alias Bruce.

The real reason why so many Americans don’t vote.

It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s bitter awareness.

On November 5, the day before the midterm elections central to the continued power and influence of dictator-in-progress President Donald Trump, a Washington Post story went against the dominant narrative about American nonvoters. Instead of offering yet another bewildered eulogy to the lost civic conscience of the more than half of Americans who don’t vote, the Post story let nonvoters from across the country explain, in their own words and in detail, why they chose to refuse their ostensible civic duty in one of the most momentous elections in the nation’s history. For instance:

Charlotte Greenleaf won’t be voting on Tuesday. Neither will anyone else in her family. Never have, never will, she says. It’s not that she’s too busy. Greenleaf, 60, is unemployed and trying to make it on disability benefits, plus the pigs and chickens she raises on a small farm near this scruffy town in central West Virginia. And it’s not that she’s satisfied with how things are. Unhappy with President Trump, she quoted her mother: “If you don’t got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” No, this is why she’s not voting: She figures the country’s leaders are chosen by rich and powerful people far from any place she’s ever been. “My favorite subject in school was history, and I learned that’s how it’s always been,” Greenleaf said. “Politicians just think about themselves.” So she tunes them out: Doesn’t read the news, doesn’t watch it on TV. And most certainly does not vote.

Read the entire Post story. Its importance is not that it blows the cover off some national secret about why people don’t vote, but that it says out loud what is literally a matter of common knowledge to most of we Americans. A good number of the more than half of Americans who elect to not vote — many for their entire lifetimes — do so because they choose to not insult themselves with the sorry pretense of having participatory power over the country’s policy decisions. They may possess or lack formal education; they may have enough money to get by or they may not; they may live in a hamlet in eastern Idaho or on the west side of Manhattan. But what these boycotters all have in common is a deep and often bitter clarity about the fact that the United States, with its flood of corporate campaign money propelling public policy from top to bottom, is not a democracy. So why would they vote when the one shred of civic power many would-be voters feel they possess is to tell big money, in effect, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” This is not a position to mock or to dismiss. It reflects a serious and fierce understanding by which millions of competent adult American nonvoters reach a cogent decision to abstain from the charade.

I am not one of those people. I vote — despite my rage at the corrupt moneyed machinery that runs the nation and controls its major decisions — because the outcomes of voting can mean life or death in people’s real lives and because voting is not incompatible with my determination as a progressive to lay waste to the structural monarchy of money on which modern capitalism rests. The two coexist, and electoral casualties are real and present. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — courtesy of the Electoral College but theoretically preventable had more nonvoters turned out and made it harder for digital interference to ensure a Trump win — has already killed people and will kill and devastate more. In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial win, if it holds, will embolden racial murders and deadly statewide policies on health care, guns, and policing, while Andrew Gillum’s victory there, if it happens, will mollify some of these and lend strength to those who resist them. Ted Cruz’s victory in Texas will buoy racist and fascist attacks, economic savagery, and suffering and death for women denied reproductive rights in that state. Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez’s New York victory has put the fear of progressive outrage into the hearts of cowardly Democrats locally and nationally.

But we betray a huge number of outraged and aware people who refuse to vote — and we weaken our shared clout as a force for overturning this corrupt corporate-funded system of governance — if we trivialize or demonize nonvoters instead of recognizing that many of them are simply expressing, in a different way, the very same things that we want in a society.

This is not about whether or how someone voted in this filtered popularity contest that we call a democracy. This is about voters’ core sense of what serves their interest. Never, ever forget that most Americans, no matter how they act out, ultimately want the same things we progressives want: an end to corporate money in government, a citizen-driven system of single-payer universal health care, and policy that serves the public will rather than private wealth.

That is our greatest strength, and it is our way to ultimately win.

The midterms proved that most voters don’t want Trump. The GOP is betting it won’t matter.

The Democrats have taken the House. Good. It will save lives. Some of us who would suffer and die under GOP-ruled policies on health care, policing, poverty, and poisoning of our air and water will instead live longer lives because of particular bills that Trump and his supine party will be unable to ratify. You and I awoke this morning to a better reality than we feared.

