The Donald seems to be the only guy in the country willing to take a bullet for unfettered free speech. Everybody else has chickened out. Any artist who doesn't appreciate this and salute the guy is an ingrate asshole.
I'm not endorsing him for president because I don't campaign for candidates or endorse politicians. (Nor is my endorsement of any value!) Trump, however, is doing us all a service by tearing the PC left a new asshole. We've all become such cowards as a result of decades of bigotry mania.
Artists are usually dopes when it comes to politics. Their reflexive leftism is almost always pandering. Artists gain an audience when they are young. Everybody's a leftist when they're a kid. The audience wants you to remain what you were when you were a kid.
So, I doubt that very many artists will appreciate that Trump is staking out the territory that they should be protecting.
I'm not even a Trump supporter and I'm adding and deleting Facebook friends at a frenzied rate because of his candidacy. Trump dementia is a fascinating phenomenon. It causes people who think of themselves as serious intellectuals to blurt out the most ridiculous rants and to invent just about every bizarre accusation they can muster. The Hitler/Mussolini/fascist/authoritarian thing, in particular, has been worked to death.
After decades of bitching that they wanted an unscripted, honest, non-consultant created candidate, intellectuals finally got one... and they despise him because he's got the rough edges and tough talk of a real person.
Intellectuals, particularly men, almost all make the foolish mistake of insisting that politics is about big ideas. It isn't at all. It's about representing competing constituencies. Trump is winning because he's reaching out to a despised and disenfranchised constituency and promising to represent their interests.
The hateful reaction to Trump isn't about ideas either. It's about the constituencies that have displaced Trump's constituency fighting like hell to maintain their stranglehold and keep Trump's constituency out. The Donald's bashers, if you'll notice, are quite insistent that Trump's constituency is so vile, racist and xenophobic that... hell... they probably shouldn't even be allowed to vote.
Who's president is not an important part of my life. Very little will change depending on that. So, I can live with any of the candidates of either party winning.
Defenders of unfettered free speech have always been quite untidy, often dissolute and strange characters. In the past, they've usually been pornographers. So, I'm not bothered by the rough edges and tough guy talk from Trump. That's to be expected in anybody who is a champion of free speech.
Free speech is the lifeblood of the arts. And Trump is the only one standing up for unfettered free speech.
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