The Beast Is Us; New York Times, 3/4/16

Timothy Egan, New York Times; The Beast Is Us:

"With media complicity, Trump has unleashed the beast that has long resided not far from the American hearth, from those who started a Civil War to preserve the right to enslave a fellow human to the Know-Nothing mobs who burned Irish-Catholic churches out of fear of immigrants...

Granted, a huge portion of the population is woefully ignorant; nearly a third of Americans didn’t know who Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was in a Gallup poll last year. But ignorance is not the problem with Trump’s people. They’re sick and tired of tolerance...

The German magazine Der Spiegel called Trump “the world’s most dangerous man.” The Germans know a thing or two about the topic.

I would like to think our better angels always prevail. But there are also dark episodes, when the beast is loose, and what stares back at us from the mirror is something ugly and frightful. Now is one of those times."