"President" inspires violence in minds ready to act out hate

In the course of a normal day people have thoughts and impulses that would certainly violate our standards of right and wrong were we to act them out.  The vast majority of adults can and do let them pass without inner struggle and without verbally or physically expressing them.  For a personal example, in the course of an MSNBC weeknight it's not unusual for me to flash on a fantasy involving the meeting of a pointy object and the temporal lobe of, say, an AG with the voice of a hedgehog declaring "No collusion, no obstruction". But in the reality sphere I haven't actually done bodily harm to anyone since my brother and I stopped having "playful" wrestling matches that ended with butt-size depressions in the sheetrock walls. 

But then there are these small but growing cyber-communities of people whose days and minds are not normal, wherein they cultivate among themselves ethnic and racial hatred, they group-validate these evil impulses, and they egg each other on toward violent acting out. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed", wrote Yeats in The Second Coming.  Now there is the upwelling of dark psychic forces, and there is a man with the greatest access to media in the history of the world, and he's giving sanction to hate, and far worse, to expressing hate verbally and physically. The white-nationalist cyber-communities of anti-immigrant racist grievance not only are heartened by rump's naked, uncoded encouragement, they have been materially abetted by rump administration policies that have gutted monitoring, investigation and intervention resources for heading these mass murdering terrorists off at the pass the way law enforcement and intelligence agents have done in cases of internationally inspired terrorism.

The dark thing is possessing human bodies, these lost souls are trading in their very lives for the chance to kill strangers, and until now the only measures taken by the federal government have only served to take obstacles out of the path of those with the intention to commit acts of terroristic murder.

This morning the hater-in-chief read a teleprompter speech in that droning monotone that signals about 100% of the time that two days later he will scoff at everything his presidential shell was forced to say in the canned message. He did mention "white supremacy" and "domestic terrorism" in the speech as a sop to the mass of critics of his racist rants, but other than that brief mention, his solutions were all in line with the GOP/NRA propaganda that video games and mental illness are the problem. Ergo, the speech waved at the idea of flagging people whose psychiatric problems contraindicate gun ownership, but he slid by the majority-supported implementation of universal background checks, and he shied away from applying the same laws and strategies to combat and prevent domestic terrorism as are used to fight international terrorism. Right now there is no mystery about where online this incitement is taking place, but reportedly there is no enabling legislation and regulations to take measures to intervene in that community of hate and identify/neutralize threats to American citizens. This is a war of minds and souls. A resident Inquirer columnist wrote this morning that it was partisan propaganda to assert that rump's attacks on Cummings and Baltimore were in any way racist. Mick Mulvaney dismissed any connection between rump's attacks on Mexicans, asylum-seekers and Congresswomen and the motivating factors driving Patrick Crusius to El Paso. Americans are either going to trust their own eyes and brains to see the evidence and lay the blame, or they aren't.

After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump's Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings

By Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept

04 August 19  

n Saturday morning, a gunman at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shot and killed at least 20 people before surrendering to the police. By all accounts, Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old alleged shooter, is a fan of President Donald Trump and his policies. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a Twitter account bearing the suspect’s name contains liked tweets that include a ‘BuildTheWall’ hashtag” and “a photo using guns to spell out ‘Trump.’”

Incredibly, the nation woke up to more grim news on Sunday, with reports that a man suited up in body armor and bearing a rifle with high-capacity magazines had carried out a rampage in Dayton, Ohio, killing at least nine people and injuring 26.

Little is known yet about the Dayton shooter, but a four-page manifesto authorities believe was written by Crusius and posted shortly before the El Paso attack is full of the kind of hateful rhetoric and ideas that have flourished under Trump.

The manifesto declares the imminent attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion,” accuses Democrats of “pandering to the Hispanic voting bloc,” rails against “traitors,” and condemns “race mixing” and “interracial unions.” “Yet another reason to send them back,” it says.

Sound familiar? The president of the United States — who condemned the El Paso attack on Twitter — has repeatedly referred to an “invasion” at the southern border; condemned Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and Syrian refugees as “snakes;” accused his critics of treason on at least two dozen occasions; and told four elected women of color to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” (It is worth noting that Crusius, in his alleged manifesto, claims his views “predate” and are unrelated to Trump, but then goes on to attack “fake news.”)

That there could be a link between the attacker and the president should come as no surprise. But it might. Over the past four years, both mainstream media organizations and leading Democrats have failed to draw a clear line between Trump’s racist rhetoric and the steadily multiplying acts of domestic terror across the United States. Some of us tried to sound the alarm — but to no avail.

“Cesar Sayoc was not the first Trump supporter who allegedly tried to kill and maim those on the receiving end of Trump’s demonizing rhetoric,” I wrote last October, in the concluding lines of my column on the arrest of the so-called #MAGAbomber. “And, sadly, he won’t be the last.”

***

How I wish I could have been proven wrong. Yet since the publication of that piece almost a year ago, which listed the names of more than a dozen Trump supporters accused of horrific violence, from the neo-Nazi murderer of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville to the Quebec City mosque shooter, there have been more and more MAGA-inspired attacks. In January, four men were arrested for a plot to attack a small Muslim community in upstate New York — one of them, according to the Daily Beast, “was an avid Trump supporter online, frequently calling for ‘Crooked Hillary’ Clinton to be arrested and urging his followers to watch out for Democratic voter fraud schemes when they cast their ballots for Trump in 2016.”

In March, a far right gunman murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — and left behind a document describing Muslim immigrants as “invaders” and Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

And now, this latest massacre in El Paso. Let’s be clear: in an age of rising domestic terrorism cases — the majority of which are motivated by “white supremacist violence,” according to FBI Director Christopher Wray — Trump is nothing less than a threat to our collective security. More and more commentators now refer, for example, to the phenomenon of “stochastic terrorism” — originally defined by an anonymous blogger back in 2011 as “the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

Sounds pretty Trumpian, right? As I wrote in October: “The president may not be pulling the trigger or planting the bomb, but he is enabling much of the hatred behind those acts. He is giving aid and comfort to angry white men by offering them clear targets — and then failing to fully denounce their violence.”

And as I pointed out on CNN earlier this year, there is a simple way for Trump to distance himself from all this. Give a speech denouncing white nationalism and the violence it has produced. Declare it a threat to national security. Loudly disown those who act in his name. Tone down the incendiary rhetoric on race, immigration, and Islam.

Trump, however, has done the exact opposite. In March, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, the president said he did not consider white nationalism to be a rising threat, dismissing it as a “small group of people.” A month earlier, in February, Trump was asked whether he would moderate his language after a white nationalist Coast Guard officer was arrested over a plot to assassinate leading journalists and Democrats. “I think my language is very nice,” he replied.

In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”

So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?

On Tuesday, just days before this latest act of terror in El Paso, the leaders of the Washington National Cathedral issued a scathing, and startlingly prescient, rebuke of Trump:

Make no mistake about it, words matter. And, Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.

Thanks to his hate-filled rhetoric, his relentless incitement of violence, and his refusal to acknowledge the surge in white nationalist terrorism, the president poses a clear and present danger to the people, and especially the minorities, of the United States.