by Kathy in BlacksburgWe were returning from a rousing noon-time symphony and a fantastic lunch with friends in Raleigh last Friday when my cell phone informed me the route home was 1 hour and 52 minutes. What? It normally takes about 25 minutes to get home. Add ten minutes for heavy traffic. Waze told me the interstate was socked in. So we took surface streets. We rolled right into the congestion anyway. My original hypothesis for what was going on was the ACC women's soccer finals. I should have known better. Surprisingly, soccer doesn't draw crowds like that here. At Blue Ridge Road traffic slowed to a stop. Police were everywhere. They looked inside of the cars as we approached slowly. Hmmm.
You see, Blue Ridge Road passes by the state fairgrounds. And there, unknown to me until later, were the our-of-their-minds supporters of one, Donald J Trump waiting for their candidate to arrive. We learned later that a full house of under 8,000 turned out to see him. Bernie can do better than that on a bad day. But, you know, it's the South. And the media aren't into Bernie. At. All. But they latched onto the supposed "big crowd." And the news of Trump's visit were all over local media that evening and the next day. And, you know the way media cover these events has an effect. They can build support by how they cover it. It is no surprise, then, that Trump is growing support in this newly backward upside-down state, were notions of freedom, constitutional rights and liberty have been turned on their heads. It's embarrassing.
But, yes, PPP polling now shows that his numbers are up here. And that's not all. To quote PPP Polling:
Trump's Islamophobia is a central feature of his appeal to his supporters: -67% of his voters support a national database of Muslims in the United States, to only 14% opposed to it. -62% believe his claims that thousands of Arabs cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed, to only 15% who don't believe that. -51% want to see the Mosques in the country shut down, to only 16% against that. -And only 24% of Trump supporters in the state even think Islam should be legal at all in the United States, to 44% who think it shouldn't be.SMH. It is just too much to absorb that Donald J Trump, xenophobe, racist and fascist (sorry, this f-word must be said) extraordinaire could dare to run, much less have the support of 33% of Republicans in NC, according to PPP, the most of any in the GOP clown car. However buffoonish and clownish they behave, we must accept the reality that candidates such as Trump pose a menace to our Constitutional form of government as well as our actual freedoms. The list of his enemies is long: all immigrants, but especially Mexican and Muslim immigrants; people of color; LGBT people; women; feminists; the disabled; Democrats and more. And idiotically, after his diatribes against all of us, he tells us that we all love him.
The man is also delusional. Give the GOP a message: Most Americans are better than Trump and the other xenophobes running for President. We must not succumb to all fear all the time. And most of all, we must reject hate. Together we can solve our nation's problems. With dividers like Trump, the harm would be incalculable, the solutions AWOL, like Trump's "conscience."
