Since my last editorial on Donald J. Trump, this man who we patriotic Americans call SCROTUS (among other things) has outdone even himself. Within the span of a few days he threatened North Korea with nuclear war and neglected to acknowledge ten U.S. servicemen who had died with the exception of a terse "That's too bad," in response to a reporter's question, and those weren't even the most offensive things he did in a week’s time span and he wasn’t done yet.

He did a campaign style rally in Phoenix where his monologue to his base of supporters was akin to theater of the absurd. He sounded like Joseph Goebbels doing a bit at the Laugh Factory. His ninety-minute ramblings even had his base leaving the air-conditioned auditorium in droves. Even these locals who are used to hot air found this to be just a bit much and he still wasn’t done.

On August 25th, while a massive hurricane bore down on large population centers on the Texas Gulf Coast, this unhinged lunatic undermined the U.S. judicial system and used a Presidential pardon which was completely unnecessary for strictly political purposes. He pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was convicted of defying a federal court order that prohibited him from using racial profiling in the commission of his duties as a law enforcement officer. It was as if Trump, this thin skinned, attention whore felt slighted that he might be upstaged by a category four hurricane. Trump felt like he needed to be the perfect storm.

However, his recent meltdown on August 14th at his own Trump Tower was classic, vintage Trump. Unhinged, unfettered, out of control and off the cuff. He was simply revolting. It revealed what many had already suspected and even more knew for sure, and that is, we have an openly racist man claiming to be President. He has blatant racists as advisors and in, what I call, his “anti-cabinet.” This has been known for some time and really didn’t get much play in the so-called liberal media…until now.

After the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Mango Mussolini was given a freebie. He was served up an opportunity on a silver platter, a fastball down the middle, a hanging curve and he couldn’t make contact. When people carrying flags of two countries that we defeated in two separate Nation defining wars gathered in a college town in Virginia and started a riot that ended up killing a counter-protester, it presented him with a no brainer.

Even this dolt couldn’t screw this one up…one would think. Think again. All he had to do was act somewhat Presidential. The bar is set so low for this man that he wouldn’t have had to say much. A great orator he is not, but in this case, he didn’t have to be. All he had to do was to say the things any President or even any half-witted, half way decent human being would have said, given the opportunity. He could have at least made an attempt to heal some of the wounds that he helped to create. He just couldn’t do it. He blamed the violence on “both sides…both sides.”

He waited an excessive amount of time to deliver this temperate damnantion of these events and didn’t call out any of the hate groups by name. In a moment of near high hilarity his advisers spun this by saying Trump just wanted to gather “all the facts before addressing the Nation.” Since when has this guy ever concerned himself with facts, any facts let alone “all the facts.” Then just to make it clear in case none of us could read between the lines, he “tweeted” his condemnation of the Islamic terrorist group(s) who were responsible for the terrorist attacks on Barcelona. He did this almost immediately and long before virtually any facts had been confirmed.

Then two days later he had that now infamous impromptu, off the cuff meltdown that revealed the darkness that lies in that place a heart and soul is supposed to reside. He played to his base, as they say, which of course includes the KKK which cites Trump as an inspirational figure. Most people in this country, on both sides of the political spectrum, agreed that he lost his moral authority to lead this great nation. I would argue he never had any moral authority to lose in the first place.

He didn’t even call the mother of the woman killed by a member one of these terrorist groups that unleashed their venom in Charlottesville. To her great credit she said, she didn’t want to talk to him anyway. That phone call would be almost as awkward as O.J. Simpson showing up to his ex-wife’s funeral. The young woman killed was named Heather Heyer and her name can be added to the long list of civil rights activists who have been killed through the years by America’s terrorists.

So, it turns out we have some people in this country who simply don’t like other people based on their race, country of origin and sexual preferences, gee…who knew? They go by many names, including Nazis, neo Nazis, KKK, white supremacist and the alt-right. We can now, and without hesitation, call these people a new name, “Trump supporters.” Regardless of your political predilections, if you still support this man, you know by now that you have affiliated yourself with and are aligned with these various white supremacist groups as well as a racist President.  I have another name for these people, “LOSERS.”

Anyway, this so-called Alt-Right movement has become the focus of the media for the moment. They have become a bigger deal than the possible collusion between “Twittler” and the Russians. This is even bigger news than a potential nuclear war. It is the distraction du jour and it’s a good one because it involves race.

Race has always been at the center of the American experience. From the time European immigrants stole land from the indigenous peoples, who had been here for thousands of years, and had that land worked on by slaves brought here from Africa for that purpose we have had “race issues”.

These twin horrors are America’s original sins. It made every other atrocity that we have inflicted on the peoples of the world and those here in our own country, pale in comparison. The issue of the indigenous people pretty much went away with their genocide, but the African-American issue is another story.  

The well-educated land owners who were the privileged, wealthy elites would forge a new Nation while codifying our ideals of imperialism, colonialism and of course Christianity. They just happened to leave out that slavery thing in our new Constitution. Did it just slip their minds? No, it was just laziness. They just didn’t want to debate the issue. When you can buy off on a bunch of slave owners declaring that, “all men are created equal,” well…you’ve got problems.

Slavery, as it turned out, was also just a matter of laziness as well.  Have you ever been to cotton country? It’s hot and humid as heck. Wealthy land owners didn’t want to pay people to work the land and sure as hell weren’t going to do the work themselves, when they could get it done by others for free. One could turn a hefty profit on the backs of others especially when you don’t pay them. An entire economic sub-culture was based on slave labor. It was heinous and it survived for generations. It was capitalism at its finest or its worst depending on your point of view.

This issue was a real moral conundrum for this fledgling nation. It would come to define two regions which were separated by the issue of slavery, the North and the South. Tensions grew between these two parts of the country. The question of how one people could enslave another haunted many.

The brutality of this hideous institution and the moral outrage by some didn’t deter much of the country (the South) from still practicing this barbaric way of life. Many of the wealthy plantation owners couldn’t imagine doing business any other way. They had a good thing going and wouldn’t let morality get in the way of this money machine. They would even have to redefine their own notion of Christianity to reconcile their barbarism with their faith. That was easy enough and just a prelude to the most infamous and enduring religious based terrorist organization in modern world history. 

Then along came our 15th president, James Buchanan who was forced, or so it seemed, to deal with the subject of slavery and the growing secession movement in the South. He dropped the ball. He argued that that the question of slavery and states’ rights would ultimately be decided in the courts. That turned out to be the biggest and most costly political miscalculation in American history. Presidential historians routinely viewed Buchanan as the worst president in U.S. history. They no doubt will have to recalibrate and make adjustments for Agent Orange when he leaves office, which we all hope is very soon.

The slave states seceeded, formed their own nation and attacked the United States. As it turned out that was bad idea, as they lost somewhere between 335,000 to 450,000 people. Their cities and towns were destroyed and their crops burned. They were just defending their right to own other human beings as property. A noble cause it was not. The Civil War was nothing short of an American apocalypse.

They couched their argument for this colossal debacle as just wanting to “defend our southern way of life.” The victors in the war struck a rather conciliatory posture with the vanquished south. However, Confederates weren’t quite finished being sore losers, in fact they were just getting warmed up. They conspired to assassinate the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.  

From these dark days, the South concocted a new excuse for their racist tendencies, “States Rights.” These rights gave southern states free reign to terrorize, “their Negroes” in any manner that they felt like at any given time. It also gave them a narrative for revisionist history.

This terrorism grew to include Christian based organizations like the Klu Klux Klan. As they were getting their robes fitted, Civil War monuments were springing up all over town squares across the south some 40 to 60 years after they got their asses kicked in the war that they started against the United States.

These were public reminders to the repressed citizens of Dixie, the African-American population, that if we could kill hundreds of thousands of mostly white “Yankees,” you are only alive because you are behaving in accordance with how we want you to behave. Cross the sidewalk to the other side of the street when you see a white man coming in your direction and bow your head if you are in the presence of a member of the ruling class and so on. Jim Crow was in full effect and those tasteless monuments served as a reminder, lest any of y’all forget.

A whole new wave of Civil War monuments went up in the 1960’ as Federal civil rights bills were swept into law. At the time, it seemed like just another lame, defiant protest from the losers.

We allowed this protest to go on for generations. Now, we are finally saying enough is enough. It’s long since time that these public monuments to the people who fought the United States of America to defend their right to own other people be removed from public places.

In addition to America’s steadfast position against slavery, we fought and defeated Nazis and Fascists in Europe in World War II. Nazism, in particular, was an evil which our great nation would not allow to spread across the globe. That ethos had the face of pure evil, Adolph Hitler. This movement in our country has a face as well. It is the visage of Donald J. Trump and like Hitler, he represents pure evil. It is only America’s decency and his own ineptitude that keeps this megalomaniac in check. When the Nazi Party swept into power the German people gave them and their Chancellor, Hitler a mandate. Trump, thank God, doesn’t have that.

Domestic terrorists who gathered recently in Charlotte, Virginia, under the guise of protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in that city, were really there on another mission. To create a chaotic “race war” against an enemy of their cause…every decent man, woman and child in the United States.

When we win a war, we take away the loser's symbols. You don’t see swastikas in Germany any more than you see statues celebrating the monsters who made war on a scale unprecedented in human history. You don’t see statues of the people who ran the concentration camps where so many, mostly Jews, suffered and perished on a massive scale.