But that is not the only truth today. Here are some others:

- The Electoral College is the Trump Party’s last weapon. Money, male rule, and racism are the traditional toxins that have prevented the United States from being a democracy. Structurally, the Electoral College is the hangman’s bridge for all travelers in American government. Virtually no seekers of the presidency cross it intact without proving allegiance to those who stand to lose money or power if their policy needs are not met. Trump, as Charles Blow has said, represents a war: money’s last hope of directing the rage of non-rich white males at someone other than the white rich super-minority whose explosively greedy choices have decimated what remains of non-educated white privilege. Aside from white rage and male crotch-clutching, today’s Republican Party platform of enabling rich cheaters offers nothing — nada, zero — that non-college-educated white Americans can embrace or believe. From omnivorous political rodents like Mitch McConnell to self-promoting brayers like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, the sole remaining salable alternative to a progressive money-shouldn’t-rule pitch is a white-or-male-must-rule pitch. That’s all that the CEOs have left to offer before the incessantly climate-heated, increasingly brown, increasingly young and non-rich population of the United States inevitably surges progressive. The Electoral College, whereby states secure representation without regard to population, is the last anachronism protecting the artificial dominance of old white racist senators and presidents in America. It elected Trump in 2016 — where he lost the popular vote — and it will, unjustly, thanks to Republican white and rural gerrymandering, re-elect him in 2020, absent some sea change of popular revolt.

- Today’s institutional Democratic Party will not lead. It will follow. You already know more about this than any pundit needs to tell you. From Bill Clinton’s smarmy supply-side myths to Hillary Clinton’s empty corporate “Stronger Together” jingle to Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s we-can’t-go-there calculus of mannered self-censoring to the DNC’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ actual progressive momentum, the institutional Democrats have excruciatingly shown us that they and their donors forbid authenticity about how corporate-funded policy actually works. Key Democratic candidates who won this season — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — led on their own, defiant of party norms. Key progressives who lost succumbed to plain old institutional corruption (as with Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, whose opponent used his official position to implement policies undermining her voters) or, to my mind, to bad “moderate” advice (as with Beto O’Rourke, who inexplicably met a bloodthirsty Ted Cruz with soft anecdotes about voters’ family stories instead of a savaging of Cruz’s empty and corrupt claims. Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party, terrified of the gall it takes to piss off today’s corporate DNC donors with passionate truths about the corporate-funded modern American pretense of democracy, will, in future history, appear as the fading rear guard of small-d democratic values. True leadership will come, and is already emerging, from those who dare to run and win (or lose) on honest arguments about corporate power. At some point in the future, this truthful baseline will become a new normal, which the fearful inheritors of today’s DNC will then timidly claim as their own.

What will make the difference is what you and I now do, in public as we face politicians and police, and in private at our gatherings of family and coworkers and friends. It has happened at decisive moments in all repressive regimes.

Our move.

The Ford-Kavanaugh hearing: Hell hath no fury like a white male denied.

On September 27, we got an historic, internationally-televised display of how the avaricious white males who momentarily rule the Western world are dooming themselves to eventual irrelevance.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a survivor of sexual assault who didn’t even want to be at the hearing, showed up because she felt she had to and blew Judge Brett Kavanaugh out of the water with her seared-in memories, her acknowledgment of there being things she does not know, and her scientific understanding of what her psyche has endured for 36 years.

And how did would-be Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and the brotherhood of winner-take-everything pledgers in his senatorial cheering section respond? Exactly the way that swaggering men whose minds are blown by a sudden loss of rule by force – which describes many a spouse abuser and strutting white male power figure -- would respond:

Kavanaugh lost it. He ranted and railed in self-pity at having been wronged as an innocent family man whose life is being inexplicably ruined by a woman who somehow suddenly decided to upend her and her family’s lives and to endure death threats and professional hell for the sake of denying a Supreme Court seat to a man she never knew well.

Kavanaugh’s cheerleaders also lost it. So much so that partway through Kavanaugh’s questioning they sabotaged their own game plan, which was to put a cooperative woman, Rachel Mitchell, in the hot seat as Ford’s prosecutorial questioner so as to dodge the optics of a mob of white men holding a witch trial for a woman. Once Mitchell proved an insufficiently compliant hire, the assembled male GOP mob broke the charade and rushed the stage with invective fury, talking over the woman they had hired while she shuffled papers and let them throw their rage party.

