Poisoning the well for profit and cruelty
Among would-be Rambos who fancy themselves patriots, artifacts from the American Revolution serve to justify, well, whatever antisocial, anti-American behavior needs justifying. Sacking the U.S. Capitol comes to mind. They’ll wave Gadsden flags and sport tee shirts citing Thomas Jefferson’s “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Etc.
But when they’re not sacking capitols and bear-spraying police, and when their crooked lawyers are not working to overturn elections that don’t go their way, these miscreants employ a more ancient tradition: poisoning the well. Smithsonian Magazine provides a thumbnail history of “an early form of biological warfare,” the practice of belligerents as ancient as the Sumerians and as recent as the Israeli Army and ISIS iterally poisoning wells to inflict suffering on civilians. RationalWiki describes metaphorically poisoning the well as “a rhetorical technique and logical fallacy that uses the association of negative emotions to distract a subject from actual evidence in an argument,” adding, “Poisoning the well is an appeal to hate.”
Brother, do many on the right hate the country they claim so loudly to love. Abusive men, take note, the Republican Party is acting out one of those dreary murder ballads with America. If they can’t have her, nobody can.
Robert Reich sees in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan how thoroughly the right has poisoned the well of democracy by undermining human decency. He finds no one admirable in the Donald-Michael-Allen-Stormy-David saga revealed in court testimony. What has our American experiment in self-government come to when so many from MAGA foot soldiers to presidents and Supreme Court justices lack the basic honor and integrity to conduct it as intended?
This cast of characters — and there are many, many others like them in Trump world — are loathsome not because they have violated the law, but because they have contributed to creating a harsh society in which everyone is potentially bought or sold.
It’s a sell-or-tell society, a catch-and-kill society, a just-take-care-of-it society. A society where money and power are the only considerations. Where honor and integrity count for nothing.
I am not naive about how the world works. I’ve spent years in Washington, many of them around powerful people. I have seen the seamy side of American politics and business.
But the people who inhabit Trump world live in a more extreme place — where there are no norms, no standards of decency, no common good. There are only opportunities to make money off others and potential dangers of being ripped off by others.
When most sites where you might read this see you only as data to be mined, your humanity has been stripped. You’ve been reduced to a commodity to be bought and sold. Nothing more.
John Pavlovitz (someone you should read) noted in 2021 that the right-wing war on “woke” is an assault on basic human decency:
“Woke” is Republican-speak for those of us who believe every America adult should have a voice in the electoral process of this nation,
for people who don’t believe a human being’s body, gender identity, or sexual orientation are anyone else’s business,
for we who are sickened at the violence against the Asian community: the direct result of the irresponsible rhetoric of a Republican president,
for Americans who are disgusted that a cancer diagnosis now often necessitates a gofundme page, because we are making illness a financial death sentence,
for people who will not abide the assassination of unarmed people of color by members of a police force infected with white supremacy,
for those who grieve the way this nation is ravaged by preventable gun violence because those who profit from it have such a stranglehold on our lawmakers—
for those of us who exhibit the slightest empathy whatsoever toward migrant families or the working poor or people of color, when we see how hostile our nation has been to them and how oppressive it still is.It’s woke to want fair elections.
It’s woke to be anti-racist.
It’s woke to be anti-fascist.
It’s woke to trust Science.
It’s woke to wear a mask in a pandemic.
It’s woke to be the parent of a bullied child.
It’s woke to want to be addressed with the gender you identify with.
It’s woke to want a less-polluted community.Anything that brings equity gets this label from the Right because inequity is its only goal.
Their goal is not to water the tree of liberty. Their goal is to poison the well of democracy, to render it unusable by the rest of us who share this land, to sabotage its very foundations.
The rule of law is one of those foundations. Equal justice under law is on trial in Manhattan (and in pending Trump cases).
See the New York Times this morning for what it looks like in the West Bank where the law protects the lawless but not the disfavored, where lawbreakers become lawmakers:
The two-tier situation has only become worse during the past year. We scrutinized a sample of three dozen cases from the West Bank since Oct. 7 that shows how much the legal system has decayed. In cases ranging from stealing livestock to arson to violent assault, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes and never as a criminal suspect.
Where does the extremist right mean to take the United States? Behold the template:
In the West Bank, a new generation of ultranationalists has taken an even more radical turn against the very notion of a democratic Israeli state. Their objective is to tear down Israel’s institutions and to establish “Jewish rule”: anointing a king, building a temple in place of the Jerusalem mosques sacred to Muslims worldwide, imposing a religious regime on all Jews.
The Times investigation continues here. As Republican lawmakers threatened the International Criminal Court last month, you have been warned.
Now, what are you prepared to do about it?
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