Long ago, during the halcyon and hilarious Jon Stewart years on Comedy Central, he coined the term 'Bullshit Mountain' as the home and pile of excrement that constantly poured forth from the GOP and their enablers on FOX. An ever growing heap of lies, allusions, thinly veiled bigotry, and completely naked racism.
When he retired, Bullshit Mountain did not do the same. If anything, the bullshit continued to flow and, like lava, devoured land, towns, suburbs, and hamlets in its wake. It unleashed more racism, more hatred, more blatant lies, more repugnant creatures who crawled up through the fetid mounds.
They found their new bullshit standard bearer when DonOLD Trump oozed up from below. For decades known as a self admitted piece of shit, he fit in beautifully on Bullshit Mountain. Even when he began spray painting himself orange, he still blended with the manure - his skin and hair like digested sweet potatos and corn.
We have watched in disgust, horror, revulsion for years now as his ignorance, hubris, self-aggrandizement, and bigotry only served to endear him to the other residents of BM. In fact, his ignorance, hubris, self aggrandizement, and bigotry made them feel seen - game recognizes game, as it were. MAGAts rejoiced in gathering to hear someone serve them word salad peppered with croutons of racism and hate and targeting of the other.
They took up the flag of birtherism when he made the search for Barack Obama's birth certificate worthy of a new Indiana Jones movie. It had everything. Something they deemed elusive, manufactured intrigue, Nazis...
It was all a way to tout his racist bonafides without having to actually say the "N" word. It didn't work out for him, but it planted the seed and his flag on Bullshit Mountain, serving as a marker and pilgrimage spot for what was to come.
When he slithered back into the political fray in 2015, his first remarks laden with derision for Hispanics, dripping in bigotry, with some profanity on top like a cherry on a shit parfait, the sewers opened and out came every white supremacist, Confederate flag waver, straight up Nazi, and suburban Karen/Chad racist in this country. They felt cozy in the sewer he set up for them. They could openly share all that pent up ragism (rage + racism) in the light. He said so.
Their lord said there would be racism, and there was. And it was not good.
Nazis have openly marched (albeit in masks - hilarious - as they shat themselves over the simple request to mask up because of COVID spread), innocent people have been attacked and died at the hands of Trump's stochastic terrorism, and any shade of brown skin immediately gets you a "Go back where you came from" from his supremely ignorant horde. (Chef's kiss to their stupidity: in 2018 a Trump supporter got in the face of Navajo legislator Rep. Eric Descheenie demanding to know if he was here "legally".)
That last one is the perfect example of Trump's "I love the uneducated!" remark years back. Of course he does. He's not a smart man. And he knows this. Peel back the blubber of hubris and hollering and there is a blindingly stupid trust fund baby who has never truly worked a day in his life. His whole schtick has been smoke and shadows, bullshit and bedazzling - all to cover the fact that he is all bluster and no brains. He knows that bumper stickerisms work with his cult because that's what works with him. Even in the White House, they reduced his daily briefings to pictures and few words.
Zero intellectual curiosity is the perfect breeding ground for bigotry and hate and racism - all based in hand-me-down tropes from their equally dim forebears, fear of the other, and the feeling of being better than based on nothing more than an accident of birth.
I've said it before and it bears repeating: If you are white, you did nothing supreme to bring that about. You are simply the product of white people having unprotected sex. That's it. That's all. You weren't touched by an angel. Your mother was touched by a dick.
Which brings me to yesterday, when the Dick-in-chief sat for an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists gathering. Now, an argument can be made both ways here. I believe it is an awful idea to give this cretin a platform to further spew his bullshit and heinous plans should he win. But then, given what went down? Perhaps giving him a live platform - not pretaped, edited, questions agreed upon in advance - is the simplest way to continually capture the blinding stupidity and overt racism he cannot help but ooze.
Right out of the gate he was offensive that the first question, asked by Rachel Scott, detailed his past words, verbatim, that were racist. She basically inquired how he squared that with seeking the votes of black people. His response? “I have never been asked a question in such a horrible manner, first question. You don't even say ‘Hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they are a fake news network, a terrible network.”
Everything devolved in spectacular fashion from there. From blowing off the role of VP "does not have any impact. No impact" to not knowing about Sonya Massey being shot in her own home"I don't know the exact case, but I saw something" to the shit heard round the world about VP Harris, "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black. So, I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?"
