Trickle Down Hate

The United States has always had a problem with racism. We’ve never been willing to tackle it head on, preferring to sweep it under the carpet and pretend that passing a law or two and paying annual homage to Dr. Martin Luther King is enough to take care of it.

Then along came Obama. In 2004, after three terms in the Illinois Senate, Obama ran for US Senate. He delivered a well received speech to the Democratic National Convention that same year.  In the interest of full disclosure, I was in Chicago on business that year, and heard him speak at a dinner I attended. He gave a fine speech – it was easy to see why there was so much buzz around him.

That was the year that birtherism was born. It’s been traced back to perennial candidate (and something of a vexatious litigant) Andy Martin, who has run for office in a number of states, including New Hampshire. Martin began the rumors about Obama – that he wasn’t born in the US, that he was a Muslim, and so on. Those rumors persisted over the years, but had nearly died down when along came Donald Trump who demanded to see Obama’s “long form” birth certificate in 2011, and birtherism kicked into high gear.

President Obama took it all in stride. He even made jokes about it. (He didn’t sit around in his underpants tweeting in a vituperative frenzy.) The Trump birtherism spread and deepened, and suddenly it was okay to be openly racist in public again, in a way that had been unacceptable since the sixties. The Trump administration has continually exacerbated that open racism.

We’ve seen violence against people of color, violence and bullying against children – including children right here in New Hampshire. The wall has served as fuel for a national tiki torch sized outpouring of racist outrage. Every day, Trump sends out malevolent rage tweets about caravans, invasions, and a crisis at the border. The reports from the border don’t bear any of this out. There is no crisis. Trump spent last weekend playing golf, which illustrates how serious this crisis is.


Given the rise in racist rhetoric, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see it mirrored in the NH legislature. This year there are two anti-immigrant bills, one in the House and one in the Senate. House bill 232 requires state and local governments to comply with federal detainer requests and prohibits state and local government entities from adopting policies that prohibit, restrict, or discourage the enforcement of federal immigration law. (Republicans love local control….except that they really don’t.) This is an unpleasant bit of work, called the “anti-sanctuary act,” and sponsored by a variety of tea partiers and Free Staters.

HB 232 pales in comparison to Senate bill 317, which bills itself as “an act prohibiting sanctuary locations in New Hampshire.” From the statement of intent…”is necessary to protect our country from foreign and domestic terrorism, diminished prosperity caused by artificially low wages paid to those present in the United States in violation of our immigration laws, a disregard of the rule of law, the presence of foreign criminals, foreign persons participating in our elections, and strained local and state finances caused by a disproportionate participation of foreign welfare recipients…”

This is a load of codswallop. Domestic terrorism in this country is perpetuated by angry white men. Foreign terrorists aren’t behind mass shootings. The pinkos at the CATO institute found in 2018 that you were more likely to die from an animal attack than be killed by a foreign terrorist. There are no foreign persons participating in NH elections. That is a nasty bit of xenophobia aimed at perpetuating the GOP myth of voter fraud. The Republicans need to keep that myth alive, because it’s how they’ll continue to chip away at voting rights. As for foreign welfare recipients? More bunk. Undocumented people don’t have the documents needed to receive public assistance.

New Hampshire Republicans eliminated the state minimum wage, and have resisted every attempt to put one into place. Yet here they are, mouthing concerns about artificially low wages? These hypocrites have turned their backs on the plight of low wage workers for decades. 

Please read SB 317, and take notice of the sponsors. There is only one from Carroll County, State Senator Jeb Bradley. Jeb Bradley has long enjoyed an undeserved reputation as a moderate. These days, he’s a political windsock, flapping in the racist breeze generated by what the Republican Party has become in the era of Trump. Wealthy old white men like Senator Jeb don’t actually march with tiki torches. They write the inflammatory rhetoric that ratchets up the kind of anger that fuels the mob mentality and leads to violence.

No matter how you feel about the wall, you should be ashamed that our state senator put his name on this dishonest and shockingly xenophobic piece of legislation. 

