How Ken Burns built his blistering attack on Donald Trump

[FSogol]

“For nearly forty years now, I have diligently practiced and rigorously maintained a conscious neutrality in my work, avoiding the advocacy of many of my colleagues, trying to speak to all of my fellow citizens,” the documentarian Ken Burns told the students, parents and faculty assembled at Stanford University’s commencement Sunday.

Shortly after stating the principles that have made him a wildly popular and influential interpreter of some of the most difficult moments in U.S. history, it became clear that Burns was reiterating this idea because he was about to depart from it. The speech that followed contained plenty of good life advice and affirmations of the communitarian ideals that have informed Burns’s work. And in addition to hitting the requisite marks, Burns launched a sharp and sweeping attack on Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency that placed the GOP front-runner in a tradition that includes some of the ugliest impulses in U.S. political history.

snip

“As a student of history, I recognize this type. He emerges everywhere and in all eras,” Burns said of Trump. “We see nurtured in his campaign an incipient Proto-fascism, a nativist anti-immigrant Know Nothing-ism, a disrespect for the judiciary, the prospect of women losing authority over their own bodies, African Americans again asked to go to the back of the line, voter suppression gleefully promoted, jingoistic saber rattling, a total lack of historical awareness, a political paranoia that, predictably, points fingers, always making the other wrong.”

But, Burns warned, what makes Trump especially dangerous is the convergence of these tendencies in a single candidate.

Whole Washington Post article by Alyssa Rosenberg here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2016/06/13/how-ken-burns-built-his-blistering-attack-on-donald-trump/?tid=hybrid_collaborative_1_na

[C_U_L8R]

1. What makes Trump especially dangerous

are the countless idiots who adore him.

[heaven05]

4. truth

the "idiots" are the real danger. Like lemmings.

[Moostache]

2. Trump is also dangerous because people hate Hillary enough to vote for him.

Right, wrong or indifferent a certain percentage of the population are so blinded by ideology that they will enthusiastically vote for roadkill before they would vote for Hillary Clinton. This is almost entirely NOT any fault of Hillary's...it is the product of being the wrong candidate at the wrong time and having suffered 30+ years of non-stop, vitriolic hate from right wing media groups. Its not fair and its not right, but it is VERY real. I have had more conversations than I care to admit with rationale, center-left and center-right types who swear on their ancestry that they would NEVER vote for her.

That is disturbing because it does the one thing that makes a Trump win possible - it suppresses turn out. I have been advocating for the Clinton campaign to essentially throw all their resources between now and November at get-out-the-vote efforts. Ignore the Orange Clown and his daily attempts to stir up controversy. Send a clear message that staying home is the same as approving Trump and say it over and over and over and over and over again.

Trump is particularly dangerous because of everything Burns said and everything everyone else in the media is starting to point out, but I fear that only succeeds in making him MORE dangerous. It cements his die-hard bloodless zealots - those who think Corey Lewandowski is a swell guy and upstanding citizen, but he also throws bones at the single issue idiot voters who are willing to give him their vote in exchange for platitudes that he will actually discard like socks 30 seconds after the election. The people who are willing to be duped by Trump make it all the more important to counter them with Democratic turn out.

There is real danger at hand with Trump, and underestimating his willingness to say or do anything to "win" would be catastrophic for these United States of America. If we allow liberals, or progressives, or centrists to sit the election out because of spitefulness and petty grievances, we will rue the day that we allowed the world to be dragged into the mud and America allowed to perish in the tiny hands of a despotic madman.

[FSogol]

3. Amen. n/t

[heaven05]

5. +1000