This is what men sick with addictive authority do. They do it in their kitchens when their female partners fail to cooperate with their being the boss. They do it in televised hearings when female accusers and female hired hands fail to properly behave. They do it because they have been taught that they can.

It may work yet again, in the Kavanaugh confirmation vote, for these desperately entitled white male defenders of their own right to do whatever they want in a closed room, bringing decades of unspeakable suffering for women in particular as a result. Or it may not. Either way, the slope of the fall of white male corporate rule steadily steepens. Reality – #metoo, climate change, global migration due to economic inequalities, the merciless parallels between today’s jobless people of color and jobless whites – continues to assert itself.

That is why, even on my vilest day as a black American man who has fended off ceaseless white suspicion on the street and on the job, I am thankful to not be a white American male.

Being unilaterally invested in the losing side would really, really suck.

White supremacists duck in at DC's Lafayette Park. Again.

 

KKK March down Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC, 1925 (Photo: Getty)

 

Crowd opposing KKK march to Lafayette Park, Washington, DC, 1982 (Photographer unknown)

 

Facing white supremacists at Lafayette Park,  Washington, DC, 2018 (Photo: Bruce A. Jacobs)

 

The August 12, 2018 embarrassment for Jason Kessler and his knucklehead squad was not the first time that white supremacist goons have targeted Washington, DC and the city's Lafayette Park. It follows at least one infamous Ku Klux Klan event in Lafayette Park, and others in historic parts of this city as well. For instance:

- In 1925, at the height of the KKK's popularity (it had 5 million members), 35,000 KKKers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue as if they owned the place. In many ways they did: U.S. lynchings peaked at more than 100 a year between the 1890s and the early 1900s, and legally-codified racial brutality, segregation, and discrimination were considered acceptable by the ruling white mainstream.

- In 1982, two years after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, a far smaller Klan contingent of 12 members faced thousands of enraged counter-protesters, some of whom overturned cars and mixed it up with police. From a New York Times account at the time:

"Eleven police officers were injured, none seriously, in the melee, and 38 demonstrators were arrested. Before order was restored, two cars had been overturned, at least two stores had been looted and windows in several buildings, including the historic home of James Madison, had been smashed.

Klan leaders had predicted that as many as 200 of their members would march from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the rally. Instead, about three dozen Klansmen showed up and, on the advice of the police, changed their plans in order to stay clear of numerous anti-Klan groups demonstrating by the hundreds at points along the route.

The Klansmen canceled the march down the avenue and drove in a police motorcade to Lafayette Park. They left their white robes in shopping bags during the 15-minute gathering, which was more of a question-and-answer session with reporters than a full-fledged rally. When it ended, the police swiftly escorted the Klansmen out of town."

1982's parallels to Sunday's event 36 years later are striking: Racists with blood on their hands call for hundreds of attendees, nearly all of them are scared away, and the handful who show up are baby-sat by police escorts to Lafayette Park, where they pose for the press before police quickly usher them back out of town to safety. It amounts to a police-guarded photo op, at massive public expense, for ninny bullies who for centuries have ducked the concept of meritocracy, let alone a fair fight.

And there is still the dangerous question of the factual meaning of free speech. More on that coming, to be sure, but the above pieces of history, about which I've just learned, come first.

Thanks to Allie. 

Video and feelings from within the crowd at the D.C. counter-protest to Unite the Right 2.

Fears were that we as counter-protestors in DC today were putting ourselves in harm’s way a year after white supremacy killed Heather Heyer and injured 34 others. We did run a risk. But this year it didn’t go the way it went in Charlottesville.

Today, thousands of us greeted the dozen or two Nazis and white supremacists who showed up at Unite the Right 2. The partisan estimates I heard from speakers on our side about our numbers ranged from 5,000 to 15,000. From the sea of people I walked and stood among at Lafayette Park, I can say with utter certainty that we numbered thousands, not “hundreds,” as Huffington Post erroneously and inexplicably reported. The Washington Post was closer, reporting “thousands” in one line while, oddly, saying “hundreds” in another line in the same story. CNN, as of this writing, has avoided citing a number, although its headline accurately trumpeted that counter-protestors “dwarfed” the racist knucklehead turnout.