Published as an op-ed in the February 8, 2019 edition of the Conway Daily Sun Newspaper 

Pick a Side

It’s official. The Trump presidency went so far off the rails this week that the rails will never be seen again. The press conference held this past Tuesday was proof that Trump is completely unfit for office. All of you who said he’d “grow into the office?” You were wrong. Really wrong.

Voters loved him because he “tells is like it is,” which means he spouted a lot of incomprehensible nonsense, punctuated with insults and bravado. Republicans loved him because he claimed to be one of them, they march in lockstep, and because ideology is more important to them than integrity. The GOP didn’t just ignore his twitter wars, inciting of violence, and boasts of grabbing women by the genitalia. They defended him.   

They loved Trump because he was about as far from Obama as you could get. The Republican Party was furious that a black guy spent 8 years in the White House. When Donald Trump became a big public birther, they ate it up.

Don’t dare tell me you’re surprised by his conduct this week. The warning signs were a mile high and flashing. We’ve all been pretending that presidenting by Twitter is perfectly normal; even though we know it is not. 

A bunch of white supremacists were miffed about the removal of confederate statuary in Charlottesville, VA, so they decided to have a rally. They publicized the rally, and made a big deal out of it.  Richard Spencer, the new David Duke was going to be there. The old David Duke was going to be there. Chris Cantwell, a NH Free State Project mover turned white supremacist was going to be there. (Sidebar: have any of these guys who think of themselves as the master race ever looked in a mirror?)

Hundreds of white supremacists marched through the UVA campus last Friday night with tiki torches, yelling, “Jews will not replace us,” and “white lives matter.” The next day, the white supremacists showed up with shields, clubs, and guns for their peaceful demonstration. Naturally, counter-protesters showed up, too. There were violent clashes. The police mostly turned their back on the protesters. One of the neo-Nazis drove his car into a crowd of people, killing one person and injuring 19 others. Two state troopers were killed in a helicopter crash.

Trump was laboring selflessly at his golf club, where he found time to tweet about how we must all be united. He emerged later in the day to attend a news conference. He said “we” condemn the violence on many sides. He liked “many sides” so much he said it twice. He switched to talking about what a great job he’s doing, and how when he watches Charlottesville it makes him very sad. He didn’t acknowledge the white supremacists were responsible for the violence. He didn’t mention their domestic terrorism. How could he? They’re his base.

There was a lot of national outrage over what Trump didn’t say. It turns out a lot of Americans disapprove strongly of white supremacists. After 24 hours of bad press, back in Washington, some adult forced Trump to read a prepared speech, where he denounced the KKK, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists, and finally mentioned the two troopers, and the young woman who were killed. He was furious at the negative coverage and furious at being forced to read an adult speech.

The next day, after several CEO’s from his manufacturing council bailed out on him, he went from simmer to full boil, and hijacked his own press conference. He babbled insensibly about a young woman, a fine young woman, whom I assume is the one who was killed, but he never provided any context, so it just came across as disconnected nonsense. He said David Duke’s statement was beautiful. He kept braying about facts, and how he waited because he needed to know the facts. Clearly he was resentful about the facts he was forced to recite the day before, because he started blathering about two sides again, and how there were some “very fine people” on both sides.

How many of you know “fine” people who grab tiki torches and Nazi flags and march through college campuses bellowing about Jews? There are not two sides to neo-Nazis engaging in domestic terrorism. Our fathers and grandfathers fought a war against this.   

Trump has never been able to elevate himself to the kind of behavior the office demands, but this press event was a whole new frontier. This is a man who is the exact opposite of a statesman. He is the antithesis of gravitas. He is seriously, dangerously, unfit for office. He is incapable of being a world leader.

He should have been in Charlottesville, speaking seriously about violence and paying homage to the dead.  He should have been grave and presidential. Instead he was conducting a petty war with the media and petulantly presenting himself as the victim in the situation. Seriously, dangerously unfit for office.

What are we going to do about it? 

 

Published as an op-ed in the August 18, 2017 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper