Pogo

The reason Trump is so popular is that he liberates Americans from being ashamed of their bigotries. This is even true for more American blacks, Jews, Asians, Hispanics (but not Latinos) and even Muslims than you might imagine. We can see this in the many instances of overt and expanded persecutions: the white man who two days ago shot three people in a Kansas bar in an anti-Middle East hate crime murder (“get out of my country!”), killing an Indian engineer and wounding two other men; the many video-recorded instances of excess brutality (and killing) by usually white police officers against usually non-white and usually unarmed civilians; the recent mass vandalism of Jewish tombstone toppling (in response to which Muslim Americans raised $100k to help fund restoration work); the more militarized and less humane (pulling people awaiting surgery out of hospital beds) round up of undocumented aliens, and increased harassment of legal resident aliens, citizens and travelers – all with significant popularity among a rainbow spectrum of Americans who claim “their” jobs are being stolen by “illegal immigrants”; the militarized police attacks on anti-pipeline protesters on Native American land (effectively an invasion against supposedly sovereign territory); the belligerence against potheads in legalized marijuana states (even poor white people can be persecuted for seeking alternatives to opioid addiction and overdose death); the official resurgence of and approval of bias against alternative sexual identity and non-heterosexual orientation; the eagerness of many careerist bigots to spew out Neo-Nazi propaganda publicly (with official tolerance and even approval), and of bigoted cowards to scrawl Nazi graffiti on monuments of groups targeted by Neo-Nazis (I’ve seen such myself, in Oakland!); the resurgent bigotry against females generally and reproductive rights in particular (individual sovereignty of their own bodies by females); and the orgy of unrestrained greed skyrocketing the Dow Industrial Average right now: the rush to privatize the $620B public education money stream (and then later be able to skyrocket tuition at “good” primary schools parents desperate for “successful” children will want to get their children into); the rush to capitalize on yet-to-be-extracted fossil hydrocarbons (quarterly capital gains trump climate change and even the hastening of the end of the world); the fury to deny socialized healthcare in favor of your-money-or-your-life profitability for the already rich; and the enjoyment of the self-righteous satisfaction in an “America first” attitude of being able to bomb all the other “darkies” on Earth. The remedy for all this depends on the collective actions of the American people over the next (few?, many?) years.