The mood among us was angry and about as closely-knit as strangers can be in public. At the metal barricade separating us from the racists – where a line of impassive and armed D.C. police faced us and a line of riot police on horseback stood directly behind them – strangers hugged each other and held our stance on the delicate line between principled necessity and life-endangering recklessness. When someone in our ranks started lobbing objects at the line of police officers who stood immobile six feet away from us across the barricade, others of us verbally spanked him with reminders about the potentially deadly consequences of thoughtless self-indulgence. This rally was serious. Jokers and fuck-offs were not welcome.

We won today. When the handful of Unite the Righters wrapped up their proceedings early, in the thunder and lightning and pouring rain amid our thousands-strong chants, we cheered and serenaded their exit with a pop-song chorus of “Na na na na, hey hey, goodbye,” along with rounds of family-unfriendly curses. That part of it felt triumphant.

But consider: A handful of rank white supremacists from outside of our city came to town and commandeered our police (I can tell you first-hand that the presence of D.C. police was solely to protect these racists from a massive and enraged crowd) as well as our Metro and a section of a major downtown public park – all at the expense of D.C. taxpayers, who literally paid for advocates of white-supremacist race war to obtain police motorcades to and from the Metro, special Metro accommodations, and police protections in a public space.

There is a conversation America needs to have – parts of Europe have already had it – about the “free-speech” rights of those whose positions and actions directly generate genocide and other fundamental crimes, including state crimes, against humanity.

More about that soon.

What do you do when your nation is in the hands of a traitorous criminal and his collaborators?

This is not partisan fiction. It isn’t the routine fake outrage of Fox News or yet another algorithmically-designed online whopper. It is the demonstrated factual truth: President Donald Trump, known racist, misogynist encourager of murderous white supremacists, banner of Muslims, and jailer of children ripped from their refugee families, has now capped his criminality by committing actual legally-defined treason: aiding and abetting an attack by a foreign government on the very nation he purports to lead.

On July 16 in Helsinki, standing a few feet away from the threat of President Vladimir Putin, Trump proved to even the most cowardly of his backers —the fleeing Paul Ryan, the concave Mitch McConnell, the whole worthless lot of the Republican leadership — that he as president will serve or betray anyone, any time, in any way that suits his own immediate interest. Especially as he withered under the plutonium stare of an 18-year autocrat — the man who helped to make him president — who very possibly has the means to handily kill Trump if the need arises.

You, like many of us, may see that we are fast running out of mainstream options for dealing with the Trump problem.

Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the money-trained Democratic leadership know no language for responding to being beaten with a steel bar and left for dead behind a garage. Mainstream reporters, now emboldened to openly use terms like “disgraceful” to describe Trump’s conduct, are straining for words to spur peaceable corrective action in the electorate. Republican leaders, who didn’t figure that their downward slope of moral cave-ins to racism and plutocracy would corner them into siding with a man who is willing to sell out America’s republic of good white people, are responding to Traitor Trump with murmurs of protest, clinging to hope that he will in the coming hours and days rephrase the past 24 hours’ impeachable thoughts.

He might. By the time you read this, Trump, at a safe distance from enforcer Putin, may very well have back-pedaled on his words for the sake of sustaining the state of chaotic demolition that is his best grip on power. What the nation — and the world — lose in coherent thought and understanding of his regime, Trump gains in his ability to maneuver and manipulate. There’s no telling what will happen. That’s the deliberate idea.

Meanwhile, the two fundamentals of Trump Nation continue to be a policy mandate of globally suicidal economic pillage and environmental destruction, and the goaded immorality of a white base too drunk on the lie of regained racial glory to notice the hastening of their own extinction.

So what do we do when our head of state is a real-life monstrous factually-verified criminal willing to sacrifice civilization for power, and a sizable chunk of the state’s enforcers (read: ICE, National Guard troops, police, prison staff, Congress), along with a nasty bloc of voters, have consented to be his collaborators?

One thing is certain: our current American mainstream, safely indoors with its indignant but toothless dissent, offers no answers.

When white people say “don’t panic” about Trump’s autocratic potential, don’t listen.

