Decades of Struggle Nullified

The Trump administration is pushing for steep cuts to the Justice Department budget, including the outright elimination of funding for the Legal Services Corporation and Violence Against Women grants, as well as slashing up to a third of the Civil Rights Division's budget.

[AG Jeff] Sessions has already hinted that he will stop investigating local police departments. Coupled with the budget cuts, we can probably expect the feds to get out of the business of policing cops entirely. Add cuts to legal services, and what we get is a clear message from the people who elected Trump: Their response to all of these awful films of local police beating or strangling or shooting unarmed black people is to worry that there's too much federal oversight of police, and too much advocacy for people who come in contact with police.

The facile conclusion to all of this is that white America wants to go back to the Fifties. But it's worse, and weirder, than that.

Seventy years ago, affluent white people could huddle in the suburbs, watch Leave It to Beaver, and pretend that cops weren't beating the crap out of people in East St. Louis or Watts or wherever the nearest black neighborhood was. But these days, the whole country regularly gawks at brutal cases of police violence on the Internet. Nobody can pretend it's not going on, but millions of people clearly don't want to do anything about it – just the opposite, in fact. They want more.

  Matt Taibbi

Black Lives Don't Matter.