Those who have heard Donald speak at one of his many well-attended rallies wonder where he got his mesmerizing speaking style and why people who support him appear to be hypnotized, or at least deeply affected by his personality. There is a simple reason: he studied Adolf Hitler’s speaking style and copied it.
From an article by Marie Brenner published in Vanity Fair in 1990 (reposted in July 2015, when Donald went for the nomination):
Donald Trump has always viewed his father as a role model. In The Art of the Deal, he wrote, “Fred Trump was born in New Jersey in 1905. His father, who came here from Sweden . . . owned a moderately successful restaurant.” In fact, the Trump family was German and desperately poor. “At one point my mother took in stitching to keep us going,” Trump’s father told me. “For a time, my father owned a restaurant in the Klondike, but he died when I was young.” Donald’s cousin John Walter once wrote out an elaborate family tree. “We shared the same grandfather,” Walter told me, “and he was German. So what?”
Although Fred Trump was born in New Jersey, family members say he felt compelled to hide his German background because most of his tenants were Jewish. “After the war, he thought that Jews would never rent from him if they knew his lineage,” Ivana reportedly said. Certainly, Fred Trump’s camouflage could easily convey to a child the impression that in business anything goes. When I asked Donald Trump about this, he was evasive: “Actually, it was very difficult. My father was not German; my father’s parents were German . . . Swedish, and really sort of all over Europe . . . and I was even thinking in the second edition of putting more emphasis on other places because I was getting so many letters from Sweden: Would I come over and speak to Parliament? Would I come meet with the president?”
Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.
Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Later, Trump returned to this subject. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories. Trump continues to endow his diminishing world with significance as well. “There’s nobody that has the cash flow that I have,” he told The Wall Street Journal long after he knew better. “I want to be king of cash.”
An article in Business Insider from August 2015 references the interview that Marie Brenner had in 1990, and goes on to explain the probable reasons for Donald’s odd reading material:
Hitler was one of history’s most prolific orators, building a genocidal Nazi regime with speeches that bewitched audiences.
“He learned how to become a charismatic speaker, and people, for whatever reason, became enamored with him,” Professor Bruce Loebs, who has taught a class called the Rhetoric of Hitler and Churchill for the past 46 years at Idaho State University, told Business Insider earlier this year.
“People were most willing to follow him, because he seemed to have the right answers in a time of enormous economic upheaval.”
Thus, we have a reason why Donald has become such an effective speaker, and why his speeches have such a mesmerizing quality to them, a quality which is rarely mentioned but becomes obvious when one listens to even a short excerpt from his speeches. Here’s his final campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It seems easy to imagine that Donald has studied Hitler’s speeches and is copying his style. This is not to imply that Donald intends to employ the same techniques and perform the same atrocities that Hitler did.
A video clip from Business Insider tells us an interesting factoid about Donald: he has for years subscribed to a “clipping service” which employs an assistant to go through all the newspapers and clip out stories about Donald. Every morning, he is given a stack of these clippings, with his name circled in red, and he goes through them. It is said that he doesn’t read them word for word, but just skims the stories and gets the gist of whether he is being lauded or ridiculed.
So we have an insight into Donald’s success in roping together gullible people, especially those who have received little information other than attending one of his speeches: Donald copies Adolf Hitler’s speaking style. It is likely that Donald does not consciously intend to copy Hitler’s ruling style or his policies, but the Republican Party is not so terribly far away from fascism.
According to Richard Wolffe, opinion columnist for the Guardian:
It may be time to concede that one of the biggest winners of this election is the twisted and murderous worldview distilled by Osama bin Laden. Unlike Bush and Obama, Trump and Flynn believe we are engaged in a war with Islam, just as al-Qaida and Isis believe they are engaged in a war with Christianity and Judaism.
