Joe: "Who raised these people?! Because I guarantee you, I was raised in the same region," Joe Scarborough said. "Who have they become that they would boo a man who is fighting for his very life, and has served this country in uniform, who is a prisoner of war…
"Someone has failed you in your life, and you need to examine that. If you still go to church, you need to pray for yourself this Sunday morning in church. And then when you get your head screwed on right, and you start putting humanity ahead of politics, against stupidity, against the tribalism that is destroying this country, then go home and tell your children the story of John McCain and what he did when things got tough and how he put others ahead of himself. And if you can teach your children that lesson, maybe they will grow up to have a little more character than you."
Nope. Their churches are only going to encourage them to continue being cretins. Their white Evangelical churches are dens of bigotry and blind hate, and they’ve been that way for decades, ever since they mobilized to block school integration.
This isn’t rocket science. It takes a village to raise people right. It takes real schools, real secular humanist values, real dedication to truth in society. And yes, it takes a Facebook community that bans Nazis, bullying, hate speech, and Russians buying our elections. And I’d argue it takes blogs that actively and without mercy ban people who can’t control themselves online.
The Internet IS making us and our kids less tolerant and it IS lowering our inhibitions on engaging in hate speech.
And if you let up, if your village drops its guard and has the arrogance to think it’s finally moved beyond racism and bigotry and no longer needs to be ashamed of itself on those fronts, then you’ll end up like Germany or the United States, with resurgent fascist groups coming to power.
That’s just how it works. Conservatives have always pretended to be in denial about that, because the majority of them are actually fine with fascism.
We raised the Deplorables, because as a village, as a country, we decided that everyone’s on their own. Every nuclear family is responsible for its own children and beyond that, we aren’t interested. That’s our village. That’s our society… at least the one that’s been imposed on the vast majority of the country by Republican gerrymandering.
And it’s what Joe Scarborough’s politics has been arguing for... for decades if not centuries. And now he’s got exactly what his politics was going to create all along, what it brought about in the past. We tried to warn them.
Hillary Clinton tried to warn them.
And as a country, not enough of us listened.
We The People raised these monsters because it takes a village to raise kids right. And now the world is suffering for it. Republicans and Libertarians own this. People like Joe Scarborough don’t get to play dumb about it, even if they are.