Oct 29, 2018
Are We Great Yet?
A middle aged white man went to an African American church to most likely shoot people and when he discovered that the doors were locked (in case someone like him showed up) he got mad and went to a nearby grocery store and found a couple of black seniors to shoot and kill. It’s easy these days. We have a self declared nationalist for a president. White supremacists have been stroked and emboldened like never before in our history. They have been given a green light by Trump and the Republicans to go out and make America white again. There has never been a terrorist attack by Muslim refugees in America but Trump tells his followers that there have been. Violent crime committed by undocumented immigrants is very rare, but he uses this talking point as a rhetorical device to scare people into voting for Republicans next week. It is one of the Republican’s central wedge issues (no talk about abortion this election cycle — just “other” people.) Other people are taking over our country and they must be stopped. What does “stop” mean? That’s left up to interpretation by the gun loving, middle aged white wacko men who listen to Fox News who go to MAGA rallies and believe in conspiracy theories to decide.
The Republican’s “real America” doesn’t have any people of color, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQs, disabled people or certain women in it.
Trump is ranting on Twitter this morning, blaming fake news for “the flame,” calling the media the true enemy of the people. Last night he tweeted, “The Fake News is doing everything in their power to blame Republicans, Conservatives and me for the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country. Actually, it is their Fake & Dishonest reporting which is causing problems far greater than they understand!”
Trump pushes a brand of paranoid right wing populism that’s exactly like anti-semitism, but without explicit reference to Jews. American anti-semitism is centuries of contempt for the Jews compounded with higher education, success in business, and liberal American ideals — all values that MAGAs are trained to see as contemptuous.
Muslims raised $50,000 in less than 6 hours for the shooting victims in Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh has told Trump he’s not welcome there until he denounces white nationalism:
“For the past three years your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement. You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.
President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism.
Our Jewish community is not the only group you have targeted. You have also deliberately undermined the safety of people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities. Yesterday’s massacre is not the first act of terror you incited against a minority group in our country.
President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you stop targeting and endangering all minorities.
The murderer’s last public statement invoked the compassionate work of the Jewish refugee service HIAS at the end of a week in which you spread lies and sowed fear about migrant families in Central America. He killed Jews in order to undermine the efforts of all those who find shared humanity with immigrants and refugees.
President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you cease your assault on immigrants and refugees.”
“This was a genuinely terrible week in America. It seems like everything I’ve been watching, thinking about, writing about for a quarter century is all coming together in some perfect storm of awfulness, and I don’t know how we claw our way out of this. We better hope Democrats at least take back the House in a couple of weeks, because I don’t know what this country is going to look like in two years if they don’t. No, that’s not quite right — I have a good sense of it, and it’s not pretty.” -Dan Perkins (aka cartoonist Tom Tomorrow)
The “come together” rhetoric by politicians is absurd. No! We’re in a fight between good and evil. There is no coming together. Evil must be stomped out. There is no understanding or accepting it.
The president isn’t going to change so we have to change the president.
8 more days.
