Let’s not set aside that ‘treating these people as human beings who deserve human rights’ is not some minor side issue. The constituencies that feel ‘hemmed in or restricted’ feel that way because they aren’t allowed to ignore laws requiring public businesses to serve all humans who come in. What they want to do is to cut certain demographics out of public life entirely, but couch it in terms to try to make it sound like they are the victim.
These are two radically different things. If the Muslim or Orthodox Jew refused service to anyone who eats pork, then it would be a comprable situation. But the Christian Bakers are not being told they have to participate in gay sex. “Your business has to serve the public if it wants a regular business license” and “you have to eat pork” are just not the same, no matter how much people who want to hurt minorities say they are.
So what they fell ‘hemmed in and constricted’ because they aren’t allowed to preach their religious beliefs in schools, and because schools teach actual proven scientific fact instead of fairy tales. What they’re ‘hemmed in and constricted’ by is that schools will teach actual facts, and that they are on equal footing with everyone else when it comes to forcing religion on other people’s kids. Framing ‘we are subject to the same restrictions as everyone else in theory, actually less in practice, and are no longer allowed to indoctrinate other people’s kids’ as ‘we are being horribly repressed’ is… more than a little unreasonable.
I’m asking, more or less: When people say “Let’s pray for Trump because we have domestic enemies,” who are they talking about?
I don’t think they’re talking about deep cover Al Qaeda agents or Americans who are secretly committed to the overthrow of our constitutional republic. I think they’re talking about anyone who opposes Trump’s agenda (or that of the right-of-center constituencies who support him). In other words, anyone who disagrees with them.
I understand that the U.S. has genuine enemies, and that some of them may be domestic. My point for debate (or maybe just the object of my rant) is, don’t we think the brush may be applied just a little too broadly?
I’m sure the answer varies from person to person. There are probably some that would reserve that description for just James Hodgkinson, and others that would apply it to everyone that voted for HRC, and nearly-infinite variations between those two ends of the spectrum.
Yes, some of them are “being alarmist, over-dramatic or paranoid”, just as some on the Left are.
Ok. So, you don’t actually have a problem with the ‘foreign or domestic’ enemies bit, in concept, but really want to talk about some of the (crazy and/or stupid…IMHO of course) Trump supporters who are using the phrase to mean anyone who disagrees with Trump.
I actually haven’t seen folks who are saying pray for Trump (which, with the first word there I tend to tune out automatically anyway) because of his domestic enemies, so I don’t know exactly what they mean by ‘enemies’ in that context. Enemies of Trump? Certainly he has a LOT of domestic enemies in this context…I’m one of them. If they mean enemies of the state because they oppose Trump then, well, we get into the idiotic and crazy realm, but also, IMHO, they don’t actually understand what it means to be an American. Again, IMHO. I’d need to see more to delve into the context of what they are getting at. My, probably knee jerk reaction though is that they are probably crazy and stupid and don’t even know themselves what, exactly, they mean by that. But probably that anyone who is opposed to their hero is an enemy of the state and should be hunted down like running dogs…
Well, a currently elected politician in the office of president sure spent years saying stuff that sounded an awful lot like this. Can’t quite remember his name, but the word Kenyan sticks in my head.
I see a significant difference between attacking a politician and attacking the supporters of a politician, the presumably regular-ish folks that are our fellow citizens. That was a big part of the issue with HRC’s “deplorables” comment: it was an attack on millions of regular voters, not just a candidate. That’s what stuck out to me about Miller’s claim too. S/He was saying that elected Republican politicians had said people who supported Obama were “an enemy of America”:
I don’t know, perhaps someone has. There are a good number of elected Republican politicians and I’m confident more than a few have said some dumb things. I just couldn’t recall anyone saying anything along those lines about Obama supporters. If it happened, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
You are exactly right. The rhetoric on the right has grown increasingly virulent. Now it is incredibly common to hear people say - with total conviction - that liberals want to literally destroy America. Heck, Ann of Green Goebbels wrote a book titled: “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism” all based on the premise that Democrats were traitors to America, again in the literal sense of the word.