Image: Getty - Foreign Policy

“Don’t panic. Organize,” are the final words of Joe Scarborough’s July 2 Washington Post missive to Democratic voters horrified by the Trump presidency’s actions to date and its autocratic potential. Scarborough’s well-intentioned message is true as far as it goes. But what’s worth remarking is how his attitude epitomizes the white, privileged, short-sighted arrogance by which the Democratic Party blew the presidency in 2016 – and may lose again in 2020 if it doesn’t pop out of its bubble.

Here is Scarborough:

“Instead of viewing this accidental president, who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, as the apocalypse du jour, Trump skeptics should treat him more like [an anomaly]. The danger created by Trump’s presidency is real. But it is not the sign of a coming Armageddon. Instead, these electoral aftershocks are more political proof that Democrats must face the ugly truth that their cataclysmic losses in 2016 were not caused by Fox News, Susan Sarandon, Vladimir Putin, the New York Times’ email stories or the sudden spread of racism in Midwestern states carried twice by Barack Obama. Rather, their shellacking was the result of a lackluster presidential campaign that had no coherent message, ignored warnings from Democratic leaders and forgot to visit Wisconsin.”

Okay. Reality check number one: Trump is not an “accidental” president, nor was the 2016 outcome an inaccurate reflection of the state of the nation. With blue-suited red-necktied senatorial and congressional zombies proffering corporate-purchased public policy (thanks in part to Citizens United) that drowned out the legislative voices of non-rich Americans, and with nearly 50 percent of voters bailing on voting altogether, it was perfectly logical that a candidate who picked up on both long-boiling voter rage and bitter racism enjoyed the results. Despite the abominable Electoral College and mind-boggling Russian interference, the Dems shouldn’t have even been within cruise missile range of a Trump victory. The collusion of the DNC with the Hillary Clinton campaign to sideline Bernie Sanders’ defiant presence and platform created a crucial political vacuum that never should have existed. Trump, the consummate bullshit artist, seized that available space to con a credulous base. Accident? More like neglectful calculus. It was the Democrats themselves who flunked that test.

Reality check number two: Trump is an “apocalypse du jour” only to insulated whites like Scarborough who have never been first in line as targets for America’s genocide, discrimination, state-sponsored brutality, and incarceration. To use the flip term “apocalypse du jour” for the presidency of a man who has dehumanized Native Americans for decades, demonized and created prison camps to tear apart refugee families at the Mexican border, and made anti-Muslim discrimination a national immigration policy, is an obscenity made possible for Scarborough by America’s centuries of bloody white immunity. Only an American white person – who has never seen themselves in a lynching photo, has never had to live with ceaseless inexplicable stops by cops asking them why they are in this neighborhood or boarding this train, has never heard the click of a car door lock at a red light when a driver sees them standing on the corner, has never had a white person clutch a purse or knapsack in their presence, has never routinely been the last person on a subway car to have someone sit beside them, and has never been at the front of the line of those chosen by the state for routine or “emergency” incarceration – can so cavalierly dismiss a white supremacist autocrat as an “apocalypse du jour.” With this, Joe Scarborough has unintentionally indicted himself and the Democratic leadership for being complicit in the casual acceptance of America’s loathsome economic and racial regime. This is the real reason why Clinton’s vapid “stronger together” campaign theme rang hollow to voters. The kinds of profound economic changes that voters of all colors would have full-throatedly supported are disallowed by the bankrollers who finance the Democratic Party – not to mention the Republican Party, which in its modern incarnation has been auctioning off its soul since Richard Nixon if you start with race-baiting, or Ronald Reagan if you start with supply-side trickonomics.

Reality check number three: Notice how Scarborough, even in his withering criticism of the Clinton campaign, stops short of defining what a “coherent message” for a Democratic presidential candidate would actually be. We hear that same deafening silence from the Democratic Party as we enter the mid-terms and as we approach 2020. That’s because the narrative necessary to galvanize a large chunk of the non-rich electorate, of all races, is one that Scarborough and the corporate Democratic Party cannot embrace: today’s plutocratic capitalism, with its fiscal chokehold on who runs for federal office and what messages air to voters, is incompatible with democracy. A policy plank that would excite voters would include, just for starters, mandatory public financing of all political campaigns and the prohibition of private contributions to all electoral runs for public office. It’s a no-brainer: public office is public property, and access to it must not, in any true democracy, be purchased by private wealth. The sole obstacle to this elemental truth is the absurd but accustomed dominance of private electoral money itself.

