I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples...-Donald J. Trump, ruminating on The Central Park Five in the pre-trial advertisements that he placed in 4 New York papers at a cost of $85,000 in order to call for their execution of the accused and whip up public sentiment against them. They were eventually exonerated after years behind bars.*
Trump was a racist in 1989 and he's a racist now. Back in the 1970s, he and his KKK father lost discrimination cases when they refused to rent their apartments to people of color. It's safe to say that Donald J. Trump was born a racist and will die a racist. Yet, there are republican assholes (That's redundant, I know) who will still tell you that Trump isn't a racist even though he has continued to blatantly prove it every day. No doubt the majority of them consider the daily manifestations of his mental illness to be a bonus attribute. In my personal experience, I have found that Republicans will claim that they aren't racists even though they happily vote for a racist like Trump. At best, it's just not a deal breaker for them which, in my book, means they are supporters of racism and that makes them racist by definition. Here in New York, I've encountered republican people who, like me, lived in this city during the time of the brutal Central Park Five rape and beating case. When confronted with Trump's virulent racist position on the case, they disingenuously claim that they've never heard about it even though it was about as big of a local story as it could possibly be for not just days, but months. It was a media firestorm on a monstrous scale. You could not escape it. The story was a horror made even worse by the horror of the dubious arrest of "the five" who, after serving up to 13 years in jail, were found to be innocent, exonerated by DNA tests. A big reason why the Central Park Five (five young male New Yorkers of color, ages 14 to 16) went through everything they went through and served time was the lynch mob frenzy whipped up by a pathetic excuse of a fake Democratic clown of a mayor named Ed Koch, and others, not the least of which were the shady aforementioned racist real estate developer named Donald J. Trump, (aka the self-proclaimed "least racist person in the room" who wouldn't even be the least racist person at a KKK or Gestapo meeting), and various republican radio talk show goons. Mississippi had nothing on New York City in 1989. I mentioned one Democrat, the late Ed Koch, but too many present day Democrats will tell you, even to your face, that not all Trump supporters are racists. I've liked a lot of what Michael Moore has had to say on various topics very much over the years, but even he is one of those. Sorry, Michael. That's just not how I see it, but, hey, not to worry, most Democratic politicians are more tolerant and lenient than you when it comes to Republican racists (There I go, being redundant, again). I expect little or nothing from the political class because politicians are working parts of the corporatist system that masquerades as our government. They are of the system, by the system, and, sadly, for the system continuing along its merry bullshit ways. They do it out of love for a fetid gumbo of expediency, naivete, love of power, love of the dialing for dollars game, and politics. It's the system they embrace and addict themselves to because they lack the desire or intellect to be or act any other way. All of that trickles down on us like cold piss. No wonder we have a golden showers president. It was inevitable. Some turkeys will tell you that the country has been the way it is now since Reagan. Yeah, until Trump came along, Ronnie Raygun was surely a candidate for worst president ever, right up there with James Buchanan, Dubya, and a dirty handful of others, but it was "the system" that not only allowed Reagan to get to the White House but promoted him for the job, and it was in place log before him. He started on that path as a grossly un-American witness for the ironically named House Un-American Activities Committee's 1947 blacklisting inquisition. Reagan was simply the accelerant used by the arsonist architects of the wave of fascism on which we are trying to surf without drowning. A system governed by American ideals instead of our long-living corrupt American reality would have rightly crushed him like the roach that he was either then or while he was still just the Governor of California calling for bloodbaths like Nixon before him and Trump now. Those blacklist hearings were the corrupt American system showing what a cancer it is live on radio and TV 70 years before it opened the doors of the White House to a psychotic goon like Trump. The same system that gave Reagan a supportive platform gave the same one to Trump just as it gave us Jim Crow voter suppression in the post Civil War years. Today's republicans have become masters of voter suppression to an extent that would make the original Jim Crow advocates envious. All that's missing are the lynchings, and if you think any Republicans you know wouldn't join in or at least quietly acquiesce to that right now, guess again. I hear these people talk and I hear the silence of the others. Which is louder? It doesn't matter. Any one of them will gladly put on the armband if Trump or some other party leader gives them the sign. We are at that point right now. Tonight's meme was created by The Revolutionary Communist Party. That may upset some people but, when a void is left by the two-party system, others will step in. So, blame those who created the void. If you look at the newspaper on the left side of the meme, you'll see that the system I'm talking about goes back a lot further than the last several decades. In fact, it goes back further than that newspaper to 1619 and has even older roots. Sure, our African-American friends and neighbors are no longer defined as 3/5ths human like they were in the "originalist" version of the Constitution but how are they (or any of us) considered by those pulling the strings in reality? African-Americans may now be considered "fully human" but people like Trump, McConnell, Carlson and everyone who backs them, supports them and votes for them are pushing back on that idea with everything they have. They long for the "good old days," hence their adoption of Confederate flags as their own, mixed in with the all too frequent swastika flag, of course. The engine of slavery was money and hate just as the engine of fascism is. It's a symbiotic relationship driven by the same forces that drove the 1933 attempt to overthrow FDR and the same forces that are now attempting to install a Trumpian dictatorship. Joe Biden is a secondary choice. How do you take your coffee? Dark or light? The Revolutionary War of the 18th century was about tyranny but it was also about pieces of the pies. This corporatist system is in our nation's mental DNA. With the general population turning browner, we need to change that mental DNA for all of our sakes, fast, or this nation will cease to be. A positive mutation is long overdue. *To this day, virulent racist that he is, Donald J. Trump refuses to admit he was wrong about The Central Park Five. In fact, he doubled down in a 2014 Op-Ed published in the New York Daily News where he called the exoneration and settlement "a disgrace."