President Joe Biden is arguing that “there is something dangerous happening in America” as he revives his warnings that Donald Trump and his allies represent an existential threat to the country’s democratic institutions.
“There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement,” Biden says in excerpts of the speech Thursday in Arizona, released in advance by the White House, referring Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.
Although voting in the 2024 Republican primary doesn’t begin for months, Biden’s focus reflects Trump’s status as the undisputed frontrunner for his party’s nomination despite facing four indictments, two of them related to his attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
They’re American. They’re the worst of us. But they’re American. We can and should be better than them though. But we can’t do that by acting like them.
You can be an American citizen and be UnAmerican. They reject the basic ideals this country was founded upon. That makes them fundamentally UnAmerican.
I definitely want to agree with you. No question there. But any country that enshrined slavery in their constitution. As we have. Who has fascisticaly toppled foreign governments for wealthy business interests. As we have. Who participated in genocide of native peoples up till at least the 1970s that we know of. As we have. Definitely matches their desires and behaviors quite well.
Not enough to make me question that those of us that want better might be the unamerican ones. But enough to recognize our failings as a country. And the difficult road ahead to be who we want to be, us. Vs who we’ve historically been, them.
They might technically be citizens but they are unpatriotic fifth columnists. And that’s being nice. It might be more correct to call them domestic terrorists: many of them openly moon over the idea of an actual shooting civil war and/or a government that will let them kill Americans that disagree with them and/or are the wrong color/ethnicity/religion, etc.
America has a long history of that unfortunately. We were the inspiration for the Nazis after all. We have made a lot of progress over the last 200 years. But they are very much part of who we’ve been unfortunately.
The lions share of people who originally settled the United States were criminals, and the dregs of society that refused to not be bigots. The pilgrims for instance. You have to remember the history we are taught is extremely whitewashed and sterilized. Then stuffed with false hero worship.
I agree they’re a danger to themselves and everyone else. But they are absolutely American and absolutely represent some of the worst America has to offer. And patriotic to that vision of the United States.