Undercurrents of Hate

by Bill Kavanagh:  Last week I wrote about the increasingly violent Right in the USA and urged the reality-based world not to underestimate their rage at losing power in this country.  Sadly, we’ve now endured yet another tragedy at the hands of a lunatic, this time at the Holocaust Museum in Washington.  A guard, known to his colleagues as a “gentle giant” of a man, lost his life when an aging Nazi convict opened fire on him with a shotgun, intending to leave this world in a blaze of violent hatred.

 While the event itself is appalling and horrifying, what should also be becoming clear is that this latest crime highlights a rising tide of hate speech and a continuing campaign of lies about the state of the country from the Right Wing fringe.  The divide-and-conquer strategy of disinformation combined with the utilization of racism to gin up fear has real consequences for people on the ground.

Witness Shepard Smith of Fox News, describing his own horror at the mood of the e-mail he receives lately from those who spend their days watching the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, et al.  We can’t simply sit by while these kind of things are said without challenging the craziness of them.  At least Smith has the guts to point it out on the Fox network, where much of this stuff is churned up for dissemination:

Comments

[btchakir]

I often wonder why Shepard is on Fox anyway... yeah, he's a conservative, but no more than Joe Scarborough. Yet he is part of the network that lets Hannity and Beck run ragged on the truth... perhaps one of the other networks, even MSNBC, could lure him away. We'd all appreciate it.

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