Nobody made a super-big deal about it on March 15, 2019, when the president of the United States — in his fancy baggy suit, over-long tie hanging down behind the Resolute Desk, veto pen in hand — sat in the Oval Office and described the surge of desperate asylum seekers on America’s southern border as “an invasion.”
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A month before that, Trump had chosen the border city of El Paso, Texas, as the place to dramatize the alleged threat from Latino migrants. He rented out a big arena (stiffing the owners, by the way) and rallied support for the xenophobic centerpiece of his re-election campaign, making sure to highlight any criminals among the thousands of migrants who’ve been arrested and detained. “Murders, murders, killing, murder,” the president rambled at one point, as his frenzied crowd chanted “Built that wall!” Trump went on: “We will. If we cut detention space, we are letting loose dangerous criminals into our country.”
Five and a half months after that rally, a white 21-year-old community-college student with a pro-Trump social media feed sat down in his family’s McMansion in a posh Dallas suburb and picked out El Paso — more than 600 miles away — on a map. When he got to the border city, the man-child posted a so-called manifesto on the hate-laden website called 8chan that stated: “This is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Hours later, in police custody, the gunman reportedly told investigators he entered a Walmart packed with back-to-school shoppers to kill as many Mexicans as possible.
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[Then came] the aftershock, the second spasm of deadly American violence in just 13 hours, and the 250th of the year.
Nine dead in Ohio.
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[I]n the predawn blackness of a hot August night, that you could see that the center of Donald Trump’s America is not holding. You had already watched the fear and loathing spiraling out of control — the immigrants afraid to leave their homes to take their kids out to a playground or an ice cream shop, the gulag of squalid concentration camps, the increasingly racist rants from a president desperate to cling to his job. And now these twin eruptions — body bags and hastily abandoned shoes stacked up on blood-stained American asphalt.
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[I]t’s all starting to feel like the same event — a Great Unraveling of America. The feeling only grew worse when I read that the authorities in El Paso believe some of the wounded may not go to local hospitals ... because they’re so afraid of our immigration cops. It seemed like one more sign that conditions in this country — the violence, the fear, the embrace of racism and xenophobia from the highest levels, and the long slide into neo-fascism — have become intolerable. And yet — with the blood of El Paso and Dayton not yet dry — far too many are still tolerating this.
None more so than America’s so-called Republican leaders — the Mitch McConnells, Mitt Romneys, the Greg Abbotts — who seemed to share the same pathetic and cowardly playbook of quickly taking to Twitter, praying for the victims and their families, praising the first responders, and quickly logging off without one word about the scourge of white supremacy, their president who helps promote it, or the gun culture that makes it all so lethal.
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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reached all the way to back to the 1990s to blame violent video games, while Abbott, the governor of Texas who once famously lamented the fact that Texans weren’t buying as many guns as Californians, said “the bottom line is that mental health is a large contributor.”
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From what we know so far, the killer embraced a sick ideology but knew exactly what he was doing — driving 600 miles to a carefully selected kill zone and writing a hate-filled but consistent manifesto. His mass murder seemed less a statement about his own mental health and more a statement about the moral health of a nation where so many are opening embracing racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Including the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Interestingly, the El Paso gunman was media-savvy enough to drop a line into his manifesto that his racist views are independent of his president, that journalists were certain to blame Trump but that would be, in his words, “fake news.”
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