistic Donald devotes his periodic pep rallies to charming assembled mobs eager to release pent-up hate toward his selected stereotyped targets.”

There was a 17% increase in hate crime during Trump’s first year in office, according to the FBI. These above-illustrated hate groups rose in total by 50 during 2018. Close to home, the Seattle Times reported July 9 a study showing hate crimes are skyrocketing in Seattle and Washington State, rising 79% over the past four years, Seattle, our next-door neighbor, is one of the country’s worst five hotbeds where rising hatred is concerned—along with Eugene, Cincinnati, Phoenix and Philadelphia.

As one expert summed it up: The entire hate movement “is exacerbated by a president who emboldens white supremacists by failing to rebuke their hateful behavior at a time when racial tensions across the U.S. are explosive.”

The fact that the country’s white population will be an over-all minority in not too many years is just one more nightmare for Donald Trump—and to a multitude of his supporters who cling to racism as their only path to imagined importance. White nationalism seems to be their only hold on the societal superiority they desperately seek. Many try to pass white supremacy off as “patriotism.”

Snide, smug, simplistic Donald devotes his periodic pep rallies to charming assembled mobs eager to release pent-up hate toward his selected stereotyped targets. And he also brainwashes the public at large via TV, never having found a lie he didn’t like or couldn’t utilize. He paints false pictures of reality, transferring evil onto the backs of innocents. It’s not difficult to see where hate is born and how it spreads.

Donald’s basic general hatred seems to be for Hispanics, Blacks and Arabians/North Africans. Although he’ll make an exception if the money’s right, as with the Saudis. He also is not averse to whipping up occasionally among the populace—on behalf of his personal imagined superior greatness—at least strong resentment bordering on hatred for selected white nations such as Canada, England, France and Germany. And there’s always, of course, the Democrats.

I suspect Donald just wakes up in the morning hating pretty much everyone. And that’s when he tweets most of his mean, nasty attacks.

SPLC is no fly-by-night operation. It remains strongly active since forming in 1971 to shore up advances that had been made or were being sought during a major surge in America’s civil rights movement. It defines as a hate group “an organization that—based on principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities—has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics” (such as black skin). You can read more about the SPLC here: https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

MEANWHILE, considering the definition of a “hate group” above, one of my favorite syndicated columnists, Leonard Pitts Jr. of The Miami Herald the other day asked the question: Is the Republican Party a hate group?

“Granted, in its ‘official statements or principles,’ the party doesn’t meet the SPLC standard. Its activities and the statements of its leaders are, however, another matter. . . So is the GOP a hate group? It’s sobering that the question can even be asked. But the inevitable answer is downright chilling. Because the SPLC offers a fair and cogent definition of that term. And the GOP fits it with room to spare.” If it walks like a hate group and talks like a hate group . . .
 Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article232893067.html#storylink=cpy

Pitts appears regularly in The Seattle Times, and his column on this question was in the July 21 issue. Even as I was reading it, Donald was continuing to rave via tweet and on TV, ineffectively attempting to justify has racist attack on four young women “of color” in the U.S. Congress—Alexandria Decasio-Cortez. Ilhan Omar, Anna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.

Nothing would be gained here by repeating a lot of Donald’s crude bleating, which already has been circulated ad nauseam. With his usual combination of racism, misogyny, lies, vanity, etc. he basically twists their criticisms of him into some sort of unpatriotic “hatred of America.” and proclaims, “You can’t talk that way about our country. Not when I’m president.”

Aye, “therein lies the rub,” therein is involved the obstacle of preserving free speech as a two-way street, establishing real equality for ethnic minorities and for women—eliminating some of the fear, bias and hatred gnawing at the edges of our society’s soul. All we, the people, need to do is get your privileged derriere out of the Oval Office, Donald.

You can hug a flag any time you want, but you’re nowhere close to a true patriot or any kind of historic warrior, Donald.