Sicko at the top; Sickos at the bottom

As the light follows the day, verbal attacks from leaders leads to violence below. And our Agent Orange in the White House has been particularly keen in recent weeks to do just that. He’s called out four Congresswomen of color (Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayana Pressley) and suggested that they ‘go back where they came from,’ oblivious of the fact that three are U.S. born, and all four are U.S. citizens. He’s attacked Elijah Cummings not only as a person, but as representative of his city of Baltimore—a “rat-infested place where no one would want to live.” Read that as a racist attack on all black inner cities, not just Baltimore. Others have charted the consistency of this racism from the moment Agent Orange announced his intention to run for President.  

Now we have had, in the last few days, two mass shootings, notable even for an America where mass shootings have become almost a national pastime. Both were by young white men, the one in El Paso by a 20-year-old who seems to have had an animus against immigrants from Mexico whom our Agent Orange has been flaming about for the past two years. So he shot up a shopping center and killed at least twenty innocent people. The shooting in Dayton, Ohio is still being investigated but it’s notable that this young white man shot and killed nine people, apparently at random, six of whom were black—which is not so random. A few days earlier, another white youth managed to sneak an illegal (in California) assault weapon into the Gilroy Garlic Festival and shot dozens, three of whom died. 

            In sum, the slaughter of innocents goes on, unabated, and egged on by our own Agent Orange in the White House. The man is poison, both on an individual and an environmental scale. 

            And in case anyone doubts that the administration is complicit in the domestic terrorism that has resulted from both its words and its policies, consider this from George Selim, formerly of the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Council. Selim wrote an op-ed in today’s USA Today titled “White supremacist terror is rising, and Trump’s policies kneecap our ability to fight back.”  Here’s part of what he wrote:

When I worked at DHS and the National Security Council, I ran a number of programs to confront these growing dangers. My office had a budget of more than $21 million and 16 full-time employees. But in the past three years, the office has been gutted, the name changed twice in this administration, the budget reduced to $3 million, and the staffing reduced by at least half. 

Selim, who now works at the Anti-Defamation League, added these stats: 

The numbers don’t lie. At the Anti-Defamation League, our experts have been tracking these trends for decades. In 2018, we found that of the 50 murders committed by extremists, 49 of those came at the hands of right-wing extremists, with white supremacists alone accounting for 39 of those murders. And from 2009 to 2018, right-wing extremists have been responsible for 73% of the extremist murders in the United States...

            So here we are folks. A sicko at the top refusing to combat or even name domestic terrorism, and lots of sickos at the bottom drinking the white supremacist koolaid, and the United States still NUMBER ONE—not in health, or security, or well-being, or equality, but in its mass murder rate, which dwarfs that of every other advanced industrial nation (and most non-industrial ones too) known. 

            What else is there to say?

Lawrence DiStasi