Pundit:

Donald Trump scapegoating policy emboldens extremists

Rasa - Some 867 hate crimes have been reported in 10 days immediately following the surprising victory of President-elect Donald Trump in the US presidential election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Approximately 40 percent of the hate crimes involved people explicitly invoking the president-elect’s name or his campaign slogan, SPLC says. African Americans, Muslims, immigrants, women and other communities have all been targeted in different ways and occasions.

News ID: 425419

Date: 30 November 2016 - 21:29

RNA - Kevin Barrett, editor of the Veterans Today from Madison, told Press that Trump’s attempt to use minorities and certain groups in the American society as scapegoats for his country’s economic and social problems has caused recent increasing number of hate crimes.

“Trump’s scapegoating has elicited this kind of reaction among his followers and I assume this would probably unfortunately continue,” Barrett said.

“He (Trump) scapegoated immigrants, he scapegoated Muslims, he delighted many people by essentially talking very very harshly about women and other groups,” the analyst noted.

He referred to the US president-elect’s tactic to put the blame of hardships on minority communities in the country, adding, “Trump did indeed politicize scapegoating of all kinds of different categories of people.”

Blaming immigrants and other groups for economic and social injustices in the United States is “quite disingenuous,” he said, adding that “it was the corporate globalizers who destroyed the jobs” and standard of living of the American people.

Barrett also argued, “Someone like Trump, who is trying to essentially get power for himself, has to spin the truth a little bit and rather than directing people’s anger primarily at the banksters and the elite that have driven the United States into the ground in terms of its manufacturing capacity and its working class jobs, instead he scapegoated other categories of people.”

He concluded that there is no future for the working and middle class in the American society and “Trump is an expert that channels people through those anger against these scapegoats and he did very well with that in his running for president and then unfortunately probably continue as president.”

Hate crimes have been reported in all but four US states including Hawaii, Wyoming, North Dakota and South Dakota. Larger states have had a higher number of hate crimes and the states of California, New York and Texas accounted for over a quarter of all the hate crime reports.

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