The lunacy of the right is just appalling. Recall the last Presidential term, where people believed Obama was going to commit genocide against white people? Actual military members were forming resistance groups because they genuinely thought Obama was going to wage war on America. People claimed Wal-Marts and old military bases were going to be used as Holocaust-style extermination camps. They thought a military exercise was cover for Obama’s plan to invade Texas. Heck, I was once at an NTC rotation when a soldier told me he believed Obama was a member of Al-Qaeda. Just this last election, we had a man with a gun attack a pizza place because he genuinely believed Hillary was using it for pedophilia.
And then Americans looked at the author of racist, easily disproven fabrications and conspiracy theories and said, “That man deserves to be President!”
Conservatives get all butt-hurt and bent out of shape about the ‘intolerant, hateful liberals.’ All I can say to them is, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Like, do they really not hear themselves? Is it some kind of huge mystery why we think these people are insane?
Not (only) what they stand for, which in most cases is just equal civil rights for oppressed minorities, of which they have been one. Rather, actual destruction of what they are, as in the inability to live their lives openly. If anyone here isn’t old enough to remember what that was like in the 50s and 60s before Stonewall, let’s have a separate discussion about that.
My hope, in the event of 45 resigning or being pushed out, hinges on the same political institutions that have protected us from the worst of 45’s nonsense, and that Pence himself is too weak a personality to actually manage to get very far in re-oppressing anyone.
As for domestic enemies, I think there are some. Covert agents of foreign powers. Conspiracies and cabals aiming at essentially the overthrow of the government. That sort of thing, that have always been with us. What vivalostwages’ SIL thought she meant by that phrase is anyone’s guess.
This is also part of the armed forces enlistment oath.
Whether your an idiot with bad ideas or not, if you’ve chosen to support a political party that operates within the US government , you’re choosing to work with America.
Now both parties have brought laws into existence of the want to bring laws into existence that aren’t constitutional, sometimes going directly against it. If anything this is the closest thing to a party being a domestic enemy. As long as they are willing to let the courts interpret whether it’s constitutional though and live with the decision they aren’t a domestic enemy.
I am absolutely certain that there are probably a few examples of individual politicians purposely trying and sometimes succeeding in undermining the Constitution… But this is usually still more like subversion rather than an attack on the Constitution.
Hell basically all federal level gun control laws are subversive to the Constitution which intended that power for states. Just like the marijuana regulations , again federal level bans are subversive to the Constitution which intended that power for states.
Right or wrong it’s clearly subversive to the Constitution but was set up by both parties. Doesn’t make them domestic enemies of the state, they weren’t attacking the Constitution.
If you already know what they mean, why are you asking?
Yes, the brush can certainly be applied too broadly. For instance, assuming that anyone who advocates praying for Trump thinks that anyone who opposes his agenda is a domestic enemy is pretty broad brush.
FWIW, I know several people who pray for Trump. I do it myself on occasion, as I do whoever is President. And neither I nor the others I know about believe that anyone who opposes Trump or his agenda is, ipso facto, an enemy of the United States.
It’s odd - I have read enough rhetoric about how Trump is a traitor and a stooge of the Russians, and anyone who voted for him supports bringing back Jim Crow and whatnot, and Kavanaugh is a rapist and Pence wants to bring The Handmaid’s Tale to real life and etc. etc. But if someone says we should pray for Trump, because (as you agree) we have domestic enemies, that means they are the ones with the broad brush.
I’m fairly certain that Trump is one of those domestic enemies, what with the whole “beholden to Putin” thing.
This fact makes me uncertain about the status of the people who support him in is efforts to undermine and destroy the country. Do you count as an enemy if you’re merely an unwitting/uninformed/deluded stooge? What if you knowingly and deliberately want to topple the government but don’t actually do anything to make it happen (like say a philosophical libertarian/anarchist)?
My vague and unformed thinking is that you have to actually do something before you can be considered an actual enemy of the country. It’s not quite reasonable to call the people enemies for just (for example) flying flags declaring their allegiance to secessionists, for the flags alone. Not quite, anyway.
It’s getting hard to have any sympathy for anyone who still supports Donald. I can see where some people voting for him out of gullibility and being impressed by his self-proclaimed business acumen. Or maybe they thought why not roll the dice. But now we see him for the monster that he is. Now I think that supporting this creature is incompatible with being a good person.