It's not just what he says but what they hear by @BloggersRUs

It's not just what he says but what they hear

by Tom Sullivan

Saturday's mass shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue leaves behind not only waves of grief, but of commentary. To the anguished crying out this is not who we are after a wave of pipe bombs and another mass shooting, one Twitter user responded this is exactly who we are. We simply just refuse to see what the mirror reflects. There lies a portrait of Dorian Gray draped in a flag.

A news media cowed by years of being "worked" by movement conservatives remains wedded to an image of journalistic normalcy at odds with the world before its eyes. The press covers an attention-obsessed administration committed to inflaming divisions as it would any other, and even more. The president speaks. The president gets coverage. The administration lies. The press headlines the lies. He spews slurs and hate? There's news at six. He says noxious things he knows the press will report and reporters report it. Just doing their jobs as the fire alarms go off at CNN.

The president invites his crowds to hate their neighbors. They do. Indeed, the president is so successful drawing angry crowds exactly because he both celebrates his own and reflects back his followers' inner darkness. He encourages them to unleash it against named enemies foreign and domestic. When violence aimed at his enemies erupts, he cannot even mimic compassion, much less accept his own words could have inspired it. He morosely reads the White House's official statement of sorrow and gets back to talking about his favorite topics: himself and his enemies.

Responding to lamentations and shock at worshipers gunned down in Mr. Rogers' neighborhood, Dahlia Lithwick believes trying to argue causation between the president's eliminationist rhetoric and the violence is pointless.

Democrat Andrew Gillum's smackdown of Ron DeSantis in last week's Florida gubernatorial debate made the case first. Gillum observed that Neo Nazis and white supremacists support DeSantis. Why? "I’m not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist,” he said. “I’m simply saying the racists believe he’s a racist.”

Aside from whatever Trump believes, what his followers hear is presidential vilification of the free press as enemies of the people, of "globalists" like George Soros (read Jews), and of a long list of political enemies targeted last week with pipe bombs. The Beatles did not cause Charles Manson with "Helter Skelter," but neither were they trying to. Trump eggs on his Mansons daily and feigns innocence when they act on what they hear.

Lithwick writes:

In the last week we have encountered two actual killers and one aspiring killer who believed their president when he said that caravans of murderous foreigners are approaching, and who believed that what their president wants is to have those caravans halted by force. They believed their president when he said that the media is hurting America and they believe their president wants to stop the media from doing that journalism by physical force. In the last week, we have seen that when the president makes or amplifies false claims about George Soros and globalists and refugees, people want to act on those claims. It doesn’t matter whether the president is being truthful or arch or ironic or funny or even if he admits moments later that he was just lying for sport. It does matter that millions of Americans believe this president wants them to rise up if the election is stolen by way of “vote fraud,” and that this president wants them to physically assault journalists who report bad things about him. That is what they hear every day, and that is what we need to worry about.

We will try to show our children that there are stark differences between love and hate, between hopelessness and hope, and between truth and fabrications. We will also have to show our children what kind of people we want them to be, because as it turns out, when you show people who you want them to be, they believe you.