I often wonder why politicians use` atheist’s or atheism as a punching bag. Recently , former president Trump, in a speech to a large crowd, made a statement virtually comparing atheists, in his list, as some of the worst, most evil people and how only his reelection will put an end to them. What do atheists have to do with arsonists and globalists? Are atheists just a convenient rallying device?

It seems though, that the mentions are not only hateful, but inciting as well. I wonder how many of those people that left that rally thought even less of atheists than they did before? How many might consider an act of violence against an atheist or atheist family? I may be jumping the shark, but isn’t violence against a group begun this way? Denigration among the general population? If dehumanizing a group causing direct physical harm to occur, how might we classify that violence? In our history, it’s the way violence against others has always been permitted. Ask Jews, blacks, or gays. And these few still carry a stigma among some thar will probably never go away.

I think that the public has become so used to the rise in crimes o assault, not only have they become a postscript in the local news, they may never be mentioned at all. This means that victims may be underreporting those crimes. If nothing is going to br done, why report aT all? Familiar?

For a time, attacks on Asian Americans made headlines. Some of the video was horrific and it seemed several times a week there were stories on television concerning these attacks. Asian-American organizations ran (and still do sometimes) TV ads about the issue. Today, we almost never see these reports and yet police officers I have spoken with claim the number of attacks have declined, but not much. Poof! Our of sight, our of mind.

That being in mind, would an attack on an arheist get any airtime? Probably not and if the attacks escalated over time, they’d still barely make the evening news as atheists aren’t really considered a defined group with immutable characteristics: like Jews and gays.