Tuesday’s big winners were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. That everyone knows (or at least should know).
But, there was another big winner on Tuesday. It wasn’t a candidate, but an ideology. The big winner on Super Tuesday was xenophobia.
Since it’s the Republican way to continue drumming up the terror threat as to keep all the paranoid GOP voters in their pockets, it makes sense that a staggering number of Republican voters on Super Tuesday support the asinine idea of banning Muslims from entering the United States.
According to ABC News exit poll results, six out of every ten Republican voters who cast ballots on Tuesday think that banning Muslims from entering the United States is an idea worth supporting.
Even though the actual percentage varied from state to state, Islamophobia was especially strong with Republican voters from Alabama (78 percent), Arkansas (78 percent), Tennessee (72 percent), Texas (65 percent), and Virginia (64 percent). ABC News further reported that seven out of 10 Georgia voters have also fallen victim to Inflated Terror Threat Shock Syndrome-itis, but did not give an actual percentage.
Support for this blatantly anti-American sentiment can be traced back to December 2015 and to the mouth of Donald Trump, the current leading Republican candidate. No shocker there. Trump’s announcement that he supported “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until [U.S.] representatives can figure out what’s going on” followed the San Bernardino shootings, where Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 14 people.
Both Farook and Malik were Muslim.
Trump’s comments have resonated with both potential GOP voters and politicians alike, because nothing says “handling the terror threat” better than banning brown people from entering your country because you’re afraid they’ll shoot up the place while ignoring all of the potential GOP voters who open fire in Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinics. Even though most people killed by terrorist attacks in the United States since 9/11 have been killed by unhinged conservative wingnuts and members of groups Donald Trump won’t outright speak against, around 60 percent of Republican Super Tuesday voters think the way to “make America great again“ is to ban immigration for certain people on the grounds of their religious affiliation.
This is the batshit conservative cavalcade we find ourselves watching during this election cycle. It’s staggering that so many people are not only throwing support for candidates like Donald Trump, but are further voicing concurrence with these xenophobic ideas. While some would take the moronic route and say things like “well, Trump tells it like it is,” common sense, coupled with even basic knowledge of what the hell the United States stands for, would beg to differ. Trump isn’t saying it “like it is,” he is merely pandering to all of those who still intently watch the terror threat, those who still think “the South shall rise again,” and those whose fundamental lack of reason makes them a perfect mouthpiece for a talking hairpiece treating the welfare of the United States like it’s the newest season of The Apprentice.
Featured image by Thierry Ehrmann, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
