Donald Trump has only been in the White House since Friday, but liberal extremists are already hammering the Republican president as a threat to human rights around the world who “despises the notions of fundamental rights and human dignity” and is a “blatant racist demagogue and would-be dictator.”
That's the opinion put forth on Monday by Natalie Nougayrede, a columnist for the liberal British Guardian newspaper who declared that Trump's presidency “risks unleashing a tsunami that could sweep away the human rights movement as it has so far existed.”
Nougayrede went so far as to assert:
It’s not just western democracies that are shaken by the inauguration of a crude bigot who has targeted women and religious and ethnic groups, and said he could envisage using torture.
Across the world, imprisoned dissidents, repressed journalists, censored writers, hounded political oppositions [and] stigmatized minorities are all set to lose out ... because defending them via international human rights architecture is now going to become a great deal more difficult.
“Of course,” she continued, “the U.S. has hardly been an infallible defender of human rights. Nor perhaps can one man in the White House single-handedly dismantle a body of international law and conventions accumulated over decades.”
“But the difference now, with Trump, is twofold,” Nougayrede stated. “First, the very words 'human rights' are likely to disappear altogether from the official vocabulary that western diplomacy is meant, in principle, to rest upon.”
“Second,” she noted, “we are confronted with a situation where authoritarian leaders are empowered not as a result of coups or abuse, but as a result of free and democratic elections.”
Therefore, “human rights violators everywhere will feel they have now been handed an entirely free hand” because "no reference whatsoever" was made to "universal values" during Trump's inaugural address, the liberal columnist claimed.
“Because the U.S. remains the sole superpower,” she stated, Trump's arrival in the White House “represents the biggest possible blow to everything that has been achieved in the realm of international human rights since the late 1940s.”
Nevertheless, the liberal columnist indicated that there's a “bright side” to the situation because “there is opportunity in crisis.”
“A Hillary Clinton presidency would have been a boon, or at least an encouragement, for the human rights struggle,” Nougayrede asserted, but “the Trump presidency will on the contrary put those rights to an unprecedented test.”
As proof, she quoted Anna Neistat, senior research director at the Amnesty International organization, who called Trump's time in the White House “the greatest threat but also greatest opportunity for the human rights movement because the advent of Trump means the end of a certain complacency.”
“Talking to the like-minded simply isn’t enough,” Neistat added, because “we need to convince the majorities” who elect their leaders.
“And therein lies the hope,” Nougayrede noted. “It’s just possible that, as it contemplates an abyss, the human rights movement will find the energy for unexpected breakthroughs. … Now starts an era of resistance to Trumpism and its affiliates.”
However, Thomas D. Williams quickly responded in an article on the Breitbart.com website, where he described Nougayrede's column as “hysteria” and “a new acme in irresponsible fear-mongering.”
Williams also stated:
The Guardian doesn’t explain how Mr. Trump intends to bring about his draconian human rights apocalypse, or even what this might look like, but assures readers that it will happen soon.
In point of fact, Nougayrede’s article is long on insults and short on facts, a trademark of modern Leftist discourse.
“It is true that Mr. Trump’s understanding of human rights, as well as the best means for defending and promoting them, may differ considerably from the Guardian’s,” he continued.
However, Williams noted that the president “has defended the right to life of unborn children, for instance, and promised to nominate pro-life judges to the Supreme Court and defund abortion giant Planned Parenthood, but these are not the sort of human rights that the Guardian cares about.”
“Neither is the right to religious liberty, which President Trump champions,” he added. “One of his first acts as president was to issue an executive order to protect conscience rights and minimize the economic and moral burden of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.”
Williams then quoted Saint John Paul II, who said that the right to life is “the first of the fundamental rights” and declared religious liberty is “the source and synthesis” of all human rights.
“If the right to life and the right to religious freedom are indeed the most fundamental of all human rights, then it appears that President Trump may turn out to be a powerful ally and advocate of human rights rather than their destroyer,” he stated.
“Perhaps that’s the real tsunami that has certain people in a panic,” Williams concluded.
