A MESSAGE FROM MR SULU FROM AN ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE – Following the recent pile-ups on celebrities guilty of wrong-think, some try to pretend this time it’s really different:
No one would bat an eye if an entertainer said they'd have voted for George Bush. Vocal support for Trump, by contrast, stirs backlash because he has attacked our communities, our institutions, and our values. We are not in ordinary times. They demand we all take a clearer stand.
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) April 23, 2018
Takei must have lived through the different 2000s than I have. In the 2000s I remember, Bush was portrayed as a chimp and a moron. He was called BusHitler. If he was not believed to be somehow implicated in the September 11 attacks, he was grossly negligent for not having prevented them. Most of all, he was a destroyer of the Constitution with his anti-terror laws, and a war criminal with blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on his hands, illegally invading countries for revenge, oil and Haliburton’s profits. I can’t remember many celebrities outing themselves as Bush voters precisely because they knew very well the consequences for their career and public standing.
“We are not in ordinary times,” writes Takei to justify the opprobrium heaped on high profile supporters of the current President. Forget about every other Republican politician we ever told you was Hitler and was going to destroy America and the world; Trump really really really is Hitler. “Not ordinary times” are simply times when Republicans are in power. Today it’s Trump. Yesterday it was Bush; before Bush was Reagan; before Reagan was Nixon. Names change but hysteria remains the same.
