In
today's article analysis, I'd like to take a look back at a fairly thin
"stub" style item in Truthout from October 29th; a piece I meant to
write about at the time, but lost in the shuffle during my recent two week
involuntary absence.
Frankly
there really isn't a whole lot to the article; while speaking at the
International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Trump's favorite
"Black liberal" city to demonize, Chicago, Downmarket Mussolini
alluded to a new sweeping, nationwide crackdown on crime when he said:
"In
coming weeks, Attorney General Barr will announce a new crackdown on violent
crime — which I think is so important — targeting gangs and drug traffickers in
high crime cities and dangerous rural areas. Let’s call it the surge.”
As
the article notes, it is impossible to avoid the militant nature of Trump's
rhetoric in light of Bush's use of the same term, "the surge," to
describe sending more troops to occupy Iraq in 2007 and especially in light of
the Klepto Kaiser's repeated (and often objectively racist) bloviation about
urban warzones (read: cities that vote Democrat and have a large number of
African Americans or other non-white minorities) and in particular the city of
Chicago - which has become the bête noire of the reactionary right's rhetoric
about "black on black crime" and the need for "law and order."
The
article then goes on to reference Trump's $600 million dollar promise to
provide even *more* military hardware to American police and the broad
coalition of activists opposing Trump (and police violence against African
Americans) in Chicago; two issues that are largely a bipartisan problem as
racialized injustice and militarized police forces have remained a virtually
consistent theme throughout every single presidency since Richard Nixon won a
tight election in 1968 behind anti-crime rhetoric designed to stoke the white
rage of the "silent majority."
These
are all obviously important points to consider and it should be extremely
alarming to you that this story seems to have gotten largely lost in the Trump
impeachment saga shuffle, but I'd like to take a moment to talk a little bit
about the context this piece isn't providing:
Whether
or not you think Donald Trump is smart enough to be an actual fascist, there
can certainly be no doubt whatsoever at this point in the man's multi-decade
and extremely publicized life, that he is a racist.
William
Barr, his Attorney General, is a reactionary Catholic Fundamentalist who in
addition to being "the guy that covered up Iran Contra" and someone
willing to work for the swine emperor, recently gave an alarming speech at the
University of Notre Dame that outright rejected the separation of church and
state, while using every dog whistle in the book to suggest that any attempts
to roll back white Christian patriarchal rule represented a literal f*cking
holy war against American Christians. A war being conducted even as we speak by
the dreaded "militant secularists" - by which Barr presumably means
people who think gay couples should be able to buy wedding cakes and women have
a right to autonomy over their body because they're not "baby ovens"
for a dwindling Aryan race under assault by the migrant Muslim hordes of
godless brown people threatening the eternal Western (and explicitly Christian)
order.
Now,
these two stellar examples of compassion, humanity and colorblind justice are
going to come up with a battle plan to "save" cities like Chicago
(cities full of "militant secularists" apparently) from "urban
crime" and these cracker f*cks are openly referring to it as "the
surge?" To quote Trump directly, this as of yet unannounced program will
be "very dramatic" and he assured the conference "you’re going
to see tremendous results very quickly" - are you folks kidding me or
what? That doesn't sound even slightly ominous to you? Apparently it didn't
sound very ominous to mainstream media because if you type "Trump + the
surge" into Google right now you'll turn up three copies of the same Jake
Johnson article I shared with you above posted at Truthout, Common Dreams and
Salon respectively.
In
other words, Trump might legitimately be about to let the cops declare war on
predominantly liberal American cities with large, non-white populations in an
effort to crackdown on a crime increase nobody can prove is actually happening,
and the Washington Post couldn't summon up the effort to write more than a line
item in their daily update about it? Okay then, bang up job you're doing
preventing democracy from "dying in darkness" there, Mr. Bezos.
Of
course there will be those who'll argue with me that mainstream corporate media
didn't drop the ball here because "Trump says a lot of things" and
virtually no details about "the surge" have actually come out into
the public sphere aside from the obvious exception of this speech to police
chiefs in Chicago. "This is just election rhetoric" the cynical
Beltway liberal will say, without ever mentioning that they're not exactly on
the firing line if this turns out to be one of those times we should all take
Trump both literally *and* seriously.
Unfortunately
I fear that this view is laughably naive and largely ignorant of history; it's
no big secret that a tremendously large portion of Downmarket Mussolini's
target voting base is openly in favor of persecuting liberals, visible
minorities and other marginalized people of all stripes - a war on "black
on black crime" in cities like Chicago would automatically be understood
by America's numerous hordes of voting white supremacists to be a war on
Democrats and a war on African Americans. Furthermore, Trump would hardly be the
first president to secure a second term in office based on passing horrifyingly
racist "law and order" platforms during his first go around -
obviously Nixon stands out here, but Reagan's War on Drugs, Bill Clinton's mass
incarceration bonanza crime bill and Bush's ritual harassment of Muslim
Americans through the FBI's anti-terrorist programs, all come to mind just as
readily as examples of this phenomenon at work.
Finally
I think it bears mentioning that just because Trump's administration
consistently leaks trial balloons for nightmare dystopian (and yes, usually
racist) policies into the public discourse, does not mean it's strategically
wise to stand around waiting for the Pork Reich to turn that rhetoric into
policy. Every greedbag fascist atrocity the Trump administration has foisted on
America as a whole, started out as babbling political rhetoric delivered by a
fascist reality TV show host who likes to "grab women by the pussy" -
including the Muslim ban, purposely inhumane concentration camp conditions for migrants,
as well as the complete and utter dismantling of regulatory regimes overseeing
Wall Street, the fossil fuels industry and American business as a whole.
At
some point you have to accept that this babbling moron is President and that
means a significant percentage of the time, his fascist daydreams and racist
promises are going to turn into reality sooner or later - it might behoove
people who don't want to see the racist Pork Reich occupation of liberal cities
in America grow any more entrenched, to say something about this now, before
Trump signs on the dotted line and we're throwing one more horrifying fascist
policy on the pile of grievances that won't be redressed until Trump is long
gone; if ever.
-
nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a
left focus.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t
You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.
Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.
Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!