I was sitting in a Florida DMV yesterday keeping up with all of this online. The majority of the people waiting with me for driver licenses, to pay taxes, etc were black or some lovely shade of brown. In this state, as an older white woman, I know what the default assumption about my politics are. I expect, receive, and understand the side eye I receive from so many when I am out. That same cloaking device that allows me to navigate life without suspicion in my car, in retail environments, etc - my pale skin - makes me suspect to those whose skin is darker than mine. And in a state made up of people from so many places, with shades of skin like Joseph's coat of many colors, it makes me sad.
Not for me. Let me stress that. I do not feel sorry for me - AT ALL. I can speak to how deeply repulsed I was at what I was watching and hearing. But by virtue of my skin, and what it has provided for me throughout my life, I cannot even begin to touch what it has to feel like to be in the demographics they are so intent on demonizing.
What I hate is the rampant racism and suspicion and derision so fully on display in this state. The open hostility to anyone whose skin is brown or black - seriously, join NextDoor in your area - it is ugly out there. And where I live? A stone's throw from the Mecca of MAGA, Mar-a-Lago? Oof. Houses, apartments, boats - draped in Trump flags. And when that felonious fuck comes to town and parks his gaudy plane along the highway? JFC, the people that gather with their signs, flags, bullhorns.
So I sat and watched and read as he shat the bed in real time. An interview that was supposed to be an hour, cut in half when the question about Pr0ject 2o25 came up. His handlers pulled him off the stage. Seriously, they didn't move him that fast when someone was shooting at him.
The fallout was immediate as was the response and doubling/tripling down from his coven. His inability to comprehend the word biracial is bad enough, but to see how quickly his mouthpieces embraced his message and added to it with their own equally racist and ignorant comments?
His own VP candidate, a man with an Indian wife and biracial children called the response to Trump's words, "hysterical." Completely blowing off, instead of disavowing, the type of racist rhetoric already being aimed at his family.
Jesse Watters, who cautioned men against voting for a woman lest they turn into one, sat with his panel and said the words, "She's not African American, technically (<---he stressed that word), because she has a Jamaican dad."
Insert look of gobsmackdom. Seriously. Um, Jesse, let's start with Jamaican not being a race, but from a place. And does that make the people less black? Where do you think most of those black people came from? The vast majority of people in Jamaica are of sub-Saharan African descent. She's Black and she's Indian.
He then likened her to Barack Obama, "Barack Obama was mixed race. He identified as Black."
Oh boy. Yes, Jesse, Barack had a black father and a white mother. And I would have LOVED to see the faces of all you raging bigots if he had identified as white.
At his rally last night, Trump's parking garage attorney Alina Habba blathered, “I’m a strong woman, a mom, a lawyer and an American. And unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are, I know where I come from." Seriously, the concept of someone being two things at once is breaking their little brains. Just curious, Alina - what are your thoughts on Rafael Ted Cruz and Nimrata Nikki Haley knowing their roots and where they come from? Seems to me out of the three, Kamala is the only one who did not feel the need to change her name and hide her ethnicities to further her political aspirations.
Kamala Harris has always openly embraced being biracial and loving being bi-cultural. It's never been a secret. She is Indian. She is Black. She attended an HBCU. She is exactly who she has always been. That they are scrambling to make it a "thing" against her? Good luck with that. Going for 0% of the Black vote now, huh?
They have nothing. It's that simple. So when their leader spewed more racist bullshit yesterday, that is all they had to run with. And run they are, hands full of it, trying to create a scandal when there is literally no there there. Trump is simply the same race baiting shitbag he has always been. The same bigot who took out a full page ad calling for the death penalty for the wrongly convicted Central Park Five. Age has not tempered him; it has not made him grow wise or see how vile his behavior and beliefs have been. It's all he knows, and he doesn't want to know better, to be better.
For her part, VP Harris responded to their pathetic attempts with dignity. “This afternoon,” she said, pausing for boos from the crowd. “Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists. And it was the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better."
We do deserve better. Racism was always going to be an ugly part of this campaign season. We knew that. But to see that it is now the talking point, their whole strategy? Good. Let them keep spewing their hatred, and vile rhetoric, spreading their racist memes like hot lava. It's not going to touch Harris, it's not going to touch us. Like the people in the shadow of Vesuvius, it's all going to fall on top of them.
Bullshit Mountain was always going to be the hill they died on.
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