Matt Taibbi writes: Earlier this week, an African-American protester was sucker-punched by a 78-year-old man in a cowboy hat at a Trump rally in North Carolina. The video went viral, and reporters later tracked down John McGraw, the red-faced Trumpthusiast who’d thrown the punch. McGraw explained why he’d belted Rakeem Jones:

“Number one, we don’t know if he’s ISIS,” McGraw said.

One has to commend the Inside Edition reporter doing the interview for not bursting out laughing, or dropping to the ground in shock, at this moment. McGraw went on:

“The next time we see him, we might have to kill him,” he said. “We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.”

That same night, Trump told Anderson Cooper he wasn’t backing down from his plan to bar all Muslims from entering the country. “I think Islam hates us,” he said, adding, “It’s very hard to separate because you don’t know who is who. We have to be very vigilant.”

These episodes are like a child’s game of “telephone,” only played with bone-ignorant adults. The game starts when Trump personifies “Islam” under one label, apparently not realizing that this represents an awesomely diverse collection of people who collectively represent about a quarter of the world’s population. [Continue reading…]