What do you call it when you judge an entire class of people without knowing or understanding them? It’s called prejudice. What do you call it when you believe yourself morally and intellectually superior because they have a belief system different than your own? That’s bigotry. What if you cannot differentiate between the individual and the collective? Is this a mark of wisdom or generalization and prejudice? What if you assume everyone of those people has the same weaknesses or faults, and is locked into that belief system without the ability to weigh and appreciate your perspective, or even agree with you on enough key interests to make them your friend or ally?
A good example of this prejudice is when you are talking to a friend and they attribute the negative behavior of Trump or Hillary to you, as if you innately approved or could predict such behavior when you voted.
If Trump says something outrageous or offensive, or legislates something your friend might not like, you get blamed for it. You never get credit for the positive attributes, like say, Trump is a billionaire with a supermodel wife so therefore, you must be a billionaire with a beautiful wife also. Instead, you get “Trump said Haiti is a shithole” and therefore you probably believe the same thing. The media, unfortunately, encourages this.
You see this all the time in racism, in religious bigotry, or sexism. Political bigotry or prejudice is very deadly. We’ve already had a Civil War over it. This war was a product of Democrats versus Republicans. Back then, though, the Democrats were the slave owners, and the Republicans favored the abolition of slavery. Because the psychological dynamics behind religious bigotry are identical to political bigotry, the potential for violence is the same. Witness the Protestant and Catholic Wars. or the religious strife between Christianity and Islam.
We see people suffer over the color of their skin, and blood is often shed over it, but people also suffer for identifying with two colors other than black and white, and that is red and blue (Republicans and Democrats). The former you are born with, the latter is your God-given right to choose, if at all now, in a manner that is cognitively and emotionally no different than religious ideology. In the latter category, we find political bigotry is no less deadly than any other kind of bigotry, except this bigotry is still openly encouraged by the media, politicians, far too many teachers allied to one party, some unions, etc. When this is done, ideas that matter are never discussed, only the same wedge issues, and that is why they do it.
With political bigotry the hate is the same. How does an entire group of people you don’t know, with whom you’ve never had any problem before, suddenly become subhuman? They don’t, but there are those that try very, very hard to convince you they are subhuman and worthy of censure, attacks, or even death.
See the image above. By Nazis, they mean Republicans, or Trump voters. Literally. This mentality encourages the hate they are supposedly fighting against. A few lessons in Psychology 101, in the study of psychological projection are in order.
Don’t let the print and broadcast media turn you against your friends and family, don’t let them convince you the hate, bigotry and prejudice you would normally recoil from is acceptable as long as it favors their party or candidate. That is to call evil good, and good evil. It is a true evil, the promulgation of such hate, and we need to call them out on it if they presume the right to act as moral authorities.
This is why the motto of The Impious Digest is “The greatest hate group in the world is the mainstream media.” It really is.
Make no mistake, the bigotry and prejudice is so pervasive Republican social media users and employees are censored and discriminated against at Facebook, Google, and Twitter in blue states, particularly New York and California. Now if your author’s guess is correct, a Democratic reader may assume this article was written by a Republican. That would be a very false assumption. If that assumption was made, it demonstrates that the radical intolerance of views inconsistent with accepted “liberal” dogma has become an acceptable fanaticism. The narrative becomes one where such thought crimes are products of Republicans, extremists or idiots. The question we need to ask then is where did this absurd prejudice come from, if not the media, and since when was critical thinking an act of insubordinate and malicious intent?
Your author is a registered Democrat that did not vote for Hillary and actually, cast no vote. That’s it, and time has proven this to be a very wise choice.
This is a civil rights issue, if free speech is contingent on what party you belong to, or if, as we see at Google, it can cost you your job. We need to call the media barons out if it puts the stability of this nation at risk, because such recklessness has already led to one civil war. Worse, there are nations that want us divided, and they have invested heavily in media assets. We need to be careful. We need to be tolerant of opposing political views, and we need to seek out what brings us together, because what sets us apart is nothing we can work with in a time of national peril and great division.