The good news is that, amid the Democratic Party’s willful spurning of its base, Democratic candidates themselves are forcing the party’s hand. The most recent and remarkable success is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spectacularly dethroned longtime Democratic mainstay Joseph Crowley and his posse of corporate backers by bringing a straight-up version of what Trump faked and what Dem officials have ducked: an in-your-face progressive populist message about reversing corporate rule. Mainstream American journalists breathlessly report that she is a Democratic Socialist, which, when you strip away reporters’ exclamation points, simply means that she, like most Americans (including many Trump voters), favors a capitalist economy with sane state guarantees of things like health care, wage security, and retirement. Voters across party lines have long hungered for such authentic courage in candidates. In 2016 Michael Moore famously and correctly predicted that Trump would win if the Dems didn’t show more nerve. In 2015 some, including me, felt a queasy sense of possibility about Trump’s dishonest populism while mainstream media dismissed him. Observers have been saying for years, amid the moneyed, amoral monologue of American politics, that we progressives need passionately principled candidates who aren’t afraid to lose. It remains to be seen how much the Democratic Party will heed the success of candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and face up to the flagrant contradiction between the needs of its entrenched bankrollers and those of its long-term political base. The party can’t satisfy both.

Meanwhile, no one should confuse values-based revulsion at Trump’s agenda with “panic.” For many of us, be we survivors of early American genocide or slavery or holocaust or internment camps, the horrors that Trump makes possible are not new. We have fought and died and collectively survived them before. We will again. There is nothing “panicked” about our resolve to see these threats for what they are and to defeat them.

The only people panicking are those who are too privileged or too afraid to face the reality of what is at stake.

- Thanks to Allie.

The roots of the Trump electorate’s immorality.

The lynching of Reuben Stacy, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 1935

After an average of 54 lynchings a year between 1877 and 1950, with a peak average of 111 annually from 1889 to 1918 in the wake of Reconstruction, lynchings in contemporary America happen far less often. That’s progress. But America’s 400-year enterprise of demonizing black and brown people for fear and profit is explosively thriving in the racist fusillades of President Donald Trump and their reception by his voters.

It is time to call out those in the Trump base not only for their calamitous ignorance and their horrific gullibility in falling for Trump’s false economic promises, but also for their immorality, plain and simple, in once again trading away human decency for racial privilege.

In the past 50 years, the fall of white working people from having strong unions and solid blue-collar careers to being corralled in the post-Reagan work camp of unregulated industry has created real and justified rage and disillusionment. But in no sane world is this an excuse for suffering whites, with their eroded privilege, to fall back on the expedient evil of white supremacy. This centuries-old core moral failure will be, in the future telling of history, the monumental disgrace of America’s ever-shrinking white majority.

White racism is the trick gear enabling America’s impossibly top-heavy capitalist machinery to somehow keep lurching forward, through monopoly to plutocracy, in defiance of claimed meritocracy or democracy. White supremacy is to non-rich white people what money is to the fabulously rich: an exclusive currency of dominance by which both enjoy a monopoly on something they covet. For the one percent, the payoff is their economic and political dominance over the rest of us. For whites without great wealth, the reward is the simple privilege of their presumed centrality in the nation’s culture, with comfortably white national standards of normality by which whites never have to explain their presence or their worth, and through which they can rely on their whiteness as a guarantee of authority and respect. Like any group that inherits privilege, both of these favored parties — the rich and the white — can, if they choose, expediently learn to live with the nagging moral wrongness of their roles in the hierarchy.

And so we now see that 58 percent of Republicans (versus 5 percent of Democrats and 27 percent of independents) support the Trump administration’s separating — in some cases literally tearing loose — traumatized children from their parents as part of its anti-refugee policy at the U.S.-Mexican border, which has separated 2,000 children from their parents in six weeks. (A whistleblower’s recording of such children screaming in their prison — let’s call these facilities what they are — reveals the level of abominable cruelty here.) Meanwhile, alleged Christian leaders sell out what Jesus is known to have stood for in their attempt at a quid pro quo for Trump’s support of policies that allow their religious groups to feed at the government trough while dodging discrimination laws and the constitutional separation of church and state. And in recent incidents, Greyhound Bus Lines and Concord Bus Lines both folded to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers’ illegally telling passengers they must be U.S. citizens in order to ride.