The only losers who wish to keep their heroes on public display are in the American South. Sorry my southern brothers and sisters, it just doesn’t work that way. Even the Germans themselves conceded, ‘OK you won, we lost, we have to move on and rebuild our country. We can even be allies and help to rebuild Europe.’ Not the South. They still insist on fighting the same war over and over again and guess what, they still lose every time.

These people suddenly have become historians who wish to preserve history. The phrase I hear over and over again by these white supremacists goes something like, ‘We just want to preserve our white heritage.’ They honestly act as if they are afraid it somehow will be taken away from them. This is about as comical as Christians claiming that their religion is under attack.

Of all the things to concern one’s self with, the preservation of white culture and heritage is as dumb as it gets. Don’t worry white/Christian America you’ll be just fine. Nobody is going to take away your Kenny G records and make you listen to John Coltrane. While that’s not a bad idea, as it might stimulate some brain cells, I wouldn’t worry your pretty little heads over the idea.

Nobody is going to forget the civil war…nobody. Not even Trump, as one would think that came up in his discussions with Frederick Douglas. (Sorry…too easy.)

There are also those places where you could read books. One person was quoted last week as saying while tongue was firmly planted in cheek, “The hardest part about being a librarian is building Confederate statues.” A right wing whack-job announced that there was going to a good old-fashioned, Nazi style book burning scheduled in my home town of Huntington Beach, California. When it received so little interest even among Orange County brain deniers, he cancelled, stating he was afraid of falling victim to violence coming from the left. This of course is pure and unadulterated bullshit of the highest order.

This speaks to a bi-product of the clash between these terrorists and anti-terrorist factions that showed up to defend our country’s ideals, which is that it has given the right wing a new bogy man to rally around, the so called, “Alt-Left” and my favorite, “Antifa.” You don’t have to be a far left radical to want to defeat fascism. You don’t have to have a name to want to want to defend our democracy. These simply are made up names to rile and scare these pasty pussies. These fears are amplified and broadcast on their own 24/7/365 scare machine, Fox News and the other free mostly talk radio outlets these groups have at their disposal.  

In peaceful protests over the weekend these pro-Trump forces were outnumbered by a huge margin. In Boston thousands upon thousands of peaceful Americans met one hundred or so people of these various right-wing fringe groups. In Laguna Beach, California, a very small crowd of Trumpsters was met by 2,500 peaceful demonstrators who refused to be drug into a fight with those goons.

It would appear that America is asserting its moral authority, as Trump seems more and more isolated from not only reality, history, decency and common sense, but from those who got him elected and the vast majority of Americans who will never support this man and have resisted his authoritarian style of governance. He has turned this country, for the moment anyway, into a banana republic.

How does our African-American population view all of this? First off, I’m not going to pretend for a minute that I can even fathom what it would be like to be black in America and secondly, like all people, African-Americans do not have a single view towards any issue. They like everyone else are individuals and I can only assume that their views are like everyone else’s and run the gamut on these issues and the current events that are related to them.

However, it might be safe to say that that many African- Americans might view the media coverage of these events with a certain amount of incredulous disdain. When the whole world (except Trump of course) suddenly and for the moment shows its outrage against white supremacy and looks on in shocked horror, they must think of it as business as usual. While much of the isolated and insulated white community thinks we live in a “post-race” society, our black brothers and sisters never for a moment have had the luxury of those feelings. Blacks must, like any reasonable, thinking person, contrast the way law enforcement protected these tiki torch carrying, marching, chanting goons and how the protesters were treated in say…oh I don’t know, Ferguson, Missouri. If you are just now catching on to the concept of white privilege, then you are white and are truly privileged. Maybe you are also just as dumb as a bag of rocks.

These Nazi/KKK/Alt-Right/Trump supporters/white supremacists will of course be defeated, as there is, and has never been, room for them in our society. While their support from “law enforcement” will make this more difficult, it will be done because it has to be done.

There is no room for these Nazis and those who support their leader in the blues community either. Obviously, the music we cherish was born out of oppression by the people who are depicted in the statues most people agree, should be taken down. This is the music of redemption, of joy and of hope. The sheer happiness that this music exudes constitutes a protest in and of itself and all on its own.

Where do Trump supporters fit into all this? They don’t. Trump represents the antithesis of all these ideals. He has made his feelings clear about these terrorist groups and the people who oppose these various hate groups. I believe we should clarify our position on his dwindling, but deeply entrenched supporters.

White supremacists, fascists, Nazis and any other name you wish to call these Trump supporters have no business in our nation and no business in our blues community. In this country, we are defined by our winners and that simply is not you. Go ahead, put your hoods back on. Cover your faces with masks and bandanas because you know you are wrong. You also know you are not welcome. Any questions?

- David Mac

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