Haaretz: Apocalypse Tomorrow

Sasha Abramsky, writing in El Haaretz:

The United States, that most grand of human political experiments, is, in early 2017, hurtling toward a catastrophe.

Trumpism is ascendant, and Trump, narcissist, bigot, totalitarian thug, stands triumphant, the entire American political and military apparatus at his disposal. It is, by any measure, a revolutionary moment. And, like all revolutions, it privileges extreme personalities over more mundane, middle-of-the-road, technocrats.

In the year 2017, the American Republic – founded by Washington, Jefferson and other Enlightenment luminaries, saved by Lincoln, brought to its modern pre-eminence by Roosevelt – is being handed over to an unholy alliance-of-convenience made up of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, Russophiles, supporters of the ultranationalist wing of Israeli politics, billionaire plutocrats and conspiracists.

They use social media to bully and to intimidate, and they threaten violence, with increasing frequency, against their opponents – whom they view not as partners in a democratic discourse but as “enemies.”  

Trump’s right-hand man in the White House will be Steve Bannon – who, while in charge of the Breitbart website, peddled a vast array of racially and religiously inflammatory ideas and shamelessly blurred the lines between real and fake news in pursuit of his political agenda. Breitbart has been instrumental in “normalizing” the so-called alt-right, all the way down to the Sieg Heiling neo-Nazi hoodlums who met for a triumphal post-election get-together in Washington D.C.; as well as the white nationalists in Whitefish, Montana who recently published the names and addresses of all Jews living in their vicinity, in the hope of ginning up a social media trolling war against them.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.764870 

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