Through it all, purportedly responsible white adult American citizens have continually excused Trump’s lies, boasted and accused sexual assault, numerous fiscal concealments, apparent obstruction of justice, vulgar and racist statements, and unprecedented debasements of the presidency. Contrast this with the throngs of white voters who were so desperate to crucify dignified non-felonious President Barack Obama that they had to make up sufficiently inflammatory fairy tales. The most successful of these false claims, the “birther” myth that Obama was not born in the United States, was championed for five years by Trump himself.

The long and convenient tradition of bigotry-based immorality is alive and well in a substantial chunk of today’s white American electorate, and has in fact been here since the beginning: through the rise and predominance of the slavery industry, the Civil War that was fought over that industry, and the nation’s unofficial but perennial race wars ever since. These include the war on black civil rights, the real estate war to create and sustain white suburbs and to contain poor communities of color, the War on Drugs, the economic war to further privilege the rich and to pit neglected uneducated whites and abandoned people of color against one another, the war of militarized and brazenly corrupt policing in poor communities of color, and the post-9-11 War on Terror and its successive military and civilian assaults on majority-Muslim nations and on Muslims here and abroad.

Fearing and subjugating people of color in general and black people in particular has been elemental to American whiteness since that category’s very creation as a way to place the enslavers above the enslaved, and to, later, exclude Jewish, Italian, Irish, and other immigrants from official inclusion in white American ethnicity. Whiteness, a concept invented when European invaders needed to legitimize their homicidal occupation of the New World and their violent appropriation of free labor from Africa and the Caribbean, has served as an excuse for genocide and other atrocities on this side of the Atlantic since the 15th century. It continues to do so.

So let’s properly attribute responsibility. Trump did not create this monster. He just fed it raw meat.

Trump gun accomplishments checklist.

Trump gun action checklist as of 2018's 22nd school shooting, 5-18-2018:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 ✓  Send thoughts and prayers

 ✓  Support the NRA and accept its money

 _  Ban military-style assault weapons that make mass killings easy

 _  Close the gun show background check loophole

 _  Tighten age requirements and background checks for buying guns 

 _  Do anything at all to reduce the USA's world-leading ratio of 1+ guns per citizen

Germany to Trump-era America: you are no longer our friend.

Der Spiegel, a globally-respected mainstream German publication, has now gone public with what others of America’s European partners have so far not wanted to declare out loud to the United States: You Americans elected this monster, and we in our country will no longer abide what your nation does at his bidding.

A May 11, 2018 Der Spiegel editorial, Time for Europe to Join the Resistance, sending shock waves through Western media and politics, said in part:

The West as we once knew it no longer exists. Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership. President Trump has adopted a tone that ignores 70 years of trust. He wants punitive tariffs and demands obedience. It is no longer a question as to whether Germany and Europe will take part in foreign military interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is now about whether trans-Atlantic cooperation on economic, foreign and security policy even exists anymore. The answer: No.

Let that sink in: A leading ally of the United States – and a nation that already knows a good bit about where Trump’s America would like to go and is struggling with its own relapse in that direction – has just told us, as a country, to fuck off. Because of what we have allowed our nation to become.

We 21^st-century Americans need to get used to this pariah treatment. Our nation has earned it.

A large and growing segment of the world – not only the poorer and less powerful nations we have traditionally ravaged but also now our wealthy erstwhile global partners and peers – are horrified at what our American state has become under the loathsome, corrupt, racist, and bottomlessly amoral authoritarianism of President Donald Trump.

No American can any longer excuse Trump as an aberration, an electoral error of misplaced passion. Trump is a bona-fide and accurate reflection of our actual nation: savage in its hypocritical 400-year white supremacist expectation of conquest without consequence, lazy in its ignorance of the actual world, wickedly expedient in its acceptance of whatever lie might prolong its fantasy of mastery and unconditional prosperity.

Increasingly, the world sees this about the American state.

Our job as Americans is not only to know it, but to change it.