Historian and filmmaker Ken Burns used his graduation commencement address at Brandeis University over the weekend to give students a warning about the prospects of reelecting former President Donald Trump.
In his address, Burns said that alarm bells should go off in students' heads whenever they hear Trump-style demagoguery that tries to divide Americans into competing factions of warring tribes.
"If I have learned anything over those years, it's that there's only us," Burns said. "There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life that there's a them, run away. Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self imprisonment."
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Burns then turned his attention to the upcoming November election, which he said he "dreaded" doing due to his longstanding efforts to project neutrality.
"There is no real choice this November," he said. "There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route."
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He then explicitly laid out why Trump -- "the other route" -- was exactly the type of candidate he had warned students to avoid.
"The presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids, an easy cure for what some believe is the solution to our myriad pains and problems," he said.
"When in fact with him, you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, 'a bigger delusion,' James Baldwin would say, the author and finisher of our national existence, our national suicide as Mr. Lincoln prophesies. Do not be seduced by easy equalization. There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives. This is a choice that could not be clearer."
Read the whole speech at this link.
