“If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand along tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justification.”
— author J.K. Rowling
So profoundly right.
And that’s the key word: “rationalization.” Once a human being has the rationalization in place, he or she can justify anything.
My favorite definition of rationalization is Ayn Rand’s: rigging the conclusion.
Once the conclusion is rigged by sneaking in/permitting false evidence, and/or leaving out critically relevant facts … you’re up and running.
That’s how you got concentration camps. But that’s also how you got all the errors of human history, individually or collectively.
Errors can mean small or even, at times, silly things. We rationalize eating a little too much, but no harm done, for the most part.
But errors propped up by rationalization can mean the worst things imaginable: the horrors of history that we, in America, have sat in horror of for generations — on the premise that it cannot and never will happen here.
I am here to tell you, based not on opinion but on objective fact: The rationalization for untold horrors is already in place.
Trump (simply by existing, not by doing anything wrong) has provided that rationalization for many.
“He’s horrible,” people say, not because of his policies — which were nothing more than the policies of Mitt Romney’s platform. They dislike him because of his manner and style. They use that dislike as a rationalization to shut down civilization based on a ridiculous overreaction to the flu; on forcing experimental vaccines on the mass population; to evade and quash hard evidence of election fraud; to weaponize originally private social media companies to act as agencies of government censorship; to indoctrinate children in government-run schools with black racial supremacy and Marxist ideas; and to stand our entire Bill of Rights on its head, all in the name of “democracy.”
People capable of this much are capable of much worse. They almost have unlimited power now. Imagine once they consolidate all their power, and it’s fully unlimited. Do you know any leftists? Or RINO types who hate Trump? They glaze over when you try to bring any of this up to them. Their minds are made up. To get Trump — which really means: get any dissenters who don’t approve of what’s happening to our culture and what our government is doing — justifies all means. This attitude was an underlying part of leftism before Trump, and it will outlast Trump. It remains to be seen how far they will go. But like I said: People capable of this much wrongdoing in America, of all places, will be capable of much more.