Ugly Americans

On the heels of the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris, conservative media and their trools in the GOP, as usual, lashed out at Muslims worldwide but in particular those from Syria. The fact that the terrorists were primarily from Belgium and France is irrelevant to them as well as the facts and evidence that followed.

No one should be surprised by their racist fear mongering because that is their mode of operations. They have a following of fools and nitwits as described in Salon by Chauncey Vega entitled "After Paris, right-wing media launches new war on reason, reality". He describes the mind of the conservative in several important ways: 

 1. In the post civil-rights era, conservatism and racism is now the same thing. The Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization. As a matter of policy, it uses overt and subtle racism to win votes from racially resentful white people. To point, almost immediately, overt and open white supremacist websites began to feature content from more “mainstream” right-wing websites in response to my essay on the Paris terror attacks. Their “analysis” and “commentary” were almost identical: violent threats, racism, lies and disinformation...

2. Political psychologists and other researchers have shown that the brains and cognitive processes of conservatives exhibit binary thinking, an intolerance of ambiguity, heightened fear centers, and a disdain for subtlety and nuance. This helps to explain conservatives’ inclination towards social dominance behavior, racism, prejudice, nativism, and xenophobia. The increase in authoritarianism in the United States is also a function of the conservative brain and its vulnerability to manipulation by the Right-wing media, as well as anxieties about a changing world... 

3. Tens of millions of Americans are functionally illiterate. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that 40 percent of Americans read at a “basic” or “below basic” level. Even more disturbing, more than 50 percent of students at four-year-colleges do not have the reading skills to understand a newspaper editorial... 

Given these realities as expressed by Vega, it is no small wonder that the phrase Ugly Americans has credibility around the world.