I’ve never seen an incident that managed to combine so many of our modern anxieties -- especially about
the role that the internet and popular social media outlets like Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and niche sites like 8Chan increasingly play in spreading both bogus information and ideologies of hate, but also about race and religion, the ubiquity of guns, and a political climate that in too many nations is working to foment intolerance instead of eliminating it.
One of those nations, unfortunately, is the United States.
It’s ironic that -- in a time when the American political debate centers on
Trump’s made-up emergency about a border wall -- there ain’t no mountain high enough to keep the most vile, racist propaganda from spreading from Europe to the United States to Australia and echo back again in a matter of nanoseconds, and to keep that bile from inspiring the kind of deadly violence you’d never see from Central American immigrants.
After the banality of the wanton violence and the killer’s live broadcast, the second most shocking thing about the New Zealand massacre was how well versed the perpetrator was in right-wing tropes that aren’t just common on the American internet but find their way to “mainstream” venues like the Fox News Channel or the halls of Congress.
The Australian gunman said he wanted to spark more debate about our Second Amendment, invoked (perhaps sarcastically) the right-wing media celebrity Candace Owens, and spewed a range of warped theories about the threats to Western civilization from “invaders” that -- while horrible -- were only a degree or two more extreme than what
we’ve heard from an Iowa congressman, Steve King, or from the good citizens of Old Forge, Pa. Or from certain quarters at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Let’s be very clear: Donald Trump is not to blame for what happened in Christchurch. The killer was swimming in a cesspool of evil that both predates Trump and is much bigger than him. But let’s also not ignore this: At a moment when America and the world need a leader who will be steadfast in speaking out and trying to stop this spread of toxic white supremacy, the 45th president of the United States is doing the opposite. He is swimming in this sewage, and the killer knew it. He wrote in his manifesto that Trump is “a symbol of
renewed white identity and common purpose ...”
In the 24 hours after the killing -- a moment when Americans once would have looked to the White House for grace and appeals for unity -- the president acted like a man determined to live up to this murderer’s endorsement. Trump’s complete lack of empathy and inability to even express it, even after the slaughter of 50 innocents, spewed from his Hallmark-random-word-generator that
tweeted out “warmest sympathy and best wishes” to New Zealand. Neither that tweet, nor a subsequent statement from the White House, mentioned Muslims, expressed any solidarity with Islamic people, or condemned hatred.
Instead, Trump stuck to his scheduled event -- the veto of congressional efforts to stop his border wall, the fulfillment of his xenophobic campaign promise to spend billions on a crusade to keep out Hispanic people he’s routinely branded as criminals, murderers or rapists. Rather than acknowledge the horror of what happened in New Zealand,
the president was dismissive about the white nationalism he foments, saying “I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems, I guess.” He plowed ahead with the border event, even calling undocumented immigrants “invaders” --
the exact same language used by a man who mowed down 50 worshipers.
...
We need to get back to this simple premise: Trump’s presidency is morally unacceptable. Many of us believed this on Nov. 9, 2016. And we’ve just seen it ratified on the Ides of March, 2019. America’s political system seems to be too broken to deal with Trump’s unfitness through the most immediate political mechanism that we have, which is impeachment. But our spirits are not too broken to resist his immorality with every fiber in our beings. Now is not the time to become too jaded or cynical. Let’s renew the vows that so many of us made in those first dark hours. If you believe in a better humanity,
Donald Trump is not our president.
