Fascist America Remains a Grave Danger, Giant Step Backwards Looms

Madison, Wisconsin—Fascism is here in the United States, and has been since our nation's birth.

In our country built upon slavery, social dominance, and enduring, widespread imbecilic conceptions of race, fascism is a defining feature of America, an exercise in domestic terror.

If you're a black person at, or past adolescence walking, driving, shopping or breathing, there remains an expectation of police harassment, perhaps prison, and death-by-cop is a distinct possibility. [Note to black readers: Avoid Fitchburg, Wisconsin, in Dane County.]

Carving out a career while advocating human rights risks jail time and death in America; ask colleagues and friends of the late Sandra Brand, driven to suicide by Texas police.

Occasional massacres and 1,000-plus annual police killings are the norm, not tragic anomalies, (Kantrowitz, Mal Contends). But as President* Donald Trump struts and fumbles about, fascism can become much worse, taking us back as the last 60 years have more-or-less seen forward strides in human rights.

So, when Trump makes sadistic public appeals as the chief executive, the terror that Trump strikes is a familiar experience to a lot of Americans.

It matters what a president says. It matters that Trump minimized the Holocaust in one of his first public statements.

This lunatic is dangerous and in virtually every policy sphere is a public menace.

Today, every American should be ready with a plan to support Robert Mueller.

America already is a police state in many municipalities with occupying forces politically aligned with Trump.

Consider what is the predictable reaction of Trump to a criminal indictment of any member of his family or Trump himself? A lunatic in the White House is capable of inflicting much damage to our country.

Democrats and proponents of the experiment that is America need to stand up for the values and standards that animate their popular movements.

This means actively supporting Robert Mueller. This means actively speaking against Roy Moore.

That means speaking up loudly against Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, to pass a tax cut that will greatly benefit the wealthiest corporations and individuals, as a prelude to devastating Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats are not adept at getting their messages across to the American people.

Sure, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and sometimes Joe Biden speak eloquently on the ideals that make America great.

But the messages of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump must resonant louder or at least hit more chords with a majority or Trump wouldn't be sitting in the Oval Office and Bannon would not be getting Republicans to support the child-molester, Roy Moore.

The lights are blinking red.

Romare Beardon's work on American lynching

The Wisdom of Scott Walker—Jarring and Absent as Racism Convo Blooms

"There is a problem we have to deal with in America when it comes to race," added Scott Walker to the national conversation about racism in the wake of Charleston.

This is the caliber of the man who would be Republican Party's nominee for the presidency.

Incredible.

From Mary Spicuzza of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Scott Walker is in over his head

Scott Walker's Cowardice

Philip Rucker and Anne Gearan in the Washington Post note the exercises in cowardice of Republicans in the face of the intimacy of the Republican Party with white supremacists, first singling out Scott Walker.

Write Rucker and Gearan:

The massacre last week at a church in Charleston, S.C., opened a leadership opportunity for the nearly two dozen politicians running to be the next president.

But few stepped forward to seize it.

The Republican hopefuls mostly stammered and stumbled in response to the shootings. At first, some resisted calling the massacre racially motivated, only to reverse course when it became obvious it was.

Most stopped short of calling for South Carolina leaders to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the state capitol in Columbia. Some, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, declined to comment at all. Only after South Carolina’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, emotionally declared Monday that the flag should come down did most GOP candidates join the chorus.

Last Saturday, Scott Walker said removing this flag of hate was a "state issue," and on the same day later declined all comment.

Yesterday, after the all-clear signal was broadcast by Nikki Haley, did Walker reverse his position announcing via a tweet that yes, the flag of hate should come down. (WISC-TV, Madison)

Any thinking voter considering this vapid, weak man for public office ought remember that Scott Walker has no center, no morality, beyond his pathological lust for his own political advancement bought by the Koch brothers, and any special interest who will give him money.

Scott Walker—Profile in Racism

When South Carolina began to fly the flag of white supremacy from the state house in Columbia in 1961, seven years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, white segregationists celebrated. (Todd, Meet the Press)

Said Eugene Robinson, "Well, forgive the metaphor. But it was a middle finger directed at the federal government. It was flown there as a symbol of massive resistance to racial desegregation. Period."

Yet today, every Republican candidate for the presidency cannot manage to condemn the flag of white supremacy still flying on the South Carolina statehouse grounds, ludicrously suggesting the racist massacre committed by a white supremacist in Charleston precludes comment on flying the flag of white supremacy.

Scott Walker is among the worst offenders. (Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Walker is a lifelong, racially toxic politician who owes his political ascendency to his moving into a district to run for a Wisconsin State Assembly seat (held by Walker from 1993-2002) in a white section of the most segregated greater urban area in the United States—Milwaukee. (MacGillis, The New Republic)

Safely ensconced in his white district Walker practiced his odious racial politics, authoring in 1996 the ALEC-devised Truth in Sentencing laws that targeted low-level drug "offenders" (Adelman, Valparaiso University Law Review) amid declining crime rates. (ALEC Exposed, PRWatch)

Walker talked up a storm employing talking points developed by ALEC as Democrats ran scared, and private, for-profit prison companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CXW) garnered heavy profits, trading at its all-time high in 1997 at $151.88. (New York Times)

Walker went on to target blacks from voting, and targeting the inner city of Milwaukee as governor.

In 2013, Wisconsin led the nation in concentrating black men behind bars as Walker's racial politics bore its rotten fruit. (Corley, NPR)

Scott Walker is a racist with a vile history, so no one should be surprised by his deplorable behavior following the Charleston terrorist massacre.

Corrections Corporation of America traded at its all-time high in 1997
following the proliferation of ALEC and Scott Walker's Truth in Sentencing law
across the nation and authored by ALEC member Walker in Wisconsin

Charleston Is an Act of Domestic Terrorism, by Definition

Update: " The murders of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, is being investigated by the Justice Department as a possible case of domestic terrorism, a U.S Justice Department spokeswoman said on Friday." (Reuters)
 --
The Charleston Massacre (Grandin, The Nation, New York Times) is much worse than a hate crime from the American South.

It is an act of domestic terrorism by definition and should be treated as such.

18 U.S. Code § 2331 (5)
the term “domestic terrorism” means activities that—
(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State;
(B) appear to be intended—
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and
(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

This is an easy call.

"Black churches suffered at the hands of thugs and terrorists throughout the Civil Rights era, as they had for a century before, but such attacks aren’t a matter of remote history. As recently as the 1990s, a wave of fire-bombings hit black churches," notes Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic.

Perhaps the Republican Party can see its racial taunts, racist dog whistles and its war on black Americans should cease immediately.

Perhaps Scott Walker and Paul Ryan could begin the cease fire; I wouldn't count on it.