The point is that we are only at war if we agree to be at war. It is not necessary to buy into the insane world view of the leaders of the Islamic State, which holds that Mohammedan prophecy predicts that the world will end with a war between the true Islamists and the infidel, with the final battlefield being in a town now under the control of the Islamists. This is a specific matter of belief for the leaders of the Islamic State: the final battle will be in the town of Dabiq, against the armies of “Rome”, that is the Christian infidels, and only a few will survive to see the Day of Judgement. (This information comes from an article in the Atlantic titled “What ISIS Really Wants”– recommended reading for students of the problem, and deeply chilling.)
Do not be reassured. The Islamic State is a deadly threat, primarily because of its sophisticated use of the Internet for propagandizing. Its message is potentially attractive to alienated youth who see nothing good about Western society. Some people will become recruits, and some of them will become committed terrorists who will try to destroy the West from within.
It is tempting, but a mistake, to accept the challenge of this ideology and send American troops to Dabiq to try to destroy the Islamic State. That is exactly what they want, and it will be self-defeating. A better course of action would be to remain true to your personal beliefs and support moderate, modern Muslims who will attack the Islamist jihadists and destroy their retrograde, medieval way of death with modern weapons.
The epithets for Donald’s pick for Secretary of Education have her as “a Michigan philanthropist.” She is much more than that: she sent her own children to a private Christian school and that is what she plans to support: taking public money as vouchers to support private schools, including religious schools.
As medium.com has it:
She and her husband have funded efforts to create private-school vouchers and protect charter schools from government oversight and regulation.
Ms. de Vos’ influence in Michigan has led to minimal government oversight of Michigan private/charter schools; in interviews with Chalkbeat, an independent organization that studies education in the US, King stated:
“There are a lot of schools that are doing poorly and charter authorizers do not seem to be taking the necessary actions to either improve performance or close those underperforming charters,” current U.S. Secretary of Education John King told Chalkbeat about Michigan last month.
So Ms. de Vos, who enjoys the anodyne epithet of “philanthropist”, is in reality a woman who wants to funnel public money into private primary schools that emphasize religion over basic education and avoid government oversight.
Dementia Rate Drops
A new study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the rate of dementia has dropped in the last twelve years:
The new study found that the dementia rate in Americans 65 and older fell by 24 percent over 12 years, to 8.8 percent in 2012 from 11.6 percent in 2000…
In 2000, people received a diagnosis of dementia at an average age of 80.7; in 2012, the average age was 82.4.
And that “is very good news,” said John Haaga, director of the institute’s [National Institute on Aging] division of behavioral and social research. It means, he said, that “roughly a million and a half people aged 65 and older who do not have dementia now would have had it if the rate in 2000 had been in place.”
Since between 4 and 5 million people in the US develop dementia every year, this is a major problem. A study funded by the National Institutes of Health concluded that caring for people with dementia cost more (roughly $215 billion) than caring for those with heart disease ($102 bn) and cancer ($77 bn) combined.
The NYT article also described three simple tests for dementia: a test of recall, immediately and after a five to ten minute delay, for a list of ten nouns; subtracting seven from a hundred repeatedly (serial sevens), and counting backwards from twenty.
The fall in dementia rates occurred despite a dramatic increase in diabetes diagnoses, from 9 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2012. Diabetes increases the risk of dementia by 39 percent.
Dr. Langa, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said in the NYT article that the decline in dementia rates is difficult to explain. Dr. Denis Evans, a professor of medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, was said to claim that the decline in rates could be spurious because of the difficulty in diagnosing dementia, even though the study was performed by experts. Nonetheless, Dr. Langa estimated that rates of dementia have declined 25 to 30 percent since the 1990’s.
Whether rates of dementia continue to decline is open to question, but there is cause for optimism because rates of heart disease have also declined, and both dementia and heart disease may be reduced by aggressive treatment of high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Both conditions have been much more effectively treated recently.
If dementia and heart disease continue to decline in future, then old age may not be so debilitating as it has been in the past. The elderly may be more independent and may enjoy life more, a possibility to be appreciated by those of us who are getting to be over sixty now.
Post-election statistics show that 42 percent of women overall voted for Donald. 53 percent of white women voted for Donald. 94 percent of black women voted for Hillary, but only 68 percent of Latina women did the same.
Why would any woman vote for Donald after what he said about “grabbing women” by the genitals, women he didn’t even know?
I considered the possibility that some women didn’t even hear the tape that recorded (not surreptitiously, but unbeknownst to the speakers) Donald’s comments about how he was so famous that he could sexually molest women he didn’t know and get away with it. Or if they did hear it, they discounted it as propaganda or somehow irrelevant.
It is possible that the state of the media today is such that a significant proportion of women simply didn’t hear about this issue. The fact is that there is a lot of news that doesn’t reach the people who really need to know.
Another possibility is that women heard about the tape, but discounted it because of contrary information they received about Hillary. It is hard to imagine for me, but possible that some women heard about Hillary’s claimed misdeeds and thought them to be more consequential than Donald’s statements and the corroborating statements of at least a dozen women who described his attacks upon them.
What did Hillary do that was so terrible? “Lock her up” was apparently just a campaign slogan, as Donald said today that he wasn’t going to pursue her for her allegedly illegal deeds because she was suffering over a “vicious” campaign. Donald forgot to mention that it wasn’t up to him to decide whether the Justice Department or the FBI should investigate or prosecute anyone in particular– that’s not how it works in this country. Both institutions are supposed to be independent of the President. Perhaps Donald intends to alter that arrangement.
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Here’s an article that purports to answer the question of why 53 percent of white women voted for Trump: the “Ivanka voter.” I don’t believe it but then I’m not a woman, so I don’t get to answer the question.
From the same source, PopSugar, here’s an article that claims that, if it were only up to people under 39, Hillary would have won. That makes me feel a little bit better, but until the country gets to be majority black and Hispanic and majority under 39, and everybody under 39 votes (they didn’t, not by a long shot), we’re still in for a lot of Republican control.
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Enemy
The preceding piece on ex-General Michael Flynn mentioned Mr. Flynn’s relationship with Russia and his advocacy of rapprochement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. There is also, in the article by Seymour M. Hersh, a statement that China has a stake in the Syrian conflict and that China also faces an Islamic terrorist problem. There are two comments following the article which present an alternate point of view, namely, that Mr. Hersh is not telling the entire truth.
China does have a problem with Islamic terrorists, and China is an ally of the Syrian government, but there is more to the story, as usual. The Chinese government is oppressive towards its Uighur minority, and there is an equivalent Uighur Muslim resistance which could be described by the Chinese as terrorism.
Russia has a problem with Islamic terrorists, particularly in Chechnya, but the Russian government is no more benign than the Chinese government. Premier Vladimir Putin has abrogated democratic elections, ordered the assassination of dissenting journalists, and engaged in brutal acts of terrorism against its own people on many occasions. These actions have been publicized in many American news media over the years, and the stories are not false.
Perhaps the most famous story is that of the assassination of a Russian dissident, a former member of the Russian intelligence services, in England. The dissident was killed with a solution of polonium-210 surreptitiously administered in his tea; it took him a month to die of internal radiation poisoning. His death would have been a mystery if the doctors treating him had not had the inspiration to investigate the possibility of poisoning by an alpha-particle-emitting radioactive element, a substance that could only have been obtained by a government with the specialized resources that Russia possesses.
Such curiosities aside, it is clear that Russia is governed by an oppressive regime. China is governed by a similarly repressive regime. Syria is governed by a genocidal, oppressive regime which thinks nothing of murdering its own people with poison gas. The Islamic State is an ideologically-driven, aggressive, violent, and oppressive regime. The only government that I can say is not oppressive is that of the United States, and I’m not entirely sure of our own purity.
Perhaps the only truth is that governments are, of necessity, violent and oppressive, and there is no way to effectively govern the people without resort to violence and repression. That is hard for me to believe. There must be some way to govern effectually without resorting to repression, obstruction of basic human rights, violence, and murder. There must, somehow.
Donald has named retired Lt. General Michael Flynn as his national security advisor, a post that does not require Senate confirmation. Mr. Flynn has been a Trump sycophant since Donald declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination to run for president. The New York Times described ex-General Flynn as “hotheaded” and with “poor judgement.” Politico did a long piece on Flynn before the election which attempted to be balanced but left the impression that ex-General Flynn has the ability to assimilate large quantities of information but not the discernment to judge its truthfulness nor the discretion to avoid talking out of turn when faced with ambivalent data.
Lt. General Michael Flynn was forced into retirement after two years as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency because he was too “disruptive.” Or perhaps he displeased President Obama by his persistent claims that al Qaeda was not on the run. Perhaps his discovery that Obama’s Daily Security Briefing had been watered down and omitted repeated warnings that jihadist groups were increasing in number and virulence made him enemies among National Security apparatchiks like Susan Rice who were responsible for the censorship of the president’s briefings. Take your pick.
The retired general appears to have developed bitterness and resentment towards his former colleagues in the national security apparatus, because during his speech to the Republican convention earlier this year, chants of “Lock her up!” began, and he encouraged them. That is, he hates Hillary as well as the president. He also seems to have developed a lack of discernment with regards to the distinction between truth and conspiracy theories, so much so that his former colleagues had a term for his some of his claims, “Flynn facts.”
Then there is ex-Gen. Flynn’s relationship with Russia. He has appeared as an analyst on Russia Today (RT), a “news” channel paid by the Russian government which is available on most satellite-TV feeds. He went to Russia for an RT 10th anniversary celebration and sat two seats down from Premier Vladimir Putin. His opinion on the sarin-gas attacks in Syria? He’s not sure if they were “false flag” attacks actually perpetrated by Turkey and arranged to put the blame on the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. This epitomizes his problem with discernment when it comes to telling the difference between truth and lies. To my mind, it is fairly obvious that Syria is responsible for the sarin attacks.
There is, it appears, a much more pointed reason for ex-General Flynn’s dismissal from the Defense Intelligence Agency and forced retirement from the Army: the Joint Chiefs of Staff were supplying military intelligence to Syrian President al-Assad through intermediaries (Germany, Israel, and Russia) and undermining President Obama’s policy of arming Syrian rebels by having the Turks sell them obsolete weapons. This information comes from an article written by Seymour M. Hersh in the London Review of Books. This explains why Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal were also forcibly retired at around the same time: they were also involved in what President Obama saw as insubordination.
Where Donald Gets His “News”
The New York Times posted an article about a fake news item that “went viral”: the claim that protesters against Trump’s election were bussed in to a site in Austin, Texas. A blogger with a small following posted some photographs of busses on Twitter with the statement that these busses must have something to do with the protests that were going on at the time (November 9.) In fact, the busses were for a corporate conference that attracted some 13,000 visitors (Tableau Software.) The man who made the post claimed he had searched for a conference online and failed to find it; he then made the connection to the protests with no other evidence than seeing a number of buses parked near where the protests were going on.
The tweet attracted the attention of a number of right-wing sites and was circulated as “proof” that the protests were being organized, by “Soros money”– with no evidence. More than 300,000 Facebook users linked to a Free Republic post that repeated the same rumor as if it were fact. The director of corporate affairs for the bus company heard of the rumor the next day and debunked it to a local Fox News affiliate, but few people received the facts compared to the many who heard the rumor.
The original poster of the tweet received the facts the next day and deleted his tweet, but by then it was too late. Donald had already heard the rumor and repeated it on his tweet: “… Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!” at 6:19 PM on Nov. 10 (timed as “shortly after 9 PM” by the NYT.) The next day, November 11, snopes.com had posted a debunking of the rumor, the Tableau company made a statement to the local television station and the local newspaper, but to little effect. Sites like “Right Wing News” and “Joe the Plumber” repeated the rumor as if it were fact.
The poster of the original tweet, Eric Tucker, saw his Twitter following jump from 40 to 960 because of his mistaken tweet; he posted retractions and a note that, in future, he would be more careful about fact-checking. Nonetheless, Donald and most of the right-wing psycho-sphere have responded to this single mistaken rumor as if it proved that all of the protests against the results of the election were fake and instigated by liberal media.
Multiply this error by a thousand and you see the fact-free sea that Donald swims in, a toxic sea of lies and misperceptions that confirms his right-wing attitudes and makes his point of view as poisonous to the truth as we can possibly imagine. Here is an essay in the NYT about “fake news” in all its varieties and how Facebook managers are having tremendous difficulty in trying to control or root out not just completely false, but outrageously slanted “news” stories and “analysis.” Furthermore, the “fake news” is eroding trust in real news put out by traditional reporting and traditional reporters, as denounced in this editorial and this op-ed.
Our president-elect got his media attention based on a lie that Obama was not born in the US, but possibly in Kenya or some other foreign country. He flogged this lie for five years before finally abandoning it just before the election and immediately substituting another lie: that Hillary was originally responsible for starting the lie, during her 2008 campaign. So Donald is morally responsible for the promulgation of thousands of lies about Obama and Hillary, lies that propelled him into the White House.
The New York Times and other media today announced that Donald will pay a large sum to settle the civil lawsuits against his “Trump University” scam. This outrageously obvious hoax had people paying up to $35,000 (and in one case, $80,000) for a series of “courses” or pep talks that claimed to provide listeners with Donald’s secrets to success in the business of real estate.
Donald’s sudden reversal (he had previously vowed to fight the suits “on principle”) comes as a surprise to many, but makes perfect sense when considered in the light of the numerous issues that he must face in the next two months. Donald must hire about 4,000 qualified workers to fill out his administration of the Executive Department of the United States federal government. He must create a coherent policy regarding both foreign affairs and domestic matters, and he must find a judge to nominate to the federal Supreme Court.
All of these matters will make serious demands on his time, and he cannot afford to be tied up testifying in a case in which he is sure to lose– possibly with a much greater damage amount than a “paltry” $25 million. His position in the suits was seriously undermined by some of his sales executives who, when deposed, stated that the “University” was “a fraudulent scheme” and “a facade, a total lie.” Donald also admitted in a deposition that he had not, as he had claimed, handpicked his instructors.
The New York Attorney General announced the settlement today, just a few days before the San Diego case was due to be heard before a jury. The deal apparently wraps up all of the outstanding cases against him in the “Trump University” matter. For a relatively small sum to the billionaire Donald, he has put this unpleasant controversy behind him well before being inaugurated. Only time will tell whether other fraudulent schemes he has been involved in will come back to sink their teeth in his gluteal areas.
Myron Ebell, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), has no training or experience in any branch of science, yet he has been loudly denying that climate change exists for many years, and President-elect Donald is likely to nominate him to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell’s influence on Donald is entirely mysterious to me; perhaps a reader can explain what the connection is. Donald appears to believe that climate-change-denial is a popular point of view, at least among Republicans/conservatives.
Mr. Ebell’s professional experience has been as a hit man for Republican Congressmen who deny the science of anthropogenic climate change (AGW.) From “Inside Climate News” (November 16):
CEI’s biggest funder, pouring in $9.1 million between 2002 and 2013, was the Florida-based Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. Run by futures trader William Dunn, the foundation is a major donor to free market think tanks…
The second largest funder, with $5 million since 2004, is Donors Trust, which has been called the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement.”
This week it [the CEI] listed three executive orders [link to CEI publication] exemplifying those that should be deep-sixed. (They involve energy conservation by the federal government, international development aid and protection of infrastructure from climate impacts.)
John H. Cushman Jr., author of the above piece, went on to quote Meg Whitman as saying that Myron Ebell is likely to have much greater influence now and that Donald will probably keep his promises about defanging the EPA because it is generally seen by the public (thanks to the mercenary efforts of Ebell and others) as “the source of all evil.”
From a PBS Frontline presentation titled, “Climate of Doubt”(October 23, 2012):
Sen. JOHN KERRY (D), Massachusetts: Well, American politics is being completely defined by huge sums of money. We had really a very broad coalition of people who believed that we ought to move forward and do something. But as the campaign and the fear built up, people began to retreat.
They spent huge sums of money in a campaign of major disinformation that had an impact, had a profound impact. And it has now made many people in public life very gunshy because they’re afraid of having those amounts of money spent against them.
Donors Trust is an example of the relatively new, anonymously funded organizations that support “global warming skeptics” like Americans for Prosperity and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. With hidden sources for large amounts of money, the “skeptics” are able to sow doubt and fear among the people. They equate the AGW hypothesis with Marxism, without explaining how, and threaten the people with the specter of “government takeover” and economic disaster– without ever bothering to tell how acceptance of the AGW hypothesis could cause economic collapse.
They targeted Republican House members who accepted the AGW hypothesis, no matter how conservative otherwise, and forced them out of office with campaigns of misinformation and intimidation. People like George Bush, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and John McCain changed their stance on global warming because of these campaigns, and have ceased to agree with AGW. Even President Obama, during his 2012 campaign, made little mention of the issue because it had become so politically poisonous.
Bob Inglis was a six-term conservative Republican Congressman who accepted the AGW hypothesis, and he was soundly defeated in a primary that was marked by a well-funded campaign to sow denial among the people. Again, from the PBS Frontline show “Climate of Doubt”:
BOB INGLIS: When you get the financial collapse going, that’s what made it possible for some well-spent money to blow doubt into the science because, you know, the bankers failed us, the federal government is failing us, it’s spending too much money, and these scientists who are funded by that federal government, they’re probably in it, too. And besides, they’re godless liberals.
MYRON EBELL, Competitive Enterprise Institute: Bob Inglis was defeated in a Republican primary 79 to 21 percent. Now, how many times has an incumbent who isn’t in prison or facing a prison sentence lost his own primary by 79 to 21 percent? This was overwhelming. But what’s happened is—
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [on camera] The smile on your face suggests, “Man, we won one.”
MYRON EBELL: Of course we won one!
Myron Ebell is one of the people who used dark money to defeat Republican Congressmen who wouldn’t become denialists.
Rep. JAMES SENSENBRENNER: That was a very key factor in 10 to 15 congressional districts in the 2010 election, where strong supporters of climate change legislation ended up being defeated.
Sen. JOHN KERRY: And there’s nothing like a loss in an election to promote fear in the survivors. And that’s exactly what happened in the United States Congress.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: Beyond Washington, in wave after wave, the skeptic tactic of fighting scientific warnings with doubt and delay was finding success. Tennessee passed a law allowing the views of climate change skeptics to be taught in schools. A Virginia state legislator cut the words “sea level rise” from an official request to study coastal communities, calling it a left-wing term.
Here in North Carolina, a warning from scientists on sea level rise would cause politicians to try and legislate climate change out of existence.
Now, Myron Ebell, a professional climate change denier with no scientific credentials, is likely to become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald.
JOHN HOCKENBERRY: [voice-over] With money from their oil and gas holdings, David Koch and his brother Charles, along with other powerful family foundations, have quietly become the venture capitalists of this free market ideology.
DAVID KOCH: The American dream of free enterprise capitalism is alive and well.
ROBERT BRULLE, Sociologist: The major funders of the climate counter-movement are ideologically-driven foundations that are very much concerned about conservative values and world views.
These conservatives are only concerned with filling their own wallets and preventing any government action that might limit their take. They have no concern for the welfare of society generally or the prosperity of the average person; they could not care less about full employment or living wages. Their philosophy is entirely selfish, even narcissistic. This extends beyond the welfare of society to the welfare of the environment– they have no feelings about maintaining a healthy ecosystem. The philosophy of these conservatives is profoundly destructive to people and to the planet.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 