wilwheaton:

Sarah has been doing, and continues to do, very important work. Primarily, she is making it possible for Americans, who have always presumed a level of trust and competence in our government, to see and track the creeping normalization of the trump autocracy.

Adult children of authoritarians are useful in three ways: first, they tend to be trustworthy confidants in regimes rife with paranoia, as corrupt authoritarian states usually are. Second, they are excellent vessels for laundering money,  creating enough distance that assets stolen from the state are harder to track. Third, they tend to have a warmer public profile which offsets the brutality of the dictator by distracting the population with pictures of their happy families or glamorous lifestyle.

For nearly two years, Jared and Ivanka have been peddled by the press as a “moderating influence” on her vulgar, bigoted father. They have done nothing to merit this characterization.

When hate crimes rose in tandem with the Trump campaign, Ivanka and Jared were silent. When xenophobes like Michael Flynn – the former NSA head revealed to be a foreign agent – screeched tirades at the Republican National Convention, Ivanka and her siblings dutifully followed on stage. When Trump filled his cabinet with white supremacists like Steve Bannon, Nazis like Seb Gorka, and racists like Jeff Sessions, Ivanka and Jared did not distance themselves, but joined the team.

This is not a “moderating influence”; this is complicity.

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