Republicans vote today in South Carolina

It would probably be good for my mental health to look away. But years of disciplining myself to watch this stuff means I've seen this.

At his closing rally, the Donald excited his partisans with this:

The standout topic, however, was terrorism and national security. Trump repeated – favorably – an apparent myth about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerilla war against the occupying United States.

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”

...The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

Benjy Sarlin, MSNBC

The reporter helpfully points to a source explaining that the story is a recurring fantasy, passed around among Islamophobic Israelis police and settlers, movie super heroes, and U.S. spooks. Snopes explains:

... the desire for simplistic solutions to complex problems has spawned several widely-circulated notions that seek to transform a fight against terrorism to the easily-manageable level of a horror film or a comic strip. One popular notion is the concept that a pig is to a Muslim as a crucifix is to a vampire: simply arm yourself with a porker, and you can use it to render even the most fanatical terrorist helpless, sending him cowering in fear lest he come into contact with anything porcine.

... messages such as the ones quoted above could be considered as silly as Muslims' proclaiming that a good way to throw the U.S. into disarray would be to "bomb" America with juicy steaks on Fridays, because "Americans are Christians," and "everyone knows Christians who eat meat on Fridays go to Hell."

Not that people who lap up this stuff are going to be dissuaded either by reason or mockery.

I wonder whether, as they have with Trump's "Mexican rapists", the Donald's GOP competitors will feel obliged to take on this crackpot notion as well.