OK, first off I'll address the politically correct left thing. From what I can tell, the 'Social Justice Warrior' is the first-born child of millennial parents. They learn about people from the internet, conceive a rigid notion of how they should act with one another, and then expect everyone to abide by it exactly. Like with the early Bolsheviks, they're applying hard intellectualism to a disparate, unpredicable group of people, and expecting it to work as well as it does in their heads. It's unsurprising that a generation far less experienced with actual human contact than any that came before it will fail to grasp that those born into a different world will resent being told to immediately give up all their bad habits at once or face ostracism. I genuinely think the politically correct movement, like many of the tenets of the "fascist left" (a phrase I see echoed around youtube comments ad nauseam of late. Note that one of the best ways to take out your enemy is to group them all together at once. It's much trickier dealing with the left as individuals. I'm left-wing, and I can see the huge, horrible flaws of liberalism. Maybe many other of the left-wingers who you might have put in this bracket can too?), comes from a good place. They're about people being kinder and more civil to each other, though that kindness isn't worth a damn if it comes at the back of a government mandate.
As to the Neo-Nazi comment, that was an allusion to Steve Bannon. It could be that what I've read about him is an exaggeration, but it doesn't seem it. I do believe that all of one's politics and beliefs tend to be part of the same package. If you can be that disdainful of several whole races, that hate will bleed into your policies, too.
I also want to point out that Obama seemed to constantly be trying to ice-skate uphill during his presidency. He was a firm believer in "democracy by degrees", but being part of a ruling party who in many ways had less power than the opposition made the intervals of those degrees very, very small. Many of the abysmal acts committed during his terms could actually be shown to have been instigated by the opposition. That doesn't excuse the fact that he endorsed the perpetuation of this chimera called "terrorism." As you're no doubt aware, the concept of terrorism is the gift that keeps giving for politicians. It's elusive enough that it can be exploited a myriad of ways. Like with drugs, you can take the tact that "this time we'll beat it," when you can't really beat a concept, can you? You can keep on pumping money into it (and extracting money from it) as it's a fight that can't be won, just wheeled out whenever it comes in handy. Any enemy, besides a few cognoscenti (i.e. let's say the entire Australian military force, though maybe even them), can be labelled terrorists when it's convenient. Obama should have read the stats about the number of terrorist-caused deaths vs the number of civilians killed in government-sanctioned retaliations; about how many more children were killed by U.S. and British forces than actual terrorists. He should have mentioned that Iraq was created and indiscriminately brutalised by the Brits, thus starting a snowball that later wreaked havoc (like with every new enemy we're told to hate, they did not just emerge from out of the ground fully-formed, like the army grown from dragon's teeth who Jason and his Argonauts faced off against- they all have a much longer history with us than we're ever told about). He should have mentioned all the arms sold to countries on our civil rights list. He should have mentioned a number of things, instead of towing the party line, but he didn't. Still, he as a man was at least more empathetic and compassionate than many of the harder-right in his party and the opposition who were really gunning for war. Snowden was interviewed by Katie Couric recently and he said something about how personality politics is a grave problem. We should be focusing on the ideas propagated and the actions implemented, and the personalities involved should be given far less focus than they are. I feel like people have used Obama, the person, as a sacrifical lamb for everything that went wrong during his term, rather than looking to the root of the problems, which often had little or nothing to do with him.
Also, while I'm on the subject of terrorists, I do feel we create a thousand times more by constantly talking about them all the time than ever would have existed otherwise. I half suspect it's the same with pedophilia. The media brings the concept to the forefront of people's minds until it becomes a viable option to a small fraction of people to whom it might never have even occurred. The sheer flagrancy of the seven country ban will certainly have activated many who would otherwise have remained inert. That's the weird, circular nature of this whole situation. Fighting terrorism creates terrorists. I'm going to reference Greek mythology a lot in this post for some reason, but they're like Medusa, they only become more powerful when we're gazing their way. And frankly, in the grand scheme of things, we have far better things to concentrate our energies on anyway.
Your paragraph about words and actions may have a point, but the thing about celebrity culture is we assign these Olympians to represent the rest of us, just like with the flawed, venal, constantly interfering Greek Gods. If we've shifted fairly smart, if imperfect, fellows like Obama out of the spotlight in favour of low-browed, thick-headed cro-magnons like Trump and Farage, who are just so ridiculously transparent in the way they tap into that tribal fear of the other lurking in most of us in order to get what they want; well this new cast of actors in the great passion play unfurling before us really make us all look bad. People learn to speak and pick up accents and ideas by example, by being exposed to them. The whole universal unconsciousness is in constant flux. I personally don't like my share of it being warped by classless wheelers and dealers like Trump. Fact is, and I know this is pretty selfish, but he's really not the kind of dude I want in my life for years on end. I guess I'm just going to have to live with his continually inserting himself into the periphery of my life for a long time to come. I understand that a slimy used car salesman is less harmful than a military pawn, but it's not just Trump who's in power, is it? It's the Republicans who now control the whole board, many of whom are the same individuals who were floating around during Bush's era. Obama may have helped keep Bush's war going (though as I pointed out, the Republican house were with him every step of the way, and only tended to object to the social changes), but the atrocities commmitted during Bush's years in power were in no way matched. Now those same artisans of destruction have more power than ever before, many of whom (like Hilary) having a strong financial incentive to keep this parade of wars going and sell as many weapons as possible to whoever will take them. Trump won't be able to stop them. I've been given no indication that he even particularly wants to.
Excelsior,
Sin H Agog.
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
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