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Comment by grayed-down | Hacker News Reader

I was enjoying the article right up to the forth from last paragraph. It was like treating yourself to a fast food burger and then finding a hair in it. After that you ball it up and throw it in the trash and never go back to where you bought it.

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What about it turned you off?

This is a genuine question; I am sincerely interested in your point-of-view.

My assumption is they have a problem with calling Trump a fascist white supremacist, and may find the "genocide" a bit too hyperbolic for their taste.

I'm going to say it was the moment the article (rightfully) referred to the President as a fascist.

"...a role in putting a fascist, white supremacist in the White House"

It's a petulant and a false statement on so many levels. The president is neither a fascist nor a racist. And anyone claiming someone is such should be willing to provide a careful definition of these terms along with unambiguous examples of committed actions pursuant to such definitions.

If the part where he said "go back to where you came from" didn't register as racist to you, you should check yourself.

Here's a packaged sample of Donald Trump's racism: https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-r...

I suppose you and I have very different definitions of racism, but I'm not seeing it in anything you've provided. Countries of origin and religion are not race.

And, to me, racism is harmful actions or words motivated by a hatred of or a belief in the superiority over a race by a member of another race.

> Countries of origin and religion are not race.

“Racism” encompasses bigotry by ethnicity (which encompasses national origin), not merely that based on the 3 classical races (Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid.) In fact, “race”, as commonly used, encompasses ethnic identity groups that are not classical races, too.

Plus there are plenty of examples of Trump being racist in the narrow classical sense, but if your best defense against the charge of racism is that he’s really just a bigot in a number of dimensions that aren't technically “racial”, well, that says quite a lot on its own.

Don't worry, I've seen plenty of bigoted and racially insensitive comments made by Trump's predecessor.

Here's a direct quote (from my link) - what would you say this indicates besides racism by your definition?

“Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump at first denied the remarks, but later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

Looks like hearsay to me, but if he made that remark, it was a stupid thing to say. While there is no wider context, the remark itself still doesn't indicate that he hates black people.

What was so bad about that paragraph? Seems like a reasonable open ended wrap-up to me?

Sure. Remember https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20004467 ? Same sort of situation. At some point, you may have to confront reality. OP claims, quite reasonably, that Zuckerberg contributes to fascism in the USA, genocide in Myanmar, and other regrettable political movements around the world.

FB may contribute to fascism in every corner of the universe, but the author specifically said the US president is a fascist. That's a patently absurd statement. And that's why I balled up the article and threw it away.

Does demagogue go down your throat better?

Sure. Because every political leader is a demagogue.

Sure. A bigot too.

But "white supremacist", when you consider the people in his circle (including his family) is an odd description, like when people call Ben Shapiro a Nazi.

So you read the part where Greenspan accurately called Trump a Fascist, and that hurt your feelings?

I hate to break it to you, bud, but Donald Trump is definitely a fascist.

I don't think he even has a coherent political ideology, much less that it's fascism.

Very few of the people who talk about "fascism" have coherent ideologies either. Trump isn't decisive enough to be a fascist. He really only knows how to do a few things well, and together those don't amount to much more than "play the news media like a fiddle". If we actually wanted USA to be less fascist, we could start by violently invading fewer nations who've done nothing to provoke invasion.

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