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Nov. 17, 2016 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
15:31
Is President-Elect Donald Trump like #TheWalkingDead's Negan？
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So recently you may have seen a slew of articles in the mainstream media comparing the arch villain of the Walking Dead, Negan, to of course Donald Trump.
Now these articles have really annoyed me, but not because I particularly want to defend Trump.
In fact, part of my annoyance is coming from the fact that I have to defend Trump, because these people are fucking stupid.
They are so stupid in the most infuriating ways because they have filtered their perception through the lens of their ideology and managed to get the situation exactly backwards.
I'll show you what I mean.
This comparison seems to have originated from actors on The Walking Dead themselves, and the progressive press have just picked up this narrative and run with it as if it's a gift from God.
The actor who played Abraham said, Negan's a little bit of a loose cannon, and Trump is a little bit of a loose cannon.
And that's not me being political, that's by his own description.
So yeah, I think we actually have our Negan and our Rick.
To call Negan a little bit of a loose cannon is to understate the situation so severely it's almost like this actor forgot that Negan bludgeoned his character to death in front of the group while they were all helpless and mushed his head into a paste on the floor with a baseball bat.
He's not just a little bit of a loose cannon.
They say the comparison feels even more relevant following season 7's 85 minute fourth episode Service which centered around Negan's first visit to Alexandria as part of his arrangement with Rick and the group.
Negan introducing himself by banging his barbed wire covered baseball bat against the walls of Alexandria immediately shows he isn't gracious and victory after essentially emasculating Rick and the Premier.
Yes, that's the point, and that's why I'm not really a big fan of Negan as a character, to be honest.
He is so sociopathically unhinged that you simply don't know if he's going to kill someone at any given time as it seems he might have the capacity for it.
Negan is a violent psychopath, a warlord who rules by fear.
To say that Donald Trump is anything like this character is, at best, highly uncharitable, and at worst utterly unfair because he has yet to even assume the office.
To the best of anyone's knowledge, Donald Trump has not killed anyone.
He has not done it joyfully to watch the suffering of others and break them.
Good lord, and we've only just started.
But he isn't just like Trump in his lack of humility.
Negan's a demagogue, offering the members of the saviors the chance to move up in his inner circle with a point system that's like a post-apocalyptic rundown of the apprentice.
Oh, brilliant comparison.
Marvellous.
You had to shoehorn that in, didn't you?
I love that the implication is that the premise of this is that every other politician doesn't do exactly the same thing.
Anyone who achieves any kind of power rewards those who help them gain the power.
Otherwise, there's no incentive for anyone to help you.
Every single politician does this.
This is not in any way unique to Donald Trump, or even indicative that he might be some kind of evil warlord.
Hillary does the same thing, Obama did the same thing, everyone does this.
You have to do this.
This is the nature of power.
Trump has also suggested torture as well as killing terrorist families.
Negan gleefully bashes people's skulls in with a baseball bat and plays Easy Street on an Endus Loop to deprive you of sleep.
Yes, these are directly comparable.
This is exactly the same thing.
There is absolutely no difference here.
And I just want to point out, Hillary knew her no-fly zone would kill Syrian civilians.
So at least, at the very least, Trump is trying to get those people most directly connected to the terrorists.
And he didn't say kill them.
He just said go after them.
Admittedly, yes, that probably does mean kill them.
But at least he's not being as explicit.
And there is some wriggle room there.
Whereas Hillary, out and out, said. that this would kill Syrians.
She just said it.
And since we're on the subject, the US has been torturing people for decades, since Bush implemented waterboarding, and the CIA started outsourcing its torture to various Middle Eastern dictatorships.
But you know what?
Trump is the villain here because he said, yeah, we could waterboard some people.
I mean, why wouldn't he?
It's not out of character for the United States to do this.
But do you know what we haven't brushed on yet?
That's right, identity politics.
How about the Daily Beast's Melissa Leon explained to us how Negan has a twisted relationship with women and a narrow-minded understanding of rape?
He offers women the chance to be his wife in exchange for the benefits of being under his protection.
Yeah, it's bizarre that Negan is in any way concerned about sexual consent in the apocalypse, isn't it?
It's really bizarre because you'd think the writers would know that you could build Negan up into a bigger villain if you had him not caring about sexual consent.
But again, the answer for this I think is revealed in the previous paragraph.
However, perhaps it's Negan's views on women that are most comparable and horrifying.
Really, that's more horrifying than smashing people's heads in with basel bats, is it?
That he is a misogynist is worse than him being a psychotic murderer.
Don't you think your principles are a bit misaligned when you think that's the case?
And I am serious when I say that these people seem to have deeply misaligned principles, as this article in Forbes will show us.
I was excited about the prospects for The Cell, episode 703 of The Walking Dead.
I figured after last week's tangent, we'd get back to the central issue of how Negan will affect the season story arc.
I have to say, I ended the hour more than a little disappointed when The Walking Dead's new villain started acting more and more like a certain presidential candidate.
Personally, I have no idea how he's making this comparison, because in this episode we get to find out about Negan's second in command and how he horribly scarred his face, and Negan's second in command's continued torture of Daryl, and then Negan's constant attempts to break Daryl to turn him into a kind of Theon Greyjoy slash reek style character.
I have no idea what they think Donald Trump has done to resemble this and they don't tell us.
Unsurprisingly, because, like I said, I mean, Donald Trump is a lot of things, and I am annoyed that I have to defend him from this, because this is just fucking stupid.
What we've seen of Negan so far has been pretty promising.
Put aside his bashing of heads in 701, and maybe Negan's not such a bad guy.
Why would we put aside his bashing of heads, you moron?
Why would we put aside him bashing the skulls in of some of the main characters?
One of my personal favourites, Glenn!
Why would I, as a viewer of this TV program, where they are trying to hype up a bad guy for me to give me a legitimate emotional investment in seeing this guy fall, why would I put aside him doing this?
He's actually shown a measure of restraint.
He could have killed them all and banters with more than a little charm.
He'd certainly be a better dinner guest than the governor.
Fucking, are you serious?
The governor isn't likely at any time to go off the handle and bash someone's skull in.
The governor had a front to maintain.
He had a purpose.
He was at least semi-rational.
Negan is unhinged.
That's the point.
That's what's meant to make him scary.
The governor was calculating and cold.
That was what made him scary.
And the idea that this is all okay because he didn't just kill them all just sounds to me like a little bitch talking.
The governor, A, would have shown measures of restraint, but B, Negan showed restraint because it's directly in his self-interest.
This is why he says, I want half your stuff, and then he says, I will define what half looks like, and then goes and takes whatever the fuck he wants, almost all of it.
All of their guns.
He leaves their food because he wants them alive to get more things for him.
He's turning them into serfs at best, slaves at worst.
This is not a good situation.
This is not him showing a measure of restraint.
This is him putting them in chains.
Negan's business plan seems lifted straight out of organized crime.
Yes, he's a warlord.
He's running a good old-fashioned protection racket.
No, it's much worse than that.
It's much worse than that.
We'll take care of the walkers for you in exchange for weekly tribute.
Yes, that is the fig leaf Negan is putting over it.
And the point of him saying this is that he knows that's bullshit.
You know that's bullshit.
And the big shit-eating grin on his face shows you that he knows you know it's bullshit.
And yet you're going to do it anyway.
Which is why he said to Rick, I just ran my cock down your throat and you said thank you.
For fuck's sake, stop trying to make it look like Negan isn't such a bad guy.
That's the point of Negan.
He is such a bad guy.
Assuming you have any pride or self-respect left, which the author of this article apparently doesn't.
But what's so bad about that?
If you're in the market for a good anti-hero who doesn't love a good gangster, Negan is not an anti-hero.
He is a villain.
I don't know whether you've noticed, but we have had nothing from Negan that shows he is in any way redeemable.
In fact, the point appears to be to show that he is beyond redemption.
He is just an evil psychopath.
But I absolutely love this.
A reasonable recipe for an interesting Negan could be one part Sonny Corleone, two parts Paulie from Goodfellas, and a large dash of Tony Soprano.
A criminal, sure, but an organized criminal.
One who's mostly interested in business, even if he does fly off the handle now and again.
Well, he is, but just to an absolutely irredeemable perspective.
Instead, the Negan we get in 703 is basically a Donald Trump of the post-apocalypse.
As we see him giving Dwight and the rest of his minions a pep talk of sorts, it becomes clear that Negan's just a demagogue.
My fucking god.
You are just beyond the pale.
Look at the rhetoric Negan uses, compared to the rhetoric Trump uses.
Look at the results of Negan's rhetoric compared to the results of Trump's rhetoric.
People don't flock to Negan.
He forces them to do his bidding.
Donald Trump packed out stadiums because he offered people hope.
Now, I know what you're going to say.
Jesus Christ.
Well, he's never going to follow through on any of this.
No, he's not.
Yeah, sure.
It's all words.
It's all words.
But Donald Trump wasn't threatening people to make them do what he said.
To make them come at his beck and call.
They came because he had a message they liked.
Negan has a message that they don't like, but they are afraid of.
These are the opposites.
But it gets worse.
Negan's enamoured with the idea of torture and the practice of torture.
We've seen what he does with Lucille, while Dwight's face has clearly seen the business end of an iron.
As for Daryl, beating him and feeding him dog food would both be violations of the Geneva Convention, but it's that damned earworm of a song Easy Street that raises the level of the T-word.
Okay, let's assume that Donald Trump was advocating for torture.
As we've already established, this is not outside of the experience of the American establishment.
But I think more importantly, we can charitably ascribe the motive to Trump as he regularly says.
We have no choice, folks.
We have no choice.
It's not that torturing people gives Donald Trump a hard-on.
He doesn't do it personally, presumably.
I mean, unless you actually think that he is going to get some sort of Middle Eastern dissidents in, get a bat out and start smashing them around with a gleeful look on his face because he gets off on that kind of thing, which is what Negan does.
And the thing is, I'm really genuinely serious when I say that these people's principles are just wildly misaligned.
To suggest that all of this, bashing their friends' heads in, enslaving them, torturing his subordinates, torturing other people that he's enslaved, this is not the worst thing that Negan has done.
The real problem, however, is Negan's casual misogyny.
Negan casually uses the same P-word that got Trump into trouble.
Although television production schedules being what they are, that's just a coincidence rather than a political statement.
It's not just locker room talk.
Negan fancies himself a star with the privileges that accrue the status.
While he pays lip service to the idea of consent, he's created a world where women are chattel!
And I see this article was written by Matt Binder.
Literally, just maybe 100 or so years ago.
100 and such a few years ago, that women were still viewed as chattel!
You know, except for the past where Negan isn't treating women like chattel, giving them the choice as to whether to be his wife or not, for some reason, which isn't something you would do to your own property, and again, like I've said, is something that would make him look worse by comparison.
But I think the reason that Negan doesn't do this might be because of people like you, who think that is worse than murder.
It's difficult to talk in absolutes and superlatives when it comes to The Walking Dead.
This is a show that's shown cannibal barbecues and children being killed in cold blood.
But somehow, when Negan half-jokingly offers Sherry back to Dwight, you want a little blast from the past with you-know-who, I fear we might have hit a new low.
That's not a new low.
That's not anywhere near the lowest of things that not only have been on the show, but Negan personally has done.
I swear I didn't make this up, okay?
For a brief shining moment, Negan promised to shake things up in a positive way.
But by the end of the hour, that hope is gone.
Fucking, what are you talking about?
What the fuck are you talking about?
It's okay to murder and kill and torture and enslave, as long as you're not being a misogynist.
You know, I mean, that's really the worst, isn't it?
Like a certain politician, Negan may look and sound like a savior to his followers, but it's obvious to anyone paying attention that he's nothing more than a different sort of monster.
Because, in your opinion, Donald Trump and Negan are moral equivalents because they are both disrespectful to women.
Honestly, this is your